Monthly Writing Prompt

For April – April 7th’s question is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work?

I don’t know about ‘risk taker’, but I do like a challenge when it comes to POV.

One of the first books I let my mother read, I tried very hard in the first chapter to not let onto the sex of the protagonist until the very last sentence. As it was a fantasy/adventure type story my mother went along with the flow (she said she kept wanting to turn the page, always a compliment) but at the very end she made notes that I had made a typo using the wrong sex for the main character. Then I think she went back to the beginning and realized I never actually said what the character’s sex was. It was an ‘I gotcha’ moment, which she actually appreciated. I still think it is one of my better writing moments. (Dream Warrior)

In another book my main character is blind (Dark Queen) and I wanted the challenge of writing most of the book from her point of view so that all the senses except vision needed to be used in describing what she thought was going on around her. Writers are always told ‘to show, not tell’ what the action is, but here I worked to not ‘tell’ or ‘show’ when writing from her point of view and it was very satisfying to work it out.