Character Building Workshop (Plus Win a Free Class)

Come try out my new Character Building Workshop for Genre Writers!

The last couple of days I’ve been working at converting the live version of the Character Building Workshop to an on-demand class, in order to add that to the roster for my online on-demand school. It grew from an initial 2,000 words of notes to close to 10,000, and includes review quizzes as well as a considerably expanded list of exercises that writers can work through at their own pace.

To celebrate, I’ll be giving away some coupons for free classes – share this post and comment with the link to the post on social media and you’ll be in the drawing to get one of the following free: Literary Techniques for Genre Writers, Reading to An Audience Workshop, and Character Building Workshop for Genre Writers. I’ll mail the winners at 10 AM Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 7.

Here’s a sample from the section on point of view:

I used second person in another flash piece that appeared in Daily Science Fiction,“ You Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

Your home is a world, a place, a Castle.

It’s full of aliens, their sad eyes watching as they serve. They come from elsewhere, the castle draws them in. They come in through fog and unexpected doorways and now none of them can go home, even the new girl, the one with hair like strawberries in sunshine.

You find her weeping and you try to comfort her. This is your home now, you sign, and it has its beauties, but she hasn’t learned how to signtalk yet and all she does is push you away.

Things to notice about this second person passage:

Second person feels odd and uncomfortable. If you read the piece in its entirety, you’ll see why the weird feeling of displacement that can result from second person was appropriate to this piece.
Part of the key of second person is cuing the reader in to differences between themself and the “you” of the fiction as soon as possible. If there may be a wide variance, let them know that’s a possibility as soon as you can.
Second person is in my opinion a little gimmicky and best suited to short pieces.

Third person can be formal and almost photorealistic, while still firmly attached, as in Andy Duncan’s “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” which can be found in Eclipse One, edited by Jonathan Strahan:

Father Leggett stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the three narrow stories of gray brick that was 207 East Charlton Street. Compared to the other edifices on Lafayette Square — the Colonial Dames fountain, the Low house, the Turner mansion, the cathedral of course — this house was decidedly ordinary, a reminder that even Savannah had buildings that did only what they needed to do, and nothing more.

He looked again at the note the secretary at St. John the Baptist had left on his desk. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, Miss Ingrid fielded dozens of telephone calls in an eight-hour day, none of which were for her, and while she always managed to correctly record addresses and phone numbers on her nicotine-colored note paper, the rest of the message always emerged from her smudged No. 1 pencils as four or five words that seemed relevant at the time but had no apparent grammatical connection, so that reading a stack of Miss Ingrid’s messages back to back gave one a deepening sense of mystery and alarm, like intercepted signal fragments from a trawler during a hurricane.

Things to notice about this third person attached passage:

It is more remote feeling than previous passages.
It is in past tense, which is a natural fit for this POV.
Careful details, like the names and address, create a sense of realism and objectivity.
At the same time, we are clearly in Father Leggett’s POV; note the of course after cathedral.