Who's Talking?

Q: What’s the hardest thing you deal with in your books related to storytelling with one or more points of view?

- from Susan

When I started the first book in my first series, it was third person point of view: “she said,” “she thought;” but I felt I was too far away from Dani O’Rourke to get inside her head and to know her as a person. So, I began again in the first person – I told the story from her perspective. It gave me a lot more room for expressing her emotions, but it meant I could only share what she knew either from direct witness or from conversations she was part of. It required a bit of plot juggling, but I got the hang of it.

Three books later, I began a different series and decided I had to be more agile and creative in using the third person because I wanted to tell those stories from multiple direct perspectives – an American expat’s view of her adopted town in France, and someone who had lived there all her life. They were bound to see and understand the dynamics differently. I used what we call “close third person” for both characters, and tried to keep them engaged with other people and each other. I think it worked pretty well. In the second book, the recently released DRESSED FOR DEATH IN BURGUNDY, there are two POVs again, but the second one is a different person because she is central to this specific story.

Recently, I read a multiple award-winning novel that might be termed a family saga. The story is told in close third from a handful of points of view, sometimes in close narrative proximity. I had no problem with the switching voices, probably because she’s a good writer, but was surprised when I re-read the book to see how she pulled it off.  She sometimes threw in a change of POV right in the middle of a paragraph! That’s a no-no in the writing classes and advice books but I think the story just propelled readers right past it.

I’m now experimenting, hoping I can take some liberties with the ‘rules’ on a stand-alone novel, suspecting that if my editors balk it will be because I haven’t done a good enough job of making these switches seem natural. Rules are fine and to be respected, but I get twitchy when they become brakes rather than guidelines. 

 A bit of promotion: All five of my mysteries are in print and available in print and ebook. The Dani O'Rourke Mysteries are: Murder in the Abstract, The King's Jar, and Mixed Up with Murder. The first French village mystery is Love & Death in Burgundy. Several of my books are also available as audio books if you like to 'read' that way!