If I Had Two Heads I’d Have Two Points of View

Question: Point of view is pesky. What's the hardest aspect of POV you deal with in your storytelling with one or more POV?

by Paul D. Marks

I'm not too proud to admit that when I first started writing prose I didn't get Point of View. I had come from a screenwriting background where POV isn't generally a big issue. Basically in a screenplay your POV is the camera. You are the camera. You can shoot over someone's shoulder or be a fly on the wall. You can view everything from a 360 degree aerial shot or from under a glass table. Hell you can walk through walls if you want. But prose POV is trickier and the key I've found is just keeping your readers in mind.

In my early attempts at writing prose my POV would be all over the place, switching from character to character even in the same scene. I guess you’d call it omniscient, but I didn’t realize that omniscient POV was archaic. Then I started to realize how confusing this was to the reader. When it's your own writing you don't see this right away because you know in your mind who your characters are and what each one is thinking and doing but you forget that your readers can’t read your mind.

I think some early writing advice I received was to write in one POV and only change POV at a break or chapter break. This can work sometimes but you always have to step back and read it as if you’re reading someone else's writing and make sure you aren't filling in the missing identifiers in your own head. You have to ask yourself is it clear that Mr.X is thinking this? And Ms. Y is the one feeling anxious?

These days, I often find it is easier to stick to one POV at a time, like the first person narrative in my Duke Rogers detective series (White Heat and Broken Windows). Though there are sections – the B stories or subplots in both – where the story is told in third person. But the shift of POV is very clear. One reason I wanted to tell the story from Duke’s POV is so I could filter Duke’s sidekick Jack through Duke’s point of view. Jack is a bit of a difficult character and I needed my readers to see that Duke was fond of him despite his flaws. Without that POV people might have ended up hating Jack and not understanding him the way Duke does. But I also wanted to step out of Duke's POV from time to time to see other things happening outside his perspective and that’s where a second POV can be useful. So in both White Heat and Broken Windows (it’s sequel dropping – love to use those hip words or is that already archaic – in the fall) there are subplots or B stories that Duke isn’t present for. And this allows us to see things that Duke can’t see or know at the time.

Of course there’s also omniscient POV and 3rd person. The former is still used these days, though maybe not as often as it once was. The latter is used often, but more often than not it’s over the shoulder of a particular character, so, in essence, we see the action from that character’s POV, though not in first person as if they’re recounting the tale.

Often, the type of story I'm trying to tell will dictate which POV to use. For my Ghosts of Bunker Hill series the use of the ghost’s POV helped me be able to tell the story from a distance so the reader could feel the historical perspective of the fictional and historical people influencing Howard Hamm's (the detective’s) view of the world. That POV works for HH but wouldn't have worked for Duke Rogers.

Sometimes the length of the piece will limit the POV. For example, in a short story you really don’t have the space to write from the POV of 3 or 4 characters (maybe not even two, though that’s more plausible), but in a novel you can. Like in Robert Crais’s novel The Promise that has chapters in the POV of various characters. It can heighten the suspense when you move around from different POVs, when one character knows something that the others don’t. On the other hand, if you write from too many POVs your reader can feel disconnected – who am I supposed to be rooting for? And confused. So sometimes you might  go for the first person single POV to keep the reader in sympathy and connected to your character. Tana French is a good example of a writer who can do multiple POVs with her Dublin murder squad and it adds some nice layers to the story when you get different perspectives of the same thing (sort of Rashomon type of thing).

The bottom line is do what’s right for the story and to find out what’s right you might have try it different ways.

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And now for the usual BSP:

I’m thrilled – I’m Doubly Thrilled – to announce that my short story “Windward,” from the anthology Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea (edited by Andrew McAleer and me) is nominated for a Best Short Story Shamus Award – and that the anthology as a whole is nominated for a Best Anthology Anthony Award. Thank you to everyone involved!

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And my Shamus Award-Winning novel White Heat was re-released on May 21st by Down & Out Books. It’s available now on Amazon.

Publishers Weekly calls White Heat a "...taut crime yarn."

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Thankful and Grateful

Thanksgiving Week in the USA, and a good time for all of us - wherever we might be from, or live now - to take stock. What are you most thankful for in your writing career?

by Paul D. Marks

I’m glad this said what are you most thankful for in your writing career. ’Cause I’m grateful for a lot of things in my career. And, for the most part, I don’t mind talking about them. But if this had been a more personal question I might have begged off since I like to keep those things close to the vest. Especially as, at the moment, I’ve had some issues that are pissing me off mightily. The whole last week/ten days has been one lousy thing after another, though none related to writing. And you tend not to feel real grateful when that happens. So this is a good exercise in helping to put things in perspective.

And I blew it, reading the question wrong, thinking it said what are you “grateful” for instead of what are you “thankful” for. But I’ll just leave it as is even though I could make a global change. It amounts to the same thing and I do feel a little foolish since it is, after all, Thanks-giving, not Grateful-giving.

As Cathy mentioned earlier in the week, it takes a village to raise a writer. It’s a rough road for most of us and unlikely that you just wake up one day with your finished book/story and everything goes well. It happens. It happened to a friend of mine at USC, who was walking through the cinema department one day when he got a call on the loudspeaker. He went to the office. They told him that Steven Spielberg was on the phone. Yeah, right, he thought, someone’s pulling my leg. But the only person pulling on him was Steven Spielberg, who’d seen his student film and wanted to produce my friend’s first feature. And the rest, as they say, is history. But that is the exception to the rule. Most of us work and struggle and play starving artist at least for a time. And when we do make it it’s often because there were people along the way who helped us and kept us from falling or making the mistakes they did.

So, what am I grateful for:

I’m grateful that I have/had the perseverance that it takes and that I didn’t give up.

I’m grateful for all the people along the way who took a chance on me and/or helped one way or another.

By Vojtech Sazel (Own work (Original text: self-made))
 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I’m grateful for computers, even as I curse them and Microsoft and Dell and the rest. I still love the technology, at least when it works. My long-ago writing partner was the first person I knew who got a personal computer, ancient technology by today’s standards. I went to his house one day, saw him move a paragraph from page 10 of a script to page 65. Wow! Coming from the world of IBM Selectrics and literally cutting and pasting pages or parts of them when we wanted to move them and then xeroxing the Scotch-taped page, that was a miracle. After that, I was the second person I knew to have a PC. Yup, high tech, 2 floppy drives and no hard drive… A Leading Edge, similar to the one in the pic here since that’s not my pic.

I’m grateful for Facebook. I’ve met a lot friends there, some of whom I’ve met in person, others I haven’t yet but hope to. And a lot of them have been very helpful in various ways and I hope I’ve returned the favors.

I’m grateful for my first paid writing gig, which just happened to be about John Lennon for one of the LA  newspapers. If you know me, you know how much I love the Beatles. So it was an honor of sorts to have my first paid writing be for something about one of them. But that was the silver lining to the dark cloud, because the article was on the one year anniversary of John’s death.

I’m grateful to have won the Shamus Award (and some others) and to have been nominated and short-listed for the Anthony and Macavity and to have come in #7 in the Ellery Queen Readers Poll one year. Wow! That’s enough to make your head spin.

I’m grateful people actually read and liked White Heat and Vortex and my short stories.

I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made.

I’m grateful for Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, where I’ve also made friends and learned a hell of a lot.

I’m grateful for my writers’ assistants, Egg and Little Egg. Bogey and Audie. Curley and Moe. And now Pepper and Buster. See the pic of Super Assistant Curley. He used to help me write, tapping away at the keyboard. Sometimes I liked what he wrote better than what I was doing.

I’m grateful to have grown up in the film noir country of L.A. and to have been exposed to all kinds of movies and writing and art in my life that I could then use in my writing to give it more life (I hope). And I’m grateful for the highs and lows and in-betweens of my life, which also have given me things to write about and draw on. I’m grateful for the adventures of one kind or another that I’ve had, some good, some not so good, but all good fodder for writing.

I’m grateful for my friend Nancy, who I’ve not seen in decades, but who taught me that grateful is spelled like that and not like this: greatful. And who, when she worked at MGM, gave me a secret insider’s history of the studio that’s never been published to my knowledge and that impressed the hell out of the authors of MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot when I showed it to them, as they’d heard of it but had never seen it.

I’m grateful for this place, Criminal Minds, where I can answer questions and spout opinions, express my weird sense of humor and even do some BSP. And grateful for my fellow Minds. I’m grateful to have been asked to join by Sue Ann Jaffarian and the other folks here at the time. And grateful to still be here. Grateful also to have been asked to blog at SleuthSayers by Rob Lopresti and Leigh Lundin. Another place for me to spout off ;) .

I’m grateful for rain in L.A. – now send more!

And last but not least, I’m grateful, not greatful, for my wife, Amy, who’s stood by me through thick and thin, ups and downs, both professional and personal. And certainly we’ve had our own ups and downs but we’ve always stuck together and stuck by each other. She’s my biggest fan and my best friend.

And I could go on even though when I first saw this question I wondered what the hell I would say, but it turns out when you—when I—stop and think about it I have a lot to be grateful for.

What are you grateful for in your writing life?

So, as this is the day after Thanksgiving, I hope you all had a good one!

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And now for something not quite completely different: My story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” is in the brand new, hot off the presses December 2016 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Get ’em while you can. And if you like the story, maybe you’ll remember it for the Ellery Queen Readers Award (the ballot for which is at the end of this issue), and others. Thanks.

Oh, and that is, of course, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, not that “other” one on the East Coast. And more on this in a future blog.

www.PaulDMarks.com

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Coffee, Tea or...E-Reader?

Have you switched to reading mostly ebooks or do you still hanker for the feel of a bound book in your hands? How would you prefer to have your books published?

by Paul D. Marks

I buy and read both e-books and paper books (in both paperback and hardback).  And I’d say I read about ¾ paper books to ¼ e-books.  Some books, of course, are only available as e-books so you have no choice.  But of books that are available in each format, I’d say that ratio is about 3 to 1.

Maybe because I’m of a generation that grew up with paper books, it’s simply what I’m used to and what I like.  That aside, there are other reasons to like paper books better.  But first, the things I like about e-books. Obviously you can store about 10 trillion of them on your iPad, Kindle, Nook or whatever you use, so particularly when traveling you can take a variety of books with you.  And since I generally have at least one non-fiction and one fiction book going at the same time, I can carry one iPad instead of two books.  Also on that iPad are magazines that I subscribe to and now don’t have to carry. And a variety of other books, so if I finish what I’m reading or just get bored with it, I have many other choices to go to, including the complete set of Classics Illustrated comic books, which I bought on DVD and transferred to my iPad.  I read and loved them as a kid, but have only read two or three since I bought the collection years ago on disc.  But somehow they’re still comforting to have there. 

There’s also a certain immediacy with e-books. You can read in the dark or buy an e-book in the middle of the night on a whim.  And there’s also certain kinds of books that I’d just as soon read on an e-reader, like manuals and other such things.  One major advantage of e-books is less clutter.  We’re running out of shelf space and have books overflowing off the shelves and have even more shelves in the garage. Maybe we should start a lending library?

But despite all the cool things about e-books, I still prefer paper books for several reasons. The main one being the tactile sensation.  The heft of them, the smell.  The overall feel. All the sensory things you don’t get with an e-book. On hardbacks, I also like to read the jacket copy, front, back and inside. I like reading the short summary of the story, the author bio and whatever other goodies are there.  I miss that on many paperbacks as well as e-books. 

And lately there have been reports saying that when one reads a book in electronic form readers don’t absorb as much information as when reading traditional books. And since most of us here are mystery readers and writers, check this from The Guardian, August 19, 2014: “A new study which found that readers using a Kindle were ‘significantly’ worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story is part of major new Europe-wide research looking at the impact of digitisation [sic] on the reading experience.” (itals added)

Both types of books can be easily highlighted.  But I also like to write notes in the margins. And it’s much more of a pain to type a note on a Kindle or other e-reader. But an advantage of the e-reader is being able to highlight a word and look it up in the dictionary. That is a very cool feature. But not enough to make me want to read more e-books.

My novel, White Heat, has sold a lot more e-books than paper, though I’d prefer if it was the other way around.  Not for the money, but for the feeling (whether real or imaginary) of something solid and permanent.  Even though e-books may outlast paper books in the long run, there is something more “real” about a paper book. And when you go to conferences, like Left Coast Crime or Bouchercon, or talks at libraries or book groups, it’s nice to have a paper version with you.

And don’t you love going into a house with lots of books everywhere, seeing their covers and spines and what your friends tastes are (so you know who to dump—only kidding). I’d miss that if everyone had only e-books.

Isn’t it just more satisfying to see a three dimensional book, with a spine and back cover, as well as a front cover. Also, particularly when reading the classics, like Chandler, Highsmith, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, they sort of “need” to be read in the traditional form, sitting in a wing chair with a glass of Scotch by your side. 

Raymond Chandler Paper Covers

Raymond Chandler Paper Spines

Raymond Chandler e-book Spine

White Heat Ebook Cover

White Heat Paperback Cover

White Heat Paperback Spine

White Heat e-book Spine

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And I’d like to congratulate two of our fellow Criminal Minds on their awards at Bouchercon a few days ago, so:

Congratulations to Catriona for her Anthony win! 

And to Art, for his Macavity win! 

  

Well done!