tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84881651887694477772024-03-04T20:29:27.946-08:00Spontaneous combustionLiving the storied lifeNancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-30195046180834094972016-11-22T05:56:00.000-08:002016-11-22T05:56:22.564-08:00Treat yourself; free downloads of two wondrous new MG fantasies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Just in time for the holidays, two of my editing clients are staging a joint book launch on November 22nd. <br /><br />It has been both my privilege and my pleasure to be a guide along the way for these two marvelous middle grade authors, and if you love magical fantasy and stories about worlds-within-worlds, you owe it to yourself and to any young readers in your life to download these books–and indeed, all the titles in both series. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4tK0fCQJXpR52AKyeVAVwUo6C4WPAX7R_WmoQUVkT2RWUxhpvWkvIswQGK5T3UYTsiBv1FxM2CFlk0WuOlf5bslVdDEkXMOF0g2UBBuWpYLaRbWEps05Dz_ctfK-MngDQvhjGjrulMImu/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-11-22+at+8.47.48+AM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4tK0fCQJXpR52AKyeVAVwUo6C4WPAX7R_WmoQUVkT2RWUxhpvWkvIswQGK5T3UYTsiBv1FxM2CFlk0WuOlf5bslVdDEkXMOF0g2UBBuWpYLaRbWEps05Dz_ctfK-MngDQvhjGjrulMImu/s200/Screen+Shot+2016-11-22+at+8.47.48+AM.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
Emma Warner-Reed is launching Book 2 in her Calendar House series about Welsh orphan Dotty Parsons in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NA6Z0O7" target="_blank">Dotty and the Chimney Thief.</a> In this tale, Dotty has to track a missing friend, in the process uncovering new clues about herself, her late mother, and the world of magical chimney sweeps hidden inside her Great-Uncle Winchester’s labyrinthine old house in Yorkshire. A perilous new threat menaces them all—and Dotty cannot be sure who is friend and who is foe. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-FS5-i0dMhcJT3J-Stw8XMELoDPyppMV4ne0Q9ZzrnNlxX1Mc3QwR_Son7V6SOAIH1lZsHqBYAJRyA7iCVDLH2458Ah592kUUF4WFUPZHXYlUTHnjxBMVSVrCVn1MA94UFDBcLmBBv8j/s1600/Magora+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-FS5-i0dMhcJT3J-Stw8XMELoDPyppMV4ne0Q9ZzrnNlxX1Mc3QwR_Son7V6SOAIH1lZsHqBYAJRyA7iCVDLH2458Ah592kUUF4WFUPZHXYlUTHnjxBMVSVrCVn1MA94UFDBcLmBBv8j/s200/Magora+3.jpg" width="131" /></a>Marc Remus is launching Book 3 in his award-winning Magora series about young Holly O’Flanigan [who coincidentally is also an orphan] in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Fog-Magora-Book-ebook/dp/B01N75T34S/ref%2526#61%3Bsr_1_2%3Fs%26%2361%3Bbooks%26amp%3Bie%26%2361%3BUTF8%26amp%3Bqid%26%2361%3B1479800947%26amp%3Bsr%26%2361%3B1-2%26amp%3Bkeywords%26%2361%3Bmagora%26%2343%3Bbridge" target="_blank">The Bridge in the Fog</a>. This series brings to vivid life the world of Magora—a place where art and magic are one in the same, and where voracious creatures called the Unfinished are both feared and persecuted. In this installment, Holly and her three best friends at Cliffony Academy of the Arts must tread a fine line between helping the Unfinished and potentially unleashing a nightmarish danger upon Magora.<br />
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Both series have proven popular on Amazon and I think if you download them, you will see why. And today the downloads are free!Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-66860018910254589882016-11-17T09:59:00.000-08:002016-11-17T09:59:33.271-08:00Size does matter: keep an eye on manuscript word countI write long, especially on first drafts—and I am not alone. I see the same dangerous prolixity in the manuscripts of many of my editing clients and writing students. It’s easy to understand why we all do this—we ramble on, blundering about in the uncharted darkness of our own imaginations as we try to find the right path into the heart of our stories. And the more we ramble, the higher our word count creeps. <br />
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I’m struggling with that now on my ghost story. Intended as a middle grade novel, at the rate I’m going, I’m worried that it’s going to top out at over 70,000 words. And although it’s true that the first Harry Potter novel was about the same length—77,325 words, to be exact—my projected 70,000 words is still on the long side for a middle grade book.<br />
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“Hold on a minute,” you may be thinking. “Are you actually obsessive enough to count every word in '<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0192CTMYG?ie=UTF8&tag=nabuwred-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=B0192CTMYG" target="_blank">Sorcerer’s Stone</a>?' "<br />
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No—but the Accelerated Reader program did. And they have a <a href="http://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx" target="_blank">free tool</a> that you can use to learn just how many words a published book contains.<br />
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Why should you care? “My book is special,” I often hear. “Sure, it’s on the long side, but 'So-and-So' is long, too. I’m sure it won’t matter to editors that my picture book is 2,000 words instead of the 500 to 800 they are asking for these days, or that my YA paranormal is 120,000 words when they expect 70,000.”<br />
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Don’t delude yourself. Whether we like it or not, size <b>does</b> matter to prospective publishers. The longer the book, the more it costs them to print it, and the more they have to charge for it. And this in turn increases the risk that the book will sell fewer copies due to price resistance on the part of parents, schools, and young readers.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiTfvoYoCKZYTzuO4r7OwTJz12gq3N6eHrbwIlyGqhWPTBkVLWSu9dxInayHHziAOwcFxGXo5D97jPROT2ZAYM3GVcM0NdpxlgXcNS1_NIOj3jJLXbQUsfGSSR7KZCpXxNwBcWfu5lpfjn/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-11-17+at+12.40.46+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiTfvoYoCKZYTzuO4r7OwTJz12gq3N6eHrbwIlyGqhWPTBkVLWSu9dxInayHHziAOwcFxGXo5D97jPROT2ZAYM3GVcM0NdpxlgXcNS1_NIOj3jJLXbQUsfGSSR7KZCpXxNwBcWfu5lpfjn/s200/Screen+Shot+2016-11-17+at+12.40.46+PM.jpg" width="125" /></a></div>
So yes, a proven writer with a successful sales record and a built-in audience of fans frothing at the mouth for the next book can write as long as she wants. That’s why the fifth book in the Potter series, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Order-Phoenix-Rowling-ebook/dp/B0192CTMXM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Order of the Phoenix</a>, was a whopping 257,154 words long. But don’t expect any publisher on the planet to give the rest of us mere mortals the same perk.<br />
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To estimate how long your manuscript should be, I think it’s helpful to make up a list of several titles in the same age range for which you are writing, then go to the <a href="http://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx" target="_blank">AR book finder site </a>to see what the word count of those books is.<br />
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Do a search for the book you want to check, then click on the blue underlined title in the result that comes up. That will take you to a window where you will find the word count. See what the median word count is for all the books you check, and aim to hit that mark in your own manuscript. For most of us, that means streamlining—for me, too!<br />
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There is of course another compelling reason to streamline your manuscripts: the tighter you write, the more powerful your prose and the more gripping your story will be. <br />
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Remember, especially you first-time authors, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the length of a manuscript and its chances of finding a publisher. In other words, the shorter the better. <br />
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PS: Many thanks to Katie Davis at the <a href="https://www.instituteforwriters.com/" target="_blank">Institute for Writers</a> for sharing this site with me. <br />
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<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-41355160998751415952016-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:002016-10-17T03:47:09.661-07:00Birth announcement for Melissa Roske's debut novel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am beyond excited this morning: Melissa Roske, one of my "ducklings" as I secretly call my writing students and freelance clients, is celebrating a huge milestone today. Her first novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Greene-Comes-Clean-Melissa-Roske/dp/1580897762/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475525447&sr=1-1&keywords=Kat+Greene" target="_blank">KAT GREENE COMES CLEAN</a>, is available for pre-order on Amazon today. I've already ordered two copies, one for her to autograph next June when the book finally comes out, and one for my iPad. you know, so I can carry KAT around with me everywhere.<br />
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And to celebrate, she's offering a <a href="https://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/cover-reveal-kat-greene-comes-clean-by-melissa-roske-a-giveaway/" target="_blank">book giveaway</a> over at Nerdy Book Club, along with an interview with Nathan Duffey, the artist who created the cover.<br />
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Days like this I am extra-grateful that I've got two new knees: because now I can really do a happy dance for Melissa. [Which I am doing due to the beat of Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling," in case you're interested.] I was privileged to be there as a kind of midwife, easing Melissa though the first few revisions of this warm and funny and insightful middle grade novel. So it gives me deep joy to know that soon everyone else is going to have the chance to find out for themselves what a fantastic writer she is.Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-87519136165044958182016-07-04T10:42:00.000-07:002016-07-04T10:42:21.050-07:00Happy Fourth of July!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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This is Yukon, our goofy Newf, gamely posing in his Uncle Sam hat, and wishing everyone a safe and glorious Fourth!Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-35960400409526520522016-06-05T05:36:00.001-07:002016-06-05T05:36:29.659-07:00Another plug for the serial commaAs my students and clients know, I am a big fan of the serial, or Oxford comma—you know, that punctuation mark that belongs in a list of three or more things before the word <i>and</i>.<br />
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lions, tigers<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b>,</b></span></span> </span>and bears</div>
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For such a tiny little squiggle, the serial comma elicits a lot of heated debate. The British writer Lynne Truss defended it beautifully—and hilariously—in the New York Times bestseller <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OIZSVY?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000OIZSVY&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Eats, Shoots & Leaves</a>.<br />
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If you can't make time to read Truss' book [although really, you should], here is a quick <a href="http://video.newyorker.com/watch/comma-queen-selfies" target="_blank">two-minute video</a><a href="http://video.newyorker.com/watch/comma-queen-selfies" target="_blank"> </a>by <i>New Yorker</i> copy editor Mary Norris, aka the Comma Queen. I couldn't say it better. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Norris</td></tr>
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Queen Mary has a new book that I'm eager to read. It's entitled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Between-You-Me-Confessions-Comma-ebook/dp/B00L3KQ1NQ?ie=UTF8&me=&ref_=mt_kindle" target="_blank">Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen</a>. Has anyone else read it yet?<br />
<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-33886589008343011072015-11-02T12:18:00.000-08:002015-11-02T12:18:26.353-08:00Read Christine Kohler on keeping an emotions journal [yours truly is quoted]<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG02S-BU_zkwgIbSoEkjb5xO8MsFr3-PT3fkJN8EYiY0fGtADIk9gvU51OqynwWXjt4K846v9mW8JQc9hAVYogvFRkz3hlPSkmq3PNDKYZMUC24_VN6P6Fw26cat-lXmSU7nGGRMv-FAdE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-11-02+at+3.06.32+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG02S-BU_zkwgIbSoEkjb5xO8MsFr3-PT3fkJN8EYiY0fGtADIk9gvU51OqynwWXjt4K846v9mW8JQc9hAVYogvFRkz3hlPSkmq3PNDKYZMUC24_VN6P6Fw26cat-lXmSU7nGGRMv-FAdE/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-11-02+at+3.06.32+PM.jpg" width="231" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Jacek Halicki</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I</span>t’s been a long time since that idyllic trip to the Adirondacks: cue the big sigh. Cobwebs are dangling all over this blog since then, however, but before I go into “poor poor pitiful me” mode to make my excuses for that, let me first do a little crowing. My friend and colleague Christine Kohler—author of the YA historical novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVHS6B6?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00GVHS6B6&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">No Surrender Soldier</a>—has a <a href="http://yaofmeritcom.ipage.com/?p=846" target="_blank">new blog post over at UncommonYA </a>that is well worth reading. It’s about how keeping an emotions journal can help writers create more vivid, compelling characters. Christine did me the honor of quoting me on the subject, too, so please head on over and check it out. <br />
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So other than contributing, in a small way, to that blog post, what has been keeping me silent here? Well, first I had to pay for my month in the mountains kayaking by coming home and working through a mountain of manuscript critiques. It’s work I love, mind you, so I’m not complaining. But it took a while. After which I dashed off to DisneyWorld with my sisters and parents in mid-September. It was the first time I’ve ever been there without kids in tow, and it was fun enjoying it as a grown-up: despite the punishing 104 degree heat. I love the Haunted Mansion!<br /><br />Then I came home and had a total knee replacement on Sept. 30th: ouch. I’d been dreading this for years, but when you can’t keep up at the Magic Kingdom with your 83-year-old mother who’s had spinal surgery, you know it’s time.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not my knee, but close</td></tr>
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According to everyone, I’m having the most phenomenal recovery in the annals of medicine—so much so that I’ve scheduled the second op for the other knee in early December.<br />
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Still, this surgery has knocked the wind out of my sails. What I call “Pain Brain” makes it hard to string three coherent words together into a sentence, much less be creative. So I hope you’ll forgive the silence of the past few months, and the silence to come. But it will all be worth it: and next year I’ll come back stronger than ever. Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-63099886131840426442015-07-30T08:23:00.000-07:002015-07-30T08:23:02.187-07:00Drifting on a lake of peace—and I've got a chapter in a new book that just came out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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The wandering writer has found her way home at last. I just returned from a nearly-idyllic month away from the suffocating heat and humidity of summer in the South. I spent all that time in one of two mountain ranges: the Blue Ridge in Virginia; and the High Peaks area of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, about an hour from the Canadian border. <br /><br />I am lucky enough to have a sister with a camp, as they call it up there, on a lake in the Adirondacks, and that’s where I spent three weeks with my loud and crazy family. <br /><br />And for those three weeks, I found I was able to live each day for itself, not worrying about what went before or what lay ahead. That is a gift that is rarely given, and I tried to appreciate every moment of it. Being unplugged from email, television, newspapers, and the Internet certainly helped banish the usual stresses of modern everyday life. And so I was able to steep in the refreshingly cool silence, and bask in the bright sunshine like the little brick-colored lizard that lived beneath the outdoor shower. My favorite thing was to get up at dawn to kayak when the lake was like glass, with loons trailing along behind me and a bald eagle soaring overhead. <br /><br />But all idylls have to come to an end, so now I’m back at my desk and already a little cranky from having to juggle deadlines. Sigh. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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However, in the days and weeks to come, whenever I need a respite, I think I will be able to dip from that deep lake of peace inside me that I filled up while I was in the mountains.<br /><br />And I do have some exciting news to share. Chris Eboch, my fellow writer and instructor at the Institute of Children’s Literature, has recently published a new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YVNM8PC?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00YVNM8PC&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">You Can Write for Children</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZtHRKfDcoCknXTgmu-gILfQydksG0uAOqTGYReeEt0uPilPGJQ5pS-1PTQtlfvTHq8yxg9pE-rlTn9iPJSHYJluW_SLxLXf24S3tqtBkELQqcSL3-2uBur4e0tiQjMAWiDwdOmbHJ2W6J/s1600/EbochBook2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZtHRKfDcoCknXTgmu-gILfQydksG0uAOqTGYReeEt0uPilPGJQ5pS-1PTQtlfvTHq8yxg9pE-rlTn9iPJSHYJluW_SLxLXf24S3tqtBkELQqcSL3-2uBur4e0tiQjMAWiDwdOmbHJ2W6J/s200/EbochBook2.jpg" width="140" /></a></div>
She has kindly included a chapter from me inside! With my permission, she used some of the material from my web series on viewpoint in a chapter in her book on POV. So please, check it out. Chris’ latest book makes an excellent companion to her other guide on writing, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FMBI18?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B005FMBI18&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Advanced Plotting</a>. That’s a resource I recommend constantly to my students and clients. <br /><br /><br /><br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-11747243235360788802015-05-20T11:48:00.000-07:002015-05-20T12:00:01.931-07:00Choosing the Perfect POV: The Writer’s Quest for the Holy Grail<span style="color: yellow;"><i>Note: This is the sixth and last in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">here on my website</a> as downloadable PDFs. </i></span><br />
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Finding the perfect form of POV for your book is a lot like the legendary quest for the Holy Grail: one wrong choice can spell your doom. Just ask the characters in the movie <i>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</i>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Madder of Grail in Valencia, Spain</td></tr>
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In that film, Walter Donovan is a rich American businessman so greedy for eternal life that he collaborates with the Nazis in order to track down the Grail. But the immortal knight who has been guarding the chalice for centuries warns, “The true Grail will bring you life; the false grail will take it from you.”<br />
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Undeterred, Donovan chooses a glitzy gold cup and drains it in one smug gulp. Moments later, his face caves in, his eyeballs shrivel up, and finally his entire body crumbles to dust as he shrieks in agony and terror.<br />
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The knight looks on dispassionately and deadpans, “He chose…poorly.” Oops!<br />
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Donovan’s lethal fate is precisely what you want to avoid when deciding which form of POV to use in your book. You certainly don’t want to make a poor choice that can suck the life out of your carefully-crafted story. But how do you choose wisely?<br />
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As I’ve suggested in this series on “<a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">Demystifying Viewpoint</a>,” one way to understand POV is to think of it this way—which character is <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/whos-wearing-the-glasses-an-easy-way-to-understand-pov/" target="_blank">wearing the glasses </a>through which readers view all the events of the book?<br />
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I’ve written about both single and multiple POV, and confessed that I am something of a <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/confessions-of-a-single-pov-puritan/" target="_blank">single POV Puritan</a>; both as a writer and a reader, I prefer books where the narrative glasses sit firmly on the nose of just one character from beginning to end. <br />
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But I tried to give equal time to <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/fight-club-multiple-pov-fights-back/" target="_blank">multiple POV</a>, since so many fine books, both for kids and adults, are written this way—with the viewpoint glasses switching from one character to another as the book unfolds.<br />
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I even wrote about <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/power-can-go-to-your-head-the-perils-of-omniscient-pov/" target="_blank">omniscient POV:</a> that form of viewpoint where <i>none</i> of the characters in the book is wearing the viewpoint glasses. Instead, the author reserves those for herself, in one guise or another.<br />
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But despite mocking myself a little as a Single POV Puritan, I do realize that this is not the best way to write every novel. It may sound like heresy for me of all people to say this, but some types of books are more effective if readers can experience them through the perspective of multiple characters—or even via the voice of an all-knowing narrator.<br />
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So how do you choose which character should wear the viewpoint glasses? How do you decide which form of POV is best for a particular project? <br />
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The answer is straightforward: you need to choose the viewpoint technique that will work best to accomplish your literary goals. That’s the fundamental question you need to ask yourself when you first sit down to write. What is your purpose with the book—to scare readers, or to make them laugh? To make them cry or to ignite them with anger? To lead them on a wild adventure, or to make them ponder emotional truths or existential questions? Your choice of viewpoint can help or hinder you in any of those goals.<br />
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In a <a href="http://www.christinekohlerbooks.com/newsletter907151.htm" target="_blank">blog article on multiple POV</a>, writer Christine Kohler has written eloquently about her reasons for choosing that technique for her YA historical novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVHS6B6?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00GVHS6B6&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">No Surrender Soldier </a>[Merit Press, Fall 2014]. Her thought process can be a model for any writer struggling to make this pivotal decision. <br />
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<span style="color: #e69138;"><i>“[The book]…is told in two POVs because the WWII soldier, Isamu Seto, is hiding in the jungle. In 1972, when Kiko’s story takes place, no one knows the soldier exists. If I had told the story in a single POV, then it might have still been suspenseful for Kiko to discover the soldier, but I would not have been able to show the reader how and why Seto hid and survived for 28 years in the jungle. Both POVs are in past tense since this is a historical novel.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #e69138;"><i>“However, 15-year-old Kiko’s POV chapters are in first person, whereas Seto’s chapters are in third person. I wrote it this way so the reader could identify with Kiko, and not Seto. The third person puts a bit more psychic distance between the reader and the character.”</i></span></blockquote>
Kohler made a daring choice here; it was a risky move to write even part of a novel aimed at YA readers from the POV of an adult—and an adult who is likely to be viewed as a “bad guy” by readers, at least initially. But she had a compelling narrative reason to do so—that’s the key. Then she was careful to mitigate the risks she took by making another wise decision. She kept the sections in her Japanese soldier’s point of view in third person in order to give readers a “safe zone.” Using third person means that young readers don’t have to get that close to Seto if they don’t want to; they can still cling to young Kiko as their proxy in the book. <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: lime;"><b>•</b><b>Genre</b>:</span></span> Note also that Kohler is writing a historical saga, one that spans three decades. A saga can be historical, covering a broad range of time; geographical, covering a sweeping event that happens in many places at once, such as a war, natural catastrophe, or the zombie apocalypse; or speculative, by which I mean a fantasy or sci fi book that builds an entirely new world [or universe] for readers. As much as it pains a single POV Puritan like myself to say this, such sagas might be too limited, too narrow in their scope, if told from the viewpoint of just one character. Such books work best with either multiple POV or omniscient narration. This way readers can get the full impact of the big event by viewing it through the lenses of several different viewpoint characters, or an all-knowing one. <br />
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On the other hand, it might work better to stick with the single POV of your detective if you are writing a mystery, where you want readers to compete with the hero in a race to solve the crime, based on clues that only your detective-protagonist knows. <br />
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Single POV can also work well in a book where you want to scare readers, such as a horror or ghost story. In books like this, it’s the unknown that ratchets up the level of fear, so the limited knowledge of a single POV character can be highly effective.<br />
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A romance, on the other hand, might be more intriguing if you tell it in the dual POV of both parties in the relationship. [<i>Although this use of POV is common in adult romances, in YA romance a single POV is often used instead.</i>]<br />
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<span style="color: lime;"><b>• Audience:</b></span> Consider your target audience as well. A more complex use of viewpoint—such as rotating through several different POV characters in the course of a novel—can well with older YA readers, but could possibly fall flat with middle graders. Multiple POV can confuse or put off younger readers, who aren’t as experienced with literary techniques and may respond better to a simpler, more direct approach. <br />
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I learned this the hard way with a middle grade ghost story that I’m working on. In the first draft, I had seven—count ‘em, SEVEN!—viewpoint characters. I was convinced I had the writing chops to pull this off; can you say over-confident and delusional? I was 150 pages into the manuscript before I finally realized that one of my characters had staged a mutiny. A quirky little guy whom I had originally thought was just a minor character turned out to be my real hero, so I had to rewrite the entire blasted book. [The fact that the revision turned out to flow so naturally was my clue that I was doing the right thing; I should have listened to my inner Puritan and stuck with single POV in the first place.]<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;"><span style="color: lime;"><b>• Reader relationship to hero</b></span>:</span> Perhaps most importantly, consider your protagonist. What kind of relationship do you want readers to have with your hero or heroine? The more strongly you want your readers to identify with your hero, the more likely it is that you’ll want to use single POV, whether in first or limited third person: perhaps even in <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/deep-pov-fast-track-to-compelling-character-voice/" target="_blank">Deep POV</a>.<br />
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On the other hand, if you are writing a book where the main character is an anti-hero, or even a villain, using first-person narration or a tight single third-person POV might be too claustrophobic for readers. Who wants to be stuck in the head of a sadistic bully for an entire book? When you don’t expect readers to like your protagonist, you may want to hold them at a distance by using a more distant form of third person POV, or even omniscient. Or you can minimize the amount of time readers have to spend with your unlikeable protagonist by switching off periodically to other, more sympathetic characters using multiple POV. <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;"><b><span style="color: lime;">• Literary goals:</span> </b></span>Finally, don’t forget to consider how the form of POV you choose can help you achieve your other literary goals for the book. Maybe you are writing a story where much of the dramatic impact at the climax comes from a twist that you have cagily been hiding up your sleeve for the entire plot. Your choice of POV is absolutely critical here, because you need to control the information that readers have in order to keep the twist hidden. This is a time where omniscient POV would almost certainly be the wrong choice: the narrator’s all-encompassing knowledge would make it very difficult for you to avoid lying to readers–which isn’t playing fair with them—and yet not reveal too much too soon. Try multiple POV for this kind of book where the twist is vital, so that you can use each POV character to dispense carefully-controlled snippets of information.<br />
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Books with a twist also work well in single POV, especially with a kind of viewpoint character called an unreliable narrator. Edgar Allen Poe is brilliant at this, as is the Golden Age mystery novelist Agatha Christie in the classic <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC12YQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000FC12YQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">The Murder of Roger Ackroyd</a>. <span id="goog_1766529035"></span><span id="goog_1766529036"></span><br />
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Another masterful example of the unreliable narrator is Louise in Katherine Paterson’s Newbery-winning <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001UFP6K8?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001UFP6K8&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Jacob Have I Loved. </a>Louise narrates the entire book in first person, and without spoiling the twist, let’s just say that she is wearing green-tinted glasses through the entire novel. Her perspective of events is definitely biased, in a way that misleads readers as to the motivations of other characters, yet without ever lying to them. <br />
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As you can see, there is a lot to consider when you start a new project and need to decide how you are going to tell your story. You need to think about your genre, your target audience, and the relationship you want readers to have with your main character.<br />
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But most of all, you need to have a clear understanding of what your story goals are. When you know what dramatic effects you want to create, what emotional reactions you want to engender, and what themes you want to explore, then you can choose the right pair of POV glasses from your literary optical shop, so that readers will see what you want them to see.<br />
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Thank you for joining me in what has turned into a bit of a saga itself: it took me nearly two years to complete all six articles in the series. My hope is that buried somewhere in this torrent of words is advice that can help you make your stories shine.<br />
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As the Grail knight said, “Choose wisely” when deciding what POV technique to use in order to bring life to your book. <br />
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<span style="color: blue;">[© 2015 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.] </span>Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-81106140254488235092015-02-27T11:23:00.001-08:002015-02-27T12:05:48.781-08:00Power Can Go To Your Head: The Perils of Omniscient POV<i><span style="color: yellow;">Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/power-can-go-to-your-head-the-perils-of-omniscient-pov/" target="_blank">my website</a> as downloadable PDFs.</span></i><br />
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Some of my favorite books are written in omniscient viewpoint—and yet omni POV is my least favorite form of narration. It makes even the most modern of books sound antique—and don't even get me started on the almost ubiquitous head hopping to be found in novels with omniscient narration. I am convinced that such head hopping is the leading cause of vertigo among avid readers. Seriously. The National Institutes of Health should do a study.<br />
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OK, let me remove my tongue from my cheek for a moment. If you have read the earlier installments of this <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">web series on viewpoint</a>, you will already know that I am just a <i>teensy</i> bit prejudiced in favor of single viewpoint. I'm not all that fond of shifting or multiple POV; and I have just made it obnoxiously clear that omni POV, as I will call it for short, is also a member of my Hall of Shame. <br />
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That being said, I adore books like Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket—both of which make use of omniscient narration. And I'm not just pinching my nose, holding my breath, and vowing to "get through it" when I read these books either. I actually enjoy what these two gifted storytellers are able to accomplish with their skillful use of omniscient viewpoint.<br />
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So what separates good from bad when it comes to omni POV? And why do I think that it is a very dangerous form of narration, especially for new writers? <br />
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Before I talk about that, let me back up and make sure it is clear exactly what omniscient viewpoint is. It comes in several different flavors, the distinctions between which can get fairly subtle. In the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005070OYK?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B005070OYK&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">The Power of POV</a> which I have recommended multiple times in this web series, Alicia Rasley divides omniscient narration into three basic kinds: objective, classical omniscient, and contemporary omniscient.<br />
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For the purposes of this piece, however, I don't think it's useful to delve too deeply into the distinctions between them. If you're interested, read Rasley's book [which I think you should do anyway].<br />
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I think the most helpful way to look at omniscient narration is simply to think of it as another kind of third person. We are already familiar with limited third person, where a book is written using <i>he/she</i> but the perspective remains inside the mind of one or more of the characters. <br />
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Well, in omniscient narration you are for the most part outside the viewpoint of <i>any</i> of the characters. Thus you can think of omni POV as a distant or impersonal form of third person rather than a personal one; or an exterior form of third person rather than an interior one.<br />
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Whatever it is called, when you write in omniscient narration you are not limited by anything any of the characters know—hence the name omniscient, which means all-knowing. Omni POV is a good way to let readers in on information that you don't want your hero to know just yet. For example, if your main character is trying to sneak up on the lair of the villain, you can increase the tension and suspense for readers by letting them know about the evil minions lurking in the shadows, while at the same time keeping the hapless hero in the dark about the danger that awaits him. " Three men with guns stood as still as statues on the other side of the door whose lock Archie had just successfully picked."<br />
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Omniscient narration is also handy in certain genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, and sweeping historical sagas. Here a writer can use omni POV to do two things. First, the all-knowing author can use her omniscience to fill readers in on necessary history or backstory that again, no one character might know.<br />
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Second, if it's important to the book for the author to keep track of how multiple characters are affected by something like a war , natural catastrophe, man-made apocalypse, or epic quest, omniscient narration is a smoother, more seamless way to do that than a frequently-shifting multiple POV. [Which can end up feeling like a game of musical chairs; when the chapter stops, readers wonder, which character's chair do I have to scramble to sit in next?]<br />
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But in a touch of dramatic irony that fiction writers can appreciate, it is the very strengths of omni POV which can lead to its doom. The all-knowing writer's ability to expound at length on absolutely any character's backstory, any event's history, any fantasy world's provenance, or any sci-fi gadget's fascinating inner technology can all too quickly lead to the dreaded "information dump." That's what it's called when a writer allows the characters to go into hibernation and the plot to stall out while she goes on and on for pages of exposition, in what amounts to a term paper within the novel. Boring!<br />
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And if you're not careful, omniscient narration can lead you to reveal too much, too soon—which can ruin a good thriller, ghost story, or mystery.<br />
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I also think that omniscient narration can sound old-fashioned to today's readers, since many of the classics that we grew up on—or were forced to read by our English teachers at school—were written in omniscient narration. So even if a book was published in the 21st century, if it is written in omniscient POV, we feel a sort of literary <i>déja vu</i> when we read it—a flashback that makes the modern story feel as if it were a relic from the 19th century. <br />
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But to me the number one failing, the Fatal Flaw, of omniscient narration, is its impersonality. Readers don't know who it is that is dispensing this encyclopedia of information. Is it some god-like narrator, or is it the author? If it's the latter, is he or she wearing an invisibility cloak that we're supposed to pretend not to see, or is this some kind of purposeful meta-fictional insertion of the writer's persona into the book? <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zeus<br />
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Or is the narrator an eerily amorphous no one at all? That's the hallmark of what Rasley calls objective or camera's-eye POV.<br />
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And not only are readers unsure of who the narrator is in omniscient viewpoint, and what their relationship to that narrator is supposed to be, they also aren't given the opportunity to get know any of the characters all that well. As a consequence, readers may never bond with any character. That emotional distance heightens the risk of alienating readers from the book all together, to the point that they put it down for good.<br />
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Writers who use omniscient POV know this, which is perhaps why you see a lot of what is called "dipping," or momentarily slipping into the viewpoint of one of the book's characters. JK Rowling is a genius at this. The first chapter of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00728DYCO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00728DYCO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Goblet of Fire</a> is a superb example of how to write omniscient narration well.<br />
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Midway through the chapter, Rowling makes the graceful narrative glissade that is called dipping. Within the space of one paragraph, she descends gradually from the stratospheric heights of omniscience. First she slips into the heads of several nameless village boys, all at once, in a kind of joint or communal POV, telling us that they teased the crippled old gardener Frank Bryce simply for the cruel fun of it.<br />
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Then, in the very next sentence, Rowling descends even further. This times she dips into Frank's head to tell us that Frank has misinterpreted the boys' motives. He believes that they torment him because they blame him for the murders of Tom Riddle and his family—though we already know that those murders bear the unmistakeable stamp of dark magic.<br />
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The fact that Rowling changes POV twice in one paragraph could mark this as head hopping—the worst of the writer's Deadly Sins. Indeed, it can be difficult to know when a writer has transgressed, crossing the line from dipping to head hopping, and I am probably a harsher judge of that than most. Nonetheless, I think Rowling avoids being branded with head hopping here primarily because for the rest of the chapter, she stays in Frank's head. If she had jumped back out of Frank's head again, that would have been head hopping. <br />
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But it's a narrow escape, and that's my point; it's devilishly difficult to avoid head hopping when you write in omniscient narration and try to dip. Harsh judge that I am, I think that author Trenton Lee Stewart made that mistake in his best-selling middle grade novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEHIB2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000SEHIB2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">The Mysterious Benedict Society</a>.<br />
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Stewart uses omniscient narration throughout the book, though he frequently dips into several of the characters' viewpoints. Most of the time, he stays in a POV long enough to avoid head hopping—but not always. Look at this passage where the adult mentor is telling the four young characters about a challenging task ahead. One of them gets a little nervous and needs a bathroom break.<br />
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...and then Mr. Benedict added, “Now, do you truly need to use the bathroom, or can you wait a few minutes longer?” [<i><span style="color: lime;">Omni POV</span></i>]<br />
Sticky truly did, but he said, “I can wait.” [<i><span style="color: lime;">Sticky's POV</span></i>]<br />
“Very well...” Mr. Benedict said [<i><span style="color: lime;">Omni POV</span></i>]</blockquote>
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To me, going into a character's head for just one sentence, and for no compelling plot purpose, is head hopping. So with apologies to Mr. Stewart, I do believe that's what he's done here. <br />
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The point is, if a talented and experienced author can make that kind of slip-up, what hope do the rest of us have of avoiding the same trap? It is just too perilously easy to go astray with omniscient POV.<br />
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So proceed at your own risk. If you are writing the kind of book that might benefit from the peculiar powers of omniscient viewpoint, then go for it! Just keep your wits about you at all times, and stay on the lookout for the pitfalls that await the unwary writer with this form of POV. <br />
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<span style="color: blue;">[© 2015 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.]</span><br />
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<i><span style="color: yellow;">Next—Which POV technique is best for you?</span></i>Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-68991685001233876782015-02-01T10:23:00.000-08:002015-02-01T10:23:25.422-08:00Priming the pump: my home-brewed writing practice<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>fter lamenting the failure of my morning page experiment last week, I vowed to cook up a little something of my own to try instead. No way I was going to give up entirely on my search for a method that would help me get back on track in terms of my writing.<br />
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What I wanted was some regular discipline that would do more than help me be creative in a general sense—which is what Julia Cameron’s morning pages are designed to do. <br />
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I also wanted something more than a technique to merely get me started—to get me past that brain-petrifying paralysis that afflicts many of us when we first sit down and try to begin a work session. Giving one a “jump start” like this is what Natalie Goldberg’s freewriting exercise is designed to do.<br />
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No, I wanted a more laser-like focus on productivity: on having something useable and at least halfway decent to show for my sweat and tears at the end of the day. <br />
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And I did come up with something—although I can’t claim that it is original or unique. Other writers and teachers before me have devised a modification of freewriting, one that gives it more structure by targeting a specific topic or goal for each session.<br />
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Once you do that, however, can you call it freewriting anymore? So I’m not naming my “method” that, if you can dignify what I’m doing with that formal a designation. I call it <span style="color: lime;"><i><b>Priming the Pump</b></i></span>. It’s simple, but in the first week that I’ve tried it, it’s accomplished just what I hoped it would—it has helped me produce something tangible at the end of each work day, something that moves my work forward in a measurable and substantive way. I’m quietly ecstatic about the results so far.<br />
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This method requires that you have a writing project already underway. This is not a brainstorming technique, though I suppose you could use it for that as well. There are five steps to <span style="color: lime;"><i><b>Priming the Pump</b></i></span>.<br />
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<li>Do a <u><span style="color: lime;">Preliminary Review</span> </u>of a work in progress</li>
<li>Write down a <span style="color: lime;"><u>Question of the Day</u></span></li>
<li>Spend either a period of time [ten to fifteen minutes?] or a number of words [100 to 700?] sketching out <span style="color: lime;"><u>Starting Notes</u></span> about the question</li>
<li>Seamlessly <span style="color: lime;"><u>Shift into Writing</u></span> actual sentences, paragraphs, and [hopefully] pages</li>
<li>Do a <span style="color: lime;"><u>Summary Review</u></span> of work done. At the end of the session, write down the answer to the initial question, to see what tangible progress you’ve made</li>
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I’ve used this five-step practice this week to help claw my way out of an uncharted swamp in the middle of a middle grade novel. I had lots of plot ideas swirling around my head, but they were confusing and contradictory and unclear. After writing the first ten chapters and being stalled for ages, I needed to blow away the fog by figuring out precisely what happens in the remaining chapters of the book. Yes, this means a dreaded outline, which I don’t always use but which I have come to think I desperately need on this particular book. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Yann Richard (Ze)</td></tr>
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The first thing I did was briefly glance over what I had already written of the book, and the notes I’d made for what was to come: <span style="color: lime;">Step 1</span>, the <span style="color: lime;">Preliminary Review</span>.<br />
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From that a clear <span style="color: lime;">Question of the Day</span> arose, almost asking itself: <span style="color: lime;">Step 2.</span> I wrote it down on a sticky note [an electronic one] and left it floating on the screen of my laptop where it would always be visible. You could do the same thing by using a paper Post-It note, an index card, or by simply jotting down the question at the top of the page on which you’re about to write. <br />
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It’s important to be as specific as you can when framing your question, because that specificity will help steer you in a fruitful direction. If you simply ask yourself, “What happens next?” your mind may seem even emptier of words and ideas than before. But if you ask, “What happens after the Hero finds the treasure map but before he meets the nefarious guide?” you will have a much better chance of finding the answer during your daily writing session.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVwNLnfY771vytR40A9I-Jbh6MIYKwvErCGcEBzPoBAUBBWnTj4UohGAw13XTu4MYom1YqPhmA4CwCHVNLSFsZOVRIsol1ojedGz7SLZCuSCPSNaz7ddJ-nbDdXvZwOtH6gFHgWx5q3Olw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-02-01+at+1.15.03+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVwNLnfY771vytR40A9I-Jbh6MIYKwvErCGcEBzPoBAUBBWnTj4UohGAw13XTu4MYom1YqPhmA4CwCHVNLSFsZOVRIsol1ojedGz7SLZCuSCPSNaz7ddJ-nbDdXvZwOtH6gFHgWx5q3Olw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-02-01+at+1.15.03+PM.jpg" height="261" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Jaypee</td></tr>
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I think it is also important to write down the question in twenty-words or less, and to keep it somewhere that is always visible during your writing session. Then if you start to feel lost again, you have only to glance up to find your writing “compass” right there to steer you back onto the path. <br />
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In <span style="color: lime;">Step 3</span>, I don’t think it matters whether you have a time goal for your <span style="color: lime;">Starting Notes</span>, or a word goal. Do whatever works best for you. I can dash off 700 words in about 15 minutes, if I’m writing on my Macbook Air or iPad, so 700 words was the goal I set for myself. <br />
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But in practice, I found I got so quickly immersed in puzzling out the answer to my question that the goal disappeared. I would look up an hour or so later and realize I had burned up those 700 words a long time ago, and was already well into <span style="color: lime;">Step 4:</span> <span style="color: lime;">Shift into Writing</span>.<br />
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Work as long as you can—whether that means as long as you continue to produce useful work; as long as your poor stiff joints hold out; or as long as your dog, cat, family, or boss at your day job will let you. <br />
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I do think it’s important to know when to stop. This is going to vary with every person; we all seem to have only so many hours of good writing in us each day before the juices stop flowing. Pull the plug when you realize that are doing more harm than good by continuing to write: either producing drivel, haring off on a wild detour, or bogging down in a quagmire of confusion or needless complexity.<br />
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But before you leap up from your desk and race off to celebrate with a glass of wine, don’t forget <span style="color: lime;">Step 5</span>: the <span style="color: lime;">Summary Review</span>. Briefly read back over what you’ve written during the session, and write down the answer to your <span style="color: lime;">Question of the Day</span>. Don’t skip this step, as I’ve found it helps keep you on target—and often leads to the question you’ll work on the next day. This week while I was experimenting with it, the next day’s question often arose spontaneously while I was writing, which was an unexpected gift.<br />
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Writing down the answer to your daily question also keeps your mind working. Even while you are going about the non-literary part of your life—wiping your kids’ noses, doing the taxes, vacuuming the carpet—your writer’s brain is hard at work at a subconscious level, wrestling with a thorny problem although you’re not actively thinking about it. And that will make it all the easier for you to not only get started the next time you sit down to write, but to make actual headway on whatever it is you’re writing.<br />
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That’s the crux of this “priming” method: to have useable work to show for it at the end of the day. It may be a completed outline for a novel or non-fiction article. Or it may be a page, a scene, or even an entire chapter. Yes, these pages may “only” qualify as a first draft, but a solid one: much more than what I call “word salad,” a chaotic, loose jumble of raw ideas. <br />
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In one week of using this system, I have not only mapped out a plot route through the second half of my novel, but I’ve also generated this blog post, and written the lead to an article on omniscient POV on which I have been stalled for months.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Editor5807</td></tr>
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If this pump-priming method works as well for you as it has for me, then I hope you have a draft cohesive and clear enough that you can revise it without needing to either deconstruct it completely or throw it all away. <br />
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No method works for every writer, so there is no money-back guarantee for this free advice. :D But if you try it, I’d love to hear what your experience with <span style="color: lime;"><b><i>Priming the Pump</i></b></span> is.<br />
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<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-63830160620470335512015-01-25T13:24:00.000-08:002015-01-25T13:24:53.284-08:00Morning pages? Epic fail, but new experiment coming<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While I was laid up in a cast after Achilles tendon surgery the past two months, I decided to give Julia Cameron's morning pages a try, subjecting the fabled advice on creativity to a 30-day experiment. And for me at least, morning pages were a flop.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBTWPM3pWp0q1NI9bsgTi0d9axMmiDN-X2rhrCRVuYaqWvFefxf-N2HxDwlct_7RBHYF-OyNQajWbKOQSSSz_hvj5NYLarNu-T14bFbdCEjY-78gFyRXXqZNTZ3x1EF0YpbKPHgWb4f06u/s1600/Open-book-pages1903.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBTWPM3pWp0q1NI9bsgTi0d9axMmiDN-X2rhrCRVuYaqWvFefxf-N2HxDwlct_7RBHYF-OyNQajWbKOQSSSz_hvj5NYLarNu-T14bFbdCEjY-78gFyRXXqZNTZ3x1EF0YpbKPHgWb4f06u/s1600/Open-book-pages1903.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a>I make this declaration even though I enjoyed writing them every morning, and even though I felt they had some benefit. But they didn't achieve what I thought was their purpose—not just to unlock one's creativity in some vague and general sense, but rather to fuel a new burst of tangible, concrete productivity. This they did not do, not for me.<br />
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Now one can argue that I have misunderstood the <i>raison d'être</i> of morning pages, especially since, like the woman who wrote this <a href="http://www.thisoffbeatlife.com/2010/03/recovering-from-julia-camerons-the-artists-way/" target="_blank"> sardonic blog post on "recovering"</a> from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006H19H3M?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B006H19H3M&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">The Artist's Way</a> , I stubbornly refused to actually read any of Cameron's books. Instead, I relied on the instructions I found on <a href="http://juliacameronlive.com/blog/" target="_blank">Cameron's blog</a>.<br />
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Perhaps Cameron never intended for morning pages to be as utilitarian as I wanted them to be. Maybe they are designed to be more like a routine tune-up for the creative spirit—something to lubricate the valves, clean the sludge out of the carburetor, and get the engine ready to run without worrying about whether the car ever leaves the driveway. But what I was hoping for was something that would actually propel me down the road, so I could rack up some real mileage on the odometer. And that didn't happen.<br />
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I did look forward to writing my 700 words—which is how I translated Cameron's prescription that one must complete three pages of longhand writing each day. For reasons that I explained in <a href="http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2014/12/rebel-without-clue-is-it-truly.html" target="_blank">my previous blog post</a>, I refused to do this by hand as Cameron prescribes. But I did do my pages first thing every morning, and yes, I did feel that it helped reconnect me each day to my identity as a writer. Certainly, that's a good thing. <br />
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But I still think they should be called morning purges, not pages. Because at the risk of being crude, they felt like the psychological equivalent of a visit to the bathroom, clearing one's self of all the emotional crap clogging up the works, making one lighter and freeing up the headspace to sit down to the day's work.<br />
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In other words, morning pages to me seem like nothing more esoteric or special than daily journaling. Period. End of sentence. And I was already doing that on a daily basis for the past eleven years, though at night rather than in the morning. And yes, it can be helpful. But it's a psychological/emotional/spiritual exercise, not a specifically creative one. <br />
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It's not what I need. This brought me back to freewriting, which I became familiar with via Natalie Goldberg's writings, though she wasn't the first to suggest them either. Dorothea Brande advised something similar in her 1932 classic, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0063LHSN2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0063LHSN2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Becoming A Writer.</a><br />
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And apparently Jack Kerouac mentions something like the technique as well in his "<a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/88/kerouac-technique.html" target="_blank">Belief and Technique for Modern Prose</a>."<br />
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But freewriting isn't necessarily aimed at helping you produce more useable prose at the end of the day's work either, and that's what I am looking for. Freewriting is like a key to switch on the ignition, when what I want is to get out of the garage and make it down the highway to the state line by sunset. <br />
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So I'm playing around in my mind with a tiny spark of an idea, an adaptation of freewriting, one that has a more specific goal: to get my literary jalopy a certain number of miles down the road during each writing session. I'm not sure what to call it yet, and I'm not sure exactly what form it will take. But words like <span style="color: yellow;"><i>target</i></span>, <span style="color: lime;"><i>focus</i></span>, <span style="color: blue;"><i>specific</i></span>, <span style="color: magenta;"><i><span style="color: purple;">result</span>, productivity</i></span>, and <span style="color: red;"><i>useability</i></span> are going to be key, I think. <br />
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Stay tuned for my next blog post to see what form this will take.Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-9598549756535335642014-12-04T06:15:00.000-08:002014-12-04T06:16:41.512-08:00Rebel without a clue: is it truly necessary to freewrite longhand?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that after all my years as a writer and writing teacher, I have never read Julia Cameron's famous <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006H19H3M?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B006H19H3M&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">The Artist's Way.</a> Recently one of my <a href="http://www.pocoleon.com/general/some-thoughts-on-life-and-motherhood/" target="_blank">former students blogged</a> about Cameron's advice to write so-called “morning pages” every day. They helped Mia find her way out of a painful creative desert, which provoked me to do a little research and find out what these morning pages are all about. <br />
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Because what writer amongst us can't use inspiration? I know I can, especially now. I seem to be mired in a Sargasso of brain-lessness at the moment. I miss my morning walks, which seemed to open me up creatively each day. As I enter the fourth week of enforced immobility after Achilles tendon surgery last month, my mind as well as my leg seems to have stopped moving. I can barely concentrate long enough to read a book, much less write one myself.<br />
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And although I still haven't read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006H19H3M?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B006H19H3M&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Artist’s Way</a>, I have read the author’s website about morning pages, and also several articles by other writers extolling what this practice has done for them. It strikes me that other than Cameron's prescription that these pages should be done first thing in the morning, this is the same technique that Natalie Goldberg recommended in her classic <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HEN3K0I?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00HEN3K0I&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Writing Down the Bones</a>.<br />
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They both also stipulate that this freewriting be done longhand: with pen on paper, saying that this allows you in some undefined way to connect more authentically with your inner self. And this is where I'm going to rebel.<br />
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Why? It’s not because I’m a techno-snob. I love notebooks and pens. I've made almost a fetish of collecting them: Moleskines; Rhodias; Cartesios; handbound leather folios so gorgeous that I have never tainted the creamy acid-free pages by daring to actually write on them; even cheap Mead composition books that I sewed cute fabric covers for. I use a green clothbound notebook as my commonplace book where I lovingly inscribe quotes that appeal to me; I make a story bible out of a Moleskine each time I begin a big new writing project. I often organize my early ideas for stories in a notebook, using a cheap fountain pen whose ink flows freely onto the paper. So at times I do enjoy the pleasures—and ostensible virtues—of writing longhand.<br />
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But with apologies to Cameron and Goldberg, I’m not going to do my morning freewriting that way. I can list three good reasons why.<br />
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First, writing in a notebook isn't as private as writing on my computer, where I can password-protect something and later securely delete it for all eternity if I so desire. It's not that I'm going to divulge any deep dark secrets in my daily practice. But the free spirit in my brain will know that whatever I write could potentially be seen by someone, and that will inhibit me: creative constipation, I call it. I already have problems turning off my Inner Editor and writing as if no one were watching. So for me at least, writing longhand would negate any benefit of spontaneity that allegedly arises from writing longhand.<br />
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Second, I don't want to waste paper. Despite my love for notebooks [I've got an entire drawer full of temptingly blank ones just waiting for me to write something profound in them], I don't want to use them for what amounts to "junk writing" that is intended only to clear my clogged creative pipes, then be cast aside. Maybe it's the Scots in me, but it seems needlessly profligate to write on paper when I know in advance I’m just going to throw it in the trash. Better to do it with ephemeral electrons on a digital screen instead.<br />
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Third, since my neck fusion surgery two years ago, it is physically painful for me to write more than a paragraph or so by hand: my muscles seize up almost immediately. Although the surgery to relieve pressure on the spinal cord was successful, some of the [thankfully minor] nerve damage was nonetheless permanent. <br />
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So between the physical pain of writing longhand, and the mental constipation I would feel in knowing that what I was writing could be found and read by anyone, I am going to respectfully agree to disagree with both these wise writer women. I don’t think that spending thirty to forty minutes each day writing by hand is going to “unlock” me creatively if it’s an ordeal that I dread. No, my daily writing practice is going to be done with a keyboard, on either of my auxiliary brains. <br />
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What are those? Philosopher and cognitive scientist <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HEN3K0I?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00HEN3K0I&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Andy Clark</a> has written extensively about how *any* tool—from a paper notebook to to a laptop computer—can with repeated use become so much a part of an individual's thinking process that it effectively functions as an extension of his or her mind. For Cameron and Goldberg and many of their students, this externalized brain is a pen and notebook. For me, however, it is either my Macbook Air or my iPad. <br />
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The keyboard has long ago become a conduit to my brain. And it isn’t just a matter of typing speed or ease either. I have spent so many years composing at the keyboard that the very act of sitting down with my laptop flips a switch in my head. The words don’t just appear faster on the screen; the thoughts and ideas that precede the words flow freely and without impediment. It’s a very fluid process for me, one that taps into a wellspring of ideas within—and isn’t that the whole point of morning pages and freewriting? <br />
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Don’t get me wrong—I love to write longhand. It has a beauty and permanence for me—a kind of durability—that writing on a computer screen does not. And that’s yet another reason why I don’t want to do my morning pages this way. My understanding from perusing Cameron’s website is that the point of morning pages is <span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>not</b></span> to cling to them. You write them to purge yourself of things that may be blocking you, to center yourself, to meditate on the page. And then you let it all go. Morning pages aren’t meant to be re-read or savored. <br />
<br />
But when I write with pen and paper, I feel a sense of special reverence that would make me <i>more</i> inhibited in what I wrote, not less. When I commit something to paper, it feels like something I want to preserve forever. And so I would feel more inclined to pause and ponder, to debate every word with myself, and ultimately to sputter and stall out and stop writing completely.<br />
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<br />
Of course, your experience with freewriting might be very different from mine; every writer works in his or her own mysterious way. But for these final two weeks in a cast [at least I hope they are the last two weeks] while I am confined largely to my bed or recliner, this will be my grand experiment. I will see if I can jump start my idling brain by doing my personal variation on morning pages—but on my lap, with my iPad Air and an external keyboard. <br />
<br />
I will let you know how it goes.<br />
<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-12844299611498126792014-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:002014-11-10T10:45:00.558-08:00The walking orthopedic disaster zone strikes again!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPg1A7T0HrtGJutaj9oXF7fo0LWHT4qgG4zZOqKhEHY4W4PHZL5mMcHZ3bdKNBEZ-YD7O2xfps8HGmxfiWBIlw3sjRex8hqpbqMwv7ptGOUeDaEJhZ66-5bRyaMZ8k6o5A1kNSB9e2AgmP/s1600/Rowdy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPg1A7T0HrtGJutaj9oXF7fo0LWHT4qgG4zZOqKhEHY4W4PHZL5mMcHZ3bdKNBEZ-YD7O2xfps8HGmxfiWBIlw3sjRex8hqpbqMwv7ptGOUeDaEJhZ66-5bRyaMZ8k6o5A1kNSB9e2AgmP/s1600/Rowdy.jpg" height="320" width="295" /></a></div>
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<br />
Meet Rowdy, my new ride for the next four to six weeks. Although I did manage to make it through October without heading to the OR—the first time in four years that has happened—the heady freedom didn’t last long. Because on Nov. 12th, I will be ending up in surgery after all, this time to repair my Achilles tendon. I will have to be off the leg completely for at least a month, part of the time in a cast: hence the nifty little red knee scooter. Do I know how to have fun or what?<br />
<br />
And yes, I fully intend to decorate Rowdy with tinsel and a string of battery-operated lights for Christmas!<br />
<br />
This surgery isn’t exactly a surprise. I’ve been hobbling around since last January on not just one but two bad Achilles tendons, which I ignored for as long as I could. Then I went through all the standard conservative treatments, including several weeks of painful physical therapy and a fashionable walking boot, but the tendons only continued to get worse. So finally my orthopedic surgeon—who really ought to name his next child after me, I’m such a good customer—said we could avoid the scalpel no longer. I got to choose which side to do first—because yes, I will have to have another surgery just like this one next year—and I picked the right leg, which is a bit worse.<br />
<br />
I knew this surgery was looming even before my orthopod weighed in: my PTs were honest with me about how bad things were in my poor heels. So I took myself off in early October for what seemed like a decadently selfish thing to do: one week in the mountains, all by myself, so I could write. I’m so glad I did that. It helped me get back in touch with my own characters and stories after so much time helping other writers with theirs.<br />
<br />
And who knows? Maybe the enforced down time after my surgery will give me the opportunity to have another writer’s retreat. It won’t be anywhere near as pleasant as my time in the mountains, but maybe it will still refresh my creative spirit.Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-34043139790829447362014-10-14T08:47:00.000-07:002014-10-14T08:47:03.276-07:00Why Lemony Snicket is my hero<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”</blockquote>
<br />If anyone needed it, this quote from Lemony Snicket’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JWMYE5Y?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00JWMYE5Y&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Shouldn’t You Be in School?</a> is proof that children’s books aren’t all saccharine fluff and nonsense.<br />
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I know it's been months since my last post: a lot has been going on, and sadly today isn't the day for me to catch you up on it. [Though I did have a heavenly solo writer's retreat last week.]<br />
<br />
I will pause long enough to say that over the past week I've been reading two middle grade series that appeal to my twisted and sometimes macabre sense of humor. The first series is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007QN2JW6?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B007QN2JW6&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Tales from Lovecraft Middle School</a>, four books by the pseudonymous Charles Gilman that are like a cross between Goosebumps and the Cthulhu mythos. Some of my best memories of my late dad are of him telling us spooky stories that I later found out were written by H.P. Lovecraft. So Gilman "had me at hello" just with his titles. <br />
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The second series is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0094RIFQ6?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0094RIFQ6&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"> All The Wrong Questions</a>, a planned quartet of books in which Lemony shares a pivotal event from his apprenticeship at the age of thirteen in the secret VFD [Volunteer Fire Department]. If the famous <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0066IM5RQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0066IM5RQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Series of Unfortunate Events</a> books were simultaneously an homage to and a parody of penny dreadfuls, then All the Wrong Questions does the same thing for Golden Age detective novels. There is even a noble librarian named Dashiell!<br />
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When I got to that quote about not waiting for a wonderful moment, I realized that was the very reason I fled to the mountains for my retreat in the first place. There never does seem to be an untroubled moment in which I can write. If it's not another round of surgery for me, it's needing to leave home to take care of my mother after she's had surgery. The central air conditioning dies and needs to be replaced, trees crash onto all three of our cars, the toilet chokes, the dog needs to go to the vet. And even when things are going well, there is always food to be bought and cooked, dishes to wash, floors to be swept, clothes to be folded, and carpets to be vacuumed. If it's not student or client manuscripts to edit, it's a new educational gig to stress over. <br />
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This is true not just for me, but for all of you who are trying to write. None of us has a life filled with untroubled moments. But what I am learning, almost against my will, is that I need to stop waiting for those mythical halcyon times before I sit down to write. As Lemony tells us wisely, it's best to grab whatever moments we can find lying around in the midst of the daily chaos.<br />
<br />
That's what I am trying to do today, with rain pouring down in sheets outside and tornado watches pending. Forget about all that, and just write. <br />
<br />
I will leave you with another quote from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JWMYE5Y?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00JWMYE5Y&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Shouldn't You Be in School</a>, this one by Lemony's imprisoned sister, Kit.<br />
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"“If you’re not scared, she told me, it’s not bravery.”<br />
<br />
As I sit down to try and find my way back into my middle grade novel, I do feel a little shaky in the knees. <i>Have I forgotten how to write? Is my idea stupid? Are my characters made of cardboard? Will kids find anything to like in this book? Is it worth writing at all?</i><br />
<br />
So like Kit, I will be brave—and like Lemony, I will keep writing. Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-8492488607476778022014-07-24T12:12:00.000-07:002015-02-27T12:04:14.303-08:00Deep POV: Fast Track to Compelling Character Voice<span style="color: yellow;"><i>Note: This is the fourth in
a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will
appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be
archived on <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/deep-pov-fast-track-to-compelling-character-voice/" target="_blank">my website</a> as downloadable PDFs.</i></span><br />
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Deep POV is single viewpoint on steroids. </div>
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<br /></div>
In
the first article of this series, I compared single POV to viewing a
scene through the eyeglasses of one particular character. Deep POV takes
single POV and intensifies it. It's like putting two tiny cameras with
powerful microscopic lenses in those glasses; installing microphones in
the character's ears, and sensors in her nose, tongue, and skin; then
finally inserting a silicon chip in her brain to channel every single
thought, perception, sensation, and emotion directly to readers.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDqrHRwKdOlzfzCiguNb9_ITiI9MJO2dVrbmDukeCYG8u0qLfeLkQEM4_uAAx0oanKvs-FSBBd3k_Sgsd-q5t_sB1LUV8LxH-6wB3gNIB4w8iQ-7Fe9S57J6DXhe9ONGyiwk58rF1h34mE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-24+at+12.45.04+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDqrHRwKdOlzfzCiguNb9_ITiI9MJO2dVrbmDukeCYG8u0qLfeLkQEM4_uAAx0oanKvs-FSBBd3k_Sgsd-q5t_sB1LUV8LxH-6wB3gNIB4w8iQ-7Fe9S57J6DXhe9ONGyiwk58rF1h34mE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-24+at+12.45.04+PM.jpg" height="320" width="215" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lars Norgaard, "World's First Cyborg Artist"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Handling
POV like this is a fantastic way to immerse readers in your story.
Although I'm not a gamer myself, it seems to me that Deep POV is like
turning the protagonist of a novel into an avatar of the reader: the
line between fictional character and reader of fiction gets blurred, so
that the reader experiences the events of the plot as if they are
happening to her. Readers slip so deeply inside the skin of a book's
narrator that it's as if the two are fused into one.<br />
<br />
I told you Deep POV was intense!<br />
<br />
The best way to get a feel for the difference between "regular" single POV and Deep POV is to read it in action. Here is a masterful example from the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004UMP47I?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B004UMP47I&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"><i>Okay for Now </i></a>[Clarion 2001], a Newbery Honor book by the gifted children's writer, Gary D. Schmidt. The novel's narrator is eighth grader Doug Swietek. Here is he speaking about a Yankees baseball cap that his older brother had stolen.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"I guess now it's in a gutter, getting rained on or something. Probably anyone who walks by looks down and thinks it's a piece of junk.
They're right. That's all it is. Now.
But once, it was the only thing I ever owned that hadn't belonged to some Swieteck before me."</i></blockquote>
<br />
This is Doug, talking straight to readers. There is absolutely no sense at all of any author sitting there with a pen or a typewriter or a computer making this up. Rather, Schmidt is writing as if he were possessed by Doug, being used by the character to transcribe his words onto the page. Now that's how to create a vivid, authentic, compelling character voice. Schmidt's novel is persuasive testimony of the power of Deep POV. There is no better way to bring a character to life.
<br />
<br />
Contrast this with regular single POV, in another wonderful middle grade novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003EINO12?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003EINO12&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"><i>A Drowned Maiden's Hair</i></a> [Candlewick Press 2006] by Laura Amy Schlitz.<br />
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<i>"Maud had a hazy idea that the Battle Hymn had something to do with with war and slavery. She felt that by singing it she was defying authority and striking a blow against the general awfulness of the day."</i><br />
<br />
Though this is single viewpoint, since it's written from within Maud's head, it is not Deep POV. It's phrases like she felt and Maud had a hazy idea that put readers at a subtle but real distance from the heroine.<br />
<br />
The cumulative effect is a slightly more formal, slightly more adult voice. There is nothing wrong with this, but for me at least, it makes the ghost of the author more evident. I'm aware that there is a writer at work here; I don't feel that Maud is speaking directly to me.
<br />
<br />
"Duh!" you may object. "That's because Schlitz was writing in third person, and Schmidt was writing in first person, Nancy, you dolt." But it is possible to write Deep POV in third person. How?
First, avoid writing anything that distances readers from your POV character in any way. Here's an example.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>She jumped when she heard the door slam.
</i></blockquote>
<br />
The phrase she heard is a tiny little wedge driven between the narrator and the reader. Do some quick and simple word-surgery, and you've gone a little deeper into your character's head.
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The door slammed. She jumped, her heart ping-ponging in her chest.</i></blockquote>
<br />
You don't tell readers that she heard the slamming door, you simply show it happening—followed immediately by the character's response. So one way to achieve deeper POV is to follow the same old literary advice you've heard time and time again: show, don't tell.
<br />
<br />
In a similar vein, avoid distinguishing the narrator's thoughts in any way from the rest of the text. Certainly don't treat them like dialogue and set them aside in quotes, and don't italicize them either. That creates distance between your character and your readers.
Also, don't apply what I call "thought tags," words such as thought, felt, surmised, guessed, supposed, etc. Again, just write the thought directly. For readers, this creates the sense that they are in the narrator's mind, hearing her thoughts by some kind of literary telepathy.
<br />
<br />
One of the places that it is easiest to slip up and forget to remain in Deep POV is in descriptive narrative. Writers—myself included—get carried away in describing a scene and start writing lyrical passages that their thirteen-year-old skateboarding hero would never say or think. Writing Deep POV is a humbling experience. With every word, you are trying to make readers forget that you, the author, exist. If you succeed, kids won’t even remember your name. Your goal is to convince them the main character is the one telling them the story, not you.
<br />
<br />
So it's definitely possible to write Deep POV in limited third person. But don't assume that you are automatically in Deep POV simply by virtue of writing in first person. I've read many first person narratives that remained aloof from the narrator. I see this mainly in student work, and when it happens, I think it's because the writer gets so caught up in setting down the events of the plot or what other characters are saying and doing that she forgets to let her narrator react to all of it.<br />
<br />
Another way of putting that is to say that the POV glasses that the writer sets on her first-person narrator's face have clear lenses, as if the hero were a scientist recording "just the facts, ma'am." And who of us sees and responds to life in such a completely neutral fashion? It's the way a first-person narrator shares plot events and her observations of other characters that reveals to use what kind of person the narrator really is. There is color to the narrator's lenses.<br />
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[<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>© Infrared photos by Nancy Butts</i></span>]</div>
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A fine example of this is the Newbery-winning novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001UFP6K8?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001UFP6K8&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"><i>Jacob Have I Loved </i></a>by Katherine Paterson. Told in first person, we believe that the cutting remarks Louise makes about her twin Caroline are accurate. It isn't until the end of the book that we realize that Louise has been envious of her sister all along, and that her observations have been tainted because she has been looking at her sister through green-colored glasses.
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That taint is what you want when writing in first person: that is, if you want to achieve Deep POV. Let every word your narrator says—even if that is about something as ordinary as the weather, the menu in the school cafeteria, or the shoes his sister is wearing—reveal more about your hero than perhaps he'd like to admit.<br />
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I've read articles and books that are almost prescriptions or recipes for how to do Deep POV, but I'm not sure that's the most helpful way to look at it. You don't have to go "all in." Such intense identification with a main character can get claustrophobic, especially if she is whiny, depressed,or unpleasant in some way. Not being able to get out of her head for even one moment can turn readers off. So you need to choose your project well. If you've got an anti-hero, or a character who might initially seem unlikeable for one reason or the other [perhaps the point of your book is show their transformation], Deep POV may not be the technique to choose, not exclusively.<br />
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Perhaps you could use it only for brief passages, borrowing techniques from Deep POV so we can hear your main viewpoint character's voice loud and proud. To me, and to many editors and readers, the voice of your protagonist is what makes a book stand out. What makes a thousand books about yet another dysfunctional family forgettable, and one book like <i>Okay for Now </i>so memorable that it haunts you for weeks after you finish it? Character voice. And one of the most powerful techniques for creating that is Deep POV. What better reason is there to learn as much as you can about it?
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<span data-mce-style="color: #0000ff;" style="color: blue;">[©
2014 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or
reproduce without express written permission from the author.]</span><br />
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<span style="color: yellow;"><i>Next in the series—Power Can Go To Your Head: The Perils of Omniscient POV</i></span><br />
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<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-86534779000469403812014-06-11T04:29:00.000-07:002014-06-11T04:29:50.299-07:00Why are trees throwing themselves at me?There goes my writing retreat!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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I am even sadder this morning than I was yesterday evening when I lost my "writing pecan" tree. I had spent several hours yesterday in its shade, blocking out a new outline for the second half of my middle grade novel. Around 5, I ran out of steam, so I packed up my portable office and began to move inside. I had just sat down at my computer to make sure that the day's work was backed up, when out of nowhere the winds started gusting and there was a sudden downpour of rain.<br />
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I heard a crack, but it wasn't so loud or so close that I thought it was anything in my yard. One of the neighbors lost a tree limb, I thought.<br />
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And then I heard my husband shouting. A microburst had completely uprooted my writing pecan, which had toppled down across all three cars, brushing the edge of the roof we just had replaced last year due to hail damage, and ending up with a few branches on the back porch. And to think that I had just been sitting at that table under the tree, not twenty minutes earlier. <i>Brrrr</i>.<br />
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The holly tree took the brunt of the pecan's weight, which saved my husband's car. The lid to the trunk will have to be replaced, but I think that's it. But both the holly and another pecan were severely injured when the first tree fell: hope we can save them, or I won't have any shade in my backyard at all. Where am I going to hang all my ghosts at Halloween?<br />
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And where am I going to write now? <br />
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My car escaped without damage, but my son's old junker is still buried under the mammoth trunk of the tree. My son launched into lumberjack mode, and the three of us were able to cut out enough of the branches to get my husband's car out and moved to a safer place, but we're now at a place where professionals need to step in. Sigh. We just finished replacing the air conditioning system last week; today we'll be dealing with insurance agents, adjusters, body shops, and tree removers.<br />
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This is the second time in six months that a tree has thrown itself at me. In January during the first ice storm, I was out walking—and please don't ask what kind of idiot goes out for a stroll in the midst of an ice storm—when a huge oak at the Baptist church suddenly crashed down just a split second after I had walked past it. It fell only a few feet behind me. I love trees so much I'm practically a Druid, so why do they keep committing suicide around me? :D <br />
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But most of all, I'm going to miss that beautiful old pecan.Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-19758825461692044112014-06-03T04:56:00.000-07:002014-06-03T04:56:17.698-07:00Summer haven: or my micro-writer's retreatSummer's upon us, and in a house full of academics—namely, my husband and son, both of whom are college professors—that means that everyone is on vacation. Everyone except me, that is. <br />
<br />Maybe it's a literary flaw, but I need peace and solitude in order to write fiction. After all those years as a newspaper reporter, I can write non-fiction in the midst of a Category 5 hurricane. But fiction is much harder for me. It requires an almost hermitic solitude for me to slip into that alternate world I'm trying to spin out of thin air, and it only takes the slightest interruption to expel me from writing paradise. <br />
<br />Now that summer is upon us and the house is filled with noise and commotion all day long, I have to escape. I don't have the time or funds to flee to a true writer's retreat; I can't even manage a weekend away. So what I do is pack up my portable office and head outside to a picnic table under the pecan trees. I'm barely fifty feet away from my back door, but this micro-retreat will have to do.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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And it works! Today I managed several hours of solid writing on my middle grade novel. Sitting outside to write releases something in me. Inside, I feel trapped by the four walls; my characters shrivel up inside me, and the smaller they get, the harder it is for me to hear their faint whispers. Outside, my characters can breathe and grow. They blossom under the open sky and speak so loudly that I can follow their voices back into the world of my book, and get lost there for hours. <br />
<br />Now that school's out, I know a lot of you have kids underfoot all day, too. So when even a daylong mini-retreat to the library or Starbucks isn't possible, try a micro-retreat—head out to your balcony, porch, or backyard instead. <br />
<br />May you fall down the rabbit hole and get some writing done, too. Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-32437421973186610452014-05-19T07:05:00.000-07:002014-05-19T07:05:11.740-07:00Indie publishing: wasteland, or brave new world?This is going to be a quickie post, as I have sworn to devote today to working on a chapter of my own novel! And it's all too easy to let myself get distracted by things that are easier for me to write—such as blog posts, for example.<br />
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So even though this is a fascinating topic about which I should write a longer post some day, I'm not going to do it today. Seriously. I'm not. If I can just drag myself away from this "new post" composition window.....<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by "Rodw" at Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
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Instead, I'm going to let this piece on the Huffington Books page speak for itself. It's a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lorraine-devon-wilke/is-self-publishing-killin_b_4960580.html?ir=Books&utm_hp_ref=books" target="_blank">spirited defense of the quality of self-published books</a> by indie author Lorraine Devon Wilke. The article sparked a conversation on a private listserv of children's writing instructors to which I belong, with some folks lamenting the abysmal quality of a lot of self-published books they've gotten off Amazon. And though I can't disagree with that, since I've stumbled across the dreck, too, I have also discovered many fine books by clearly skilled, professional writers as well.<br />
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If you like historical mysteries with a strong female protagonist, look at books by former college history professor <a href="http://www.amazon.com/M.-Louisa-Locke/e/B003SGS1WM/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507622&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">M. Louisa Locke</a>, who has a great <a href="http://mlouisalocke.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> here. If you like thrillers, paranormal or otherwise, look at books by former Hollywood screenwriter <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alexandra-Sokoloff/e/B001IXTUR2/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507553&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Alexandra Sokoloff</a>. Then there are books, both adult and middle grade, by my former colleague at the Institute of Children's Literature, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alberto-Hazan/e/B004EUGHQI/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507690&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Chris Eboch</a> [writing for adults as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kris-Bock/e/B006WV4I5O/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507789&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Kris Bock</a>]. Take a look at the middle grade <i>Island of Fog</i> fantasy series by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Keith-Robinson/e/B002QL5S1W/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507589&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Keith Robinson</a>. And of course I have to get in a plug for two of my editing clients, indie author <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alberto-Hazan/e/B004EUGHQI/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507690&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Alberto Hazan</a>, who writes urban fantasy for teens and medical thrillers for adults; and YA writer <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kristina-Ludwig/e/B006OFZT9W/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1400507650&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Kristina Ludwig</a>, who has published contemporary teen novels, short stories, and a series of novellas in the burgeoning Amish romance genre. <br />
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Of course this is only a small sample, but I believe that many talented, hard-working authors are out there in the indie publishing world, and they are every bit as professional and skilled as any traditionally-published writer.<br />
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I'd be interested in hearing what you think about indie publishing. Is it a brave new world, or a wasteland?Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-71951603785557171682014-05-13T08:59:00.000-07:002014-05-13T08:59:55.178-07:00Libromania: or how I killed my KindleI've been reading so much lately that I burned out my Kindle Paperwhite! Seriously.<br />
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For the past couple of months I've been reading incessantly, almost obsessively. I tend to do this after a long, concentrated spell of hard work, which is what the past year has been. For twelve months, I had so much work coming in—student lessons, client manuscripts, educational gigs—that I felt as if I were juggling live snakes, trying to keep all of them safely in the air so they and their venomous fangs wouldn't collapse on top of me and start a feeding frenzy on my throat. <br />
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Now there is a slight lull in the work load, which is a bit scary from a financial point of view, but wonderfully freeing and refreshing creatively. And after so much writing and editing, I need to inhale a lot of words—a lot of Story—to replenish myself. <br />
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After I finished my senior honors thesis back at Duke [and don't ask how many years ago that was], I sat down and read all eighty-eight Agatha Christie murder mysteries in one summer. Now I seem to be on a more eclectic literary frenzy—a libromania, if you will—that includes fiction and non-fiction, adult and children's books, fantasy and historical fiction and mystery and thrillers and contemporary drama.<br />
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In the process, I've fallen in love with a new writer, Gary D. Schmidt. Well, he's not new—he's been around for a while. But I just discovered him, and I am in awe. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004UMP47I?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B004UMP47I&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20">Okay for Now</a> is a middle grade novel set written in a very close and tight first-person viewpoint, and you know how I love that. It was a National Book Award finalist, and I can see why. In the deceptively simple voice of an illiterate but artistic eighth grade boy, Doug Swietek, Schmidt spools out a masterful, moving story about love and redemption. In this book, it takes a village not just to raise a child, but to heal an entire family. <br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003K16PIC?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003K16PIC&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20"><span id="goog_1410254375"></span><span id="goog_1410254376"></span>Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy</a> <span id="goog_1410254347"></span><span id="goog_1410254348"></span>is kind of a middle grade, kind of a YA—it was an honor book for both the Newbery and the Printz awards, if you can believe that. Has that ever happened before? It is written in omniscient narration that often dips into the head of the main protagonist, Turner Buckminster, and is based on a true story that happened in 1912 in the state of Maine. Having spent so much time on the coast of Maine myself—my first novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002VWKF4G?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002VWKF4G&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20">Cheshire Moon</a>, is set there—I was drawn to this book. Schmidt once again shows his mastery here. Be warned: there is an undercurrent of sorrow in all his books, even a riptide in this one. But somehow Schmidt manages the trick of being both luminous and heart-breaking at the same time. If you haven't read any of his many books yet, please do! <br />
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Or maybe not. If you're like me, when you finish one of them you'll think that it was so good that no other novel needs to be written ever again. Which isn't such a good thought for writers to entertain, not even for a split second. :-(<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpxBkUiX1paFbZaFlBVpIPpbsGEhi5Zhas_18csMbH4zyo2K5gx_dVJEzVJ7CTDrksfiEfXvVk8alFwXKKEaQ43TxJwG4DnIWdR00EySObAUnOn2M7b5O2MUfKXpXji4q1heaI4BDh7IvZ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-05-13+at+10.49.29+AM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpxBkUiX1paFbZaFlBVpIPpbsGEhi5Zhas_18csMbH4zyo2K5gx_dVJEzVJ7CTDrksfiEfXvVk8alFwXKKEaQ43TxJwG4DnIWdR00EySObAUnOn2M7b5O2MUfKXpXji4q1heaI4BDh7IvZ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-05-13+at+10.49.29+AM.jpg" height="200" width="135" /></a></div>
And besides, I think my new best friend Gary just broke my Kindle. This glorious time of year I sit outside to read, so I need my glare-free Paperwhite for that. I finished a rip-roarin' Printz-winning YA novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002OMZTQW?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002OMZTQW&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20">Airborn</a>, by Kenneth Oppel late yesterday as the sun started to slip behind the mulberry trees towards the west.<br />
<br />
I went inside to recharge the battery—and nothing. I tried every trick in the book, but when I plugged into my Mac and started getting ominous messages that the Paperwhite about to fry my USB port, that was it. I yanked out the charge cable, contacted Amazon—and even though I was three weeks out of warranty, they are sending me a new Paperwhite tomorrow! Amazon deserves a lot of credit for that. I didn't even have to ask; they immediately offered.<br />
<br />
Let's see how long it takes me to burn this one out. Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-32556748591125377622014-04-30T11:17:00.003-07:002014-04-30T11:17:53.180-07:00The roundabout way to my true NorthAfter a long time away from my middle grade novel, I feel disconnected
from it. So yesterday I spent several precious hours of solitude trying
to brainstorm some new ideas, convinced that the book was beyond
resurrection.<br />
<br />
I had to laugh this morning when I sat down and looked at
the mind map I had created for what I wanted to write next—it was the
same book I had already started. So I guess the Muse is trying to tell
me those characters ain't dead yet after all!<br /><br />Or as Stephen Pressfield says in <span id="goog_929534209"></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007A4SDCG?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B007A4SDCG&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20"><i>The War of Art</i>,</a> "Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEVNlvbteYr3PWSW2TRkMX50fjDHQuHGLDvDJq8EmMFWhtyFOAxP5jCzCW9NyGuRb6IgxL2EJ-SkytTXF5Hr1D8Y6cIViWZjDkO6-f8YIFX_Fyh7P-LRrMgCMl7rhZJcHvABRTRp5XRyPh/s1600/CompassRose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEVNlvbteYr3PWSW2TRkMX50fjDHQuHGLDvDJq8EmMFWhtyFOAxP5jCzCW9NyGuRb6IgxL2EJ-SkytTXF5Hr1D8Y6cIViWZjDkO6-f8YIFX_Fyh7P-LRrMgCMl7rhZJcHvABRTRp5XRyPh/s1600/CompassRose.jpg" height="287" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wind rose from a chart of Jorge de Aguiar, 1492</td></tr>
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Leave it to me to wander around South, East, and West, when I could have just looked at the compass and gone North in the first place. </div>
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<br />Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-68260169655124091352014-04-28T08:47:00.001-07:002014-04-28T08:55:22.677-07:00Fight Club: Multiple POV Fights Back [Part I]<span style="color: #ffd966; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i style="background-color: black;">Note:
This is the third in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint.
The originals will appear first as posts here on my Spontaneous
Combustion blog, then be archived on my <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">website</a> as downloadable PDFs.</i></span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6D-6Qq_JF59pOwb27hsjG36IRGIOAH-zckXZA7lFhciAKpoe3DY6viqzeMYNDC7TOhpEWrp-yufbs0ynqieoOV8LRYxf3AFVW5g0gmF3l5oAza_N7PrpTEtdvGPZ9YwnfDzawTO7MPtsS/s1600/Arash-Hashemi-boxer-the-final-round-next-day-paint-and-body.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6D-6Qq_JF59pOwb27hsjG36IRGIOAH-zckXZA7lFhciAKpoe3DY6viqzeMYNDC7TOhpEWrp-yufbs0ynqieoOV8LRYxf3AFVW5g0gmF3l5oAza_N7PrpTEtdvGPZ9YwnfDzawTO7MPtsS/s1600/Arash-Hashemi-boxer-the-final-round-next-day-paint-and-body.jpg" height="400" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Photo by Arash Hashemi, in the public domain</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span id="goog_1673127351"></span><span id="goog_1673127352"></span>
The POV Puritan is back—and I think I may have experienced a conversion. In <a href="http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2013/08/confessions-of-single-pov-puritan.html" target="_blank">part 2 of my series on demystifying viewpoint</a>,
I stood up loud and proud and gave my testimony as to why I thought
single viewpoint was best, both for readers and writers. Nevertheless,
at the end of that piece I promised to give multiple POV a fighting
chance to defend itself. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But the more I tried, the more I struggled
to find anything good to say about multiple viewpoint—that's how much I
dislike it as a reader. Months dragged by. Every once in a while I
would sit down and try to write this post, and every time I'd draw a
blank. Finally I had a brainstorm: I realized that I needed to let
proponents of multiple viewpoint speak for themselves. I would find four
well-reviewed middle grade novels that used several viewpoint
characters, then let them speak on behalf of multiple POV everywhere. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And despite my Puritan prejudices and
preconceptions, I found myself enjoying the books. I'm not a complete
convert, but after reading these books, I think I've come to appreciate
that in the hands of a capable writer, multiple viewpoint can work well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<h4>
<span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">QUICK BREAKDOWN OF THE FOUR BOOKS</span></h4>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT7t0qpQrQ7lzrlJNqFh0G7VWsietE2LBzNO_FQEMhpeRQ0DIGIDYfvPzZw3YxyVQJ2K4mAxkjjawL_SmD9haOkbqAAEtmkackgm1_7GglK743ZdQiT7oN7400AAiX7r16Fn54EBJDjrIZ/s1600/Wonder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT7t0qpQrQ7lzrlJNqFh0G7VWsietE2LBzNO_FQEMhpeRQ0DIGIDYfvPzZw3YxyVQJ2K4mAxkjjawL_SmD9haOkbqAAEtmkackgm1_7GglK743ZdQiT7oN7400AAiX7r16Fn54EBJDjrIZ/s1600/Wonder.jpg" height="200" width="138" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"><i>Wonder</i></a> [Knopf, 2012], by RJ Palacio</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">What's a wonder about this book is that it
didn't get a Newbery nod. Can you tell I loved it? This contemporary
drama is about a ten-year-old boy named Auggie who was born with severe
craniofacial dystopia that even after dozens of corrective surgeries
makes him look like ET. Homeschooled all his life, the book follows
fifth grader Auggie's first year at a private school in Manhattan.
Although there are many painful moments for Auggie, the theme of this
book is that kindness can triumph over anything. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The book has six main viewpoint
characters—and that's not counting three other viewpoints that are
briefly presented, in epistolary fashion, as emails in one chapter. For
me, the reason why the multiple viewpoint works in this book is due to
Palacio's brilliant evocation of the kid-like voice of Auggie, his
on-again off-again best friend Jack Will, and his classmate Summer.
Palacio captured the hearts and minds of these three characters
beautifully. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I can also see why the author chose to
include the viewpoint of Auggie's sister, Via. That is important to show
that things in Auggie's life aren't always the way he sees them; and
also to show that as much as Via loves him, her brother's disfigurement
has burdened her life as well. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">However, I think Palacio could have
dispensed with the viewpoint chapters written from the perspectives of
Via's boyfriend and Via's best friend. And I also think it would have
been possible to show the sister's side of things without getting into
her head. It could easily have been done through dialogue instead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">*******</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglXGgdEQMNaRbIrS7_2TAfew9bkN6ldGYPM3COuM8DSSLnVP6Sljaad-cHo8ISEy5HmRNBIBa8ZgzQLOt28hYRGj9qMjmWVYNY1Dyd5wTI09Jqiy6F5DCR96ZxjPm9WMJelvIc7vcKxo0m/s1600/Terupt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglXGgdEQMNaRbIrS7_2TAfew9bkN6ldGYPM3COuM8DSSLnVP6Sljaad-cHo8ISEy5HmRNBIBa8ZgzQLOt28hYRGj9qMjmWVYNY1Dyd5wTI09Jqiy6F5DCR96ZxjPm9WMJelvIc7vcKxo0m/s1600/Terupt.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKAO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003F3PKAO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Because of Mr. Terupt</a></i> [Delacorte, 2010], by Rob Buyea</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I thought it a bit odd that this book
features adult novelist John Irving so prominently. There are blurbs
from him on both the front and back cover, Buyea singles him out in the
acknowledgments, and Irving even wrote a foreword to the book. You
almost never see a foreword in a middle grade novel. It made me wonder
who the publisher saw as this book's primary audience: kids or adults?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In any case, I did enjoy this book, though not as much as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"><i>Wonder</i></a>. It's another book about a year in fifth grade, this time at a small school in New Hampshire with a new teacher. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">It is told in the constantly alternating
voices of seven fifth grade students, which didn't always work for me. I
found that often I had to flip back to the title page of each chapter
to remember which student was talking. Also, no one character had very
long to speak, as each chapter was only two to three pages long. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But I can see how this multiple viewpoint
might work well in a book that was being studied in a classroom setting.
No matter what role a child may have assumed in school, or what label
they may have acquired—joker, troublemaker, bully, mean girl, bookworm,
nerd, fatso, or the Invisible Kid—they can find a viewpoint character in
this book who speaks for them. That is what is so lovely about this
book. I think it might be great for a group of students to read it
together, almost as if it were a play and each reader took a part.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">*******</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPXf0QOl3tKD2gtV8jXRpR4TEQIIP5NOvJ8OX2boDz2STsI_rFV3HHba0PFrLslP9oRmi0_YjumkZdnLH1Rs9V0vkiOc6JfnG43m6Lf8ppmDztqu4PX_9rANuRnDgzSfKGRlC9Lqe9DgZF/s1600/Star.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPXf0QOl3tKD2gtV8jXRpR4TEQIIP5NOvJ8OX2boDz2STsI_rFV3HHba0PFrLslP9oRmi0_YjumkZdnLH1Rs9V0vkiOc6JfnG43m6Lf8ppmDztqu4PX_9rANuRnDgzSfKGRlC9Lqe9DgZF/s1600/Star.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FWIJA0?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001FWIJA0&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Every Soul a Star</a></i> [[Little Brown, 2008], by Wendy Mass</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Of the four books I read, this one about
three kids coming together at a remote campground to watch a solar
eclipse was most successful for me in its use of multiple POV. I think
that was for two reasons. First, there were only three POV characters.
Second, the author spent a significant amount of time in each
character's viewpoint before switching away to another. To me, this is
crucial. The longer you spend with each POV character, the more a reader
can settle into his or her head. If you are constantly jerking readers
from one character to another every couple of pages, it's bound to be
both distancing and disorienting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">[And I should note that when I was twelve,
I went through a serious astronomy phase myself, so I may have
connected with the story more because of that.]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">*******</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMc9flyz1hBaT66sF1Gk83wQHqYR0HGbyvl3sD_mSf7K_UVFLtsOdsDBsbgNrT7J66HWoPeEho-fF2mLxBC3-OpnwaFYdLm78dDCg2zblwHyT-i2NjcW-liehqpNmkOePEJinO2J05u1w/s1600/Knots.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMc9flyz1hBaT66sF1Gk83wQHqYR0HGbyvl3sD_mSf7K_UVFLtsOdsDBsbgNrT7J66HWoPeEho-fF2mLxBC3-OpnwaFYdLm78dDCg2zblwHyT-i2NjcW-liehqpNmkOePEJinO2J05u1w/s1600/Knots.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008EXNPP2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B008EXNPP2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">A Tangle of Knots</a></i> [Philomel, 2013], by Lisa Graff</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This whimsical, light-hearted book about
how we are all tied together by fate is like a rainbow-colored version
of Neil Gaiman, which I mean as a compliment. It was the only fantasy of
the four, and since that is my favorite genre, I expected to like it
the most. A<span id="goog_1963077028"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1963077029"></span>nd it did have a lot of charm. Nevertheless, I think it was
the least successful in its use of multiple viewpoint, primarily because
it had nine—count 'em—NINE viewpoint characters. <i>Aiyee</i>! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">That doesn't even count the prologue,
which is written in omniscient narration that dips periodically into the
head of an 18-year-old man who shows up later in the book as a
viewpoint character. There is also some second person narration early
on, and then there are nine other viewpoint characters: the heroine,
Cady; three other children; and five adults. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span id="goog_1673127349"></span><span id="goog_1673127350"></span><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This parade of characters made it
difficult for me to say that Cady is the true protagonist of the book.
Rather, I would describe her as the hub around which all the other
characters revolve. But with so many characters to read about, I never
felt that strong a connection to her. Although perhaps that was Graff's
point. She may have deliberately written a book in which no one
character predominates in order to make her point that each of them got
where they were through the tangled actions of many others. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">.... [<span id="goog_1963077032"></span>continued in part II<span id="goog_1963077033"></span><a href="http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2014/04/fight-club-multiple-pov-fights-back_28.html">http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2014/04/fight-club-multiple-pov-fights-back_28.html</a>]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #ffd966; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>[Note: This article is
running so long that I am publishing the second half in a separate post.
The entire article is archived as a single downloadable PDF at my <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">website</a>.]</i></span>Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-41251947326340572232014-04-26T13:00:00.000-07:002014-04-28T08:47:35.485-07:00Fight Club: Multiple POV Fights Back [Part II]<div>
<i><span style="color: #ffd966; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">[Note: This is a simple continuation of my blog post on multiple POV, divided into two parts because it ran so long. The entire article is archived as a single downloadable PDF at my <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/" target="_blank">website</a>.]</span></i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB01t_tEEzy1uQrwQ3K9QHuoRmC1bWf1Id9lrvtIKOKWNzjeBEUq-duWLqKeLTPSlqk2u0fZReT3xDGUd2m_hC-5fgciDL_SYGZVtE2G0LL2nFhFRrsXPm5oI_R_3aS-p9v1Z5wYnOwjyu/s1600/521px-Release0204-2004-05-karate-2009-24-06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB01t_tEEzy1uQrwQ3K9QHuoRmC1bWf1Id9lrvtIKOKWNzjeBEUq-duWLqKeLTPSlqk2u0fZReT3xDGUd2m_hC-5fgciDL_SYGZVtE2G0LL2nFhFRrsXPm5oI_R_3aS-p9v1Z5wYnOwjyu/s1600/521px-Release0204-2004-05-karate-2009-24-06.jpg" height="320" width="277" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Photo by USMC Lance Cpl. Chris Korhonen,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">in the public domain</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">....[continued from part I]</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">WHAT THE FOUR AUTHORS DID WELL</span></h4>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Unlike adult books with multiple viewpoint, where authors feel free to change POV characters in the middle of a chapter, a scene, or even a page, all four authors were very careful to make it clear for young readers when the viewpoint changed, and whose viewpoint it was. They <span style="text-decoration: underline;">always</span> changed chapters when they changed viewpoint characters, and they flagged this in multiple ways. The viewpoint character's name was prominently displayed at the start of each chapter, and sometimes in a header at the top of each right-hand page as well. In addition, different fonts were sometimes used to distinguish each POV character. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And in some cases graphical elements were used to help readers remember which viewpoint character was speaking at any time. In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FWIJA0?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001FWIJA0&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Every Soul a Star</a></i>, each character had an astronomical symbol: crescent moon [my favorite, as in my own novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002VWKF4G?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002VWKF4G&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Cheshire Moon</a></i>] for Ally; the planet Saturn [also my favorite planet] for Jack; and a star for Bree. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I especially liked how this was handled in <span id="goog_977542142"></span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20">Wonder</a><span id="goog_977542143"></span></i>. Each viewpoint section had a sketch of a face. For every character other than Auggie, there was only one eye in the face: the character's left eye. For Auggie's three POV sections, the graphic changed. In Part 1 he had no eyes; in part 6 he was wearing an astronaut's helmet with one eye—his right—and a hearing aid. And in part 8, he too has one left eye represented, just the like other characters—as if to signal that he now sees the world as a more welcoming place. Clever.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">WHAT THEY MIGHT HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY</span></h4>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">1. In each book but <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FWIJA0?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001FWIJA0&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Every Soul a Star</a></i>, I think the writers simply used too many POV characters. There were six in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Wonder</a></i>, seven in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKAO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003F3PKAO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Mr. Terupt</a></i>, and nine-plus in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008EXNPP2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B008EXNPP2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">A Tangle of Knots</a></i>. Even with all the effort made to distinguish which character was speaking when, I frequently got confused. And if a professional writer and editor couldn't keep all the viewpoint characters straight, I doubt young readers would fare any better.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">2. In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Wonder</a></i>, I think the author veered away from Auggie for far too long. He appears in Part 1, and then doesn't reappear until the final quarter of the book, in parts 6 and 8. That's far too long to stay away from the character you want your readers to empathize with the most. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">3. In both <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKAO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003F3PKAO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Mr. Terupt</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008EXNPP2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B008EXNPP2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">A Tangle of Knots</a></i>, I think the authors spent too little time with each character, and changed characters too frequently. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">CURMUDGEONLY ABOUT MULTIPLE POV NO MORE</span></span></span></h4>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Despite my strong Puritan prejudice against multiple POV, I now have to admit, however grudgingly, that there is a place for it in children's literature. How could I deny that after reading these four delightful novels by such talented middle grade authors? </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But why use multiple POV at all? Remember the <a href="http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2013/08/who-gets-glasses-easy-way-to-understand.html" target="_blank">first article in this series</a>, the one in which I compare viewpoint to wearing glasses? Well, on her website, Palacio says that she didn't initially intend to write <span id="goog_977542149"></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20"><i>Wonder<span id="goog_977542150"></span></i></a> in multiple POV. But after she started the book, she got interested in Via and the different way she viewed Auggie and his problems. In other words, Palacio wanted kids to put on Via's glasses for a while and see the world through those lenses. Then Palacio says she got interested in Summer's glasses, and so on. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJK4kOL3-f42jj6oovyHTD-Fqtq3dYpvKv4q8Pd6nJce1ru8JtRdPslBfWwGzjrqRhVIsaSJj5D2FzakxucoQnq2wWs9s7pMYZ8hxN7TTRaaipczY_hAQAHu0Riu_oSPm-zfhQdpona6X2/s1600/Conrad_von_Soest%252C_%2527Brillenapostel%2527_%25281403%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJK4kOL3-f42jj6oovyHTD-Fqtq3dYpvKv4q8Pd6nJce1ru8JtRdPslBfWwGzjrqRhVIsaSJj5D2FzakxucoQnq2wWs9s7pMYZ8hxN7TTRaaipczY_hAQAHu0Riu_oSPm-zfhQdpona6X2/s1600/Conrad_von_Soest%252C_%2527Brillenapostel%2527_%25281403%2529.jpg" height="320" width="274" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">"The Glasses Apostle," 1403</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">by Conrad von Suest</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In an NPR interview, Buyea said that all seven characters in <span id="goog_977542152"></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKAO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003F3PKAO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20"><i><span id="goog_977542155"></span>Mr. Terupt<span id="goog_977542156"></span></i><span id="goog_977542153"></span></a> suddenly appeared to him one day while he was working his mother's garden. So in his case, it wasn't a conscious decision—this was simply the way the Muse decided to deliver the gift of this novel to him.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">What does multiple POV accomplish that single POV cannot? I think Palacio says it best. It's a way to help young readers see many different sides of a story. Kids tend to be very ego-centered. I don't mean that they are selfish; I mean that they tend even more than adults to see other people as reflections of themselves. That is probably why single POV is so effective in gaining young readers' attention, because it mirrors their own experience of life. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKIkFs81cVdEkRChQI-_lAu4O-H05QBA197We7xH7SmwnZy-s7EVHe9B0Z-JDoEAJ3ff7njToCnXTEktRfHChJu4dMt0cJdmUeyfOH3vl7l3NYDi7lPv7feE9mDnDAogL5cueYFcmhqWC1/s1600/GirlMirror.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKIkFs81cVdEkRChQI-_lAu4O-H05QBA197We7xH7SmwnZy-s7EVHe9B0Z-JDoEAJ3ff7njToCnXTEktRfHChJu4dMt0cJdmUeyfOH3vl7l3NYDi7lPv7feE9mDnDAogL5cueYFcmhqWC1/s1600/GirlMirror.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Photo by Tangopaso,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">in the public domain</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But that may be precisely why a multiple POV book is a refreshing change of pace for kids. It knocks the glasses they're used to wearing off their noses, so they are forced to look through someone else's lenses and discover that not everybody sees the world the way they do. There aren't just two sides to any story; there are a thousand. Shifting between several different viewpoint characters encourages readers to imagine how one event can be experienced in unexpected ways by a variety of different people. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And that may be the best reason to use multiple POV in a middle grade novel. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">However, as I said above, I'm only a partial convert. I stubbornly maintain that multiple POV is not to be undertaken lightly. It is very, very difficult to pull off—even as much as I liked these four books where the authors handled it well, I still had some issues with how they used it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And unfortunately, I've also read many books with multiple POV that were not done well. I'm not going to list those here, because that would be mean-spirited. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Like so many things in writing, there is no one right way to craft a book. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I hope I’ve been able to step far enough
aside from my own aesthetic preferences to allow multiple viewpoint a fair
chance to duke it out against single POV. Even I have to agree that a compelling case
can be made for using multiple POV in some books. There are always risks
and trade-offs to doing that, however—a subject I’ll speak about in the
last installment of this series.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In the meanwhile, with writers as gifted and skilled as Palacio, Buyea, Mass, and Graff as its champions, it's clear that this narrative technique needs no help from me. Sometimes multiple viewpoint may be the best way to tell a certain story.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Next time, however, I am finally going to write about a specialized form of single viewpoint that is near and dear to my heart—something called Deep POV. I can't wait!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 15px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="color: #ffd966;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Next time: What Is So Special About Deep POV?</span></i></div>
Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-5033918527686396302014-04-09T11:55:00.000-07:002014-04-09T12:08:57.572-07:00Finally researching that piece on multiple viewpointI've just ordered five middle grade novels via inter-library loan that use the dreaded multiple POV: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051ANPZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0051ANPZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Wonder</a> by RJ Palacio, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FWIJA0?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B001FWIJA0&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Every Soul a Star</a> by Wendy Mass, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKAO?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B003F3PKAO&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Because of Mr. Terupt</a> by Rob Buyea,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008EXNPP2?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B008EXNPP2&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank"> A Tangle of Knots</a> by Lisa Graff, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC0WLA?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000FC0WLA&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">A Week in the Woods</a> by Andrew Clements.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoaHzZcA1mJgpHk5SlcZbmUgOnPVLYdYRY8J7jiwX539SHmh-PnqL0nKkvK1KAjcA7PuKHKnJ2KNhqDo0-sdkxM78C9-rSHoWAMjZgp7C4COaXBU4waLFYLcNiEj4AmLHKKbRIzdtMKOMi/s1600/ManyGlasses+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoaHzZcA1mJgpHk5SlcZbmUgOnPVLYdYRY8J7jiwX539SHmh-PnqL0nKkvK1KAjcA7PuKHKnJ2KNhqDo0-sdkxM78C9-rSHoWAMjZgp7C4COaXBU4waLFYLcNiEj4AmLHKKbRIzdtMKOMi/s1600/ManyGlasses+copy.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I make no bones about being a single-POV Puritan; in fact, I wrote an article about that which I published both <a href="http://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2013/08/confessions-of-single-pov-puritan.html" target="_blank">here</a> and on my <a href="http://nancybutts.com/free-tips/demystifying-pov-a-series-on-viewpoint/confessions-of-a-single-pov-puritan/" target="_blank">website</a> last summer. At that time I promised that I'd give multiple POV a chance
to defend itself, but I'm only now getting around to it. Sorry! After
trying rather unsuccessfully to set aside my POV prejudice and write a
fair, objective piece on why and when and how to use multiple viewpoint,
I got a brainstorm. Why don't I let some the best examples of it that I
can find in middle grade literature speak for themselves?<br />
<br />
So
that's what I'm doing. It may take a while for all five books to
arrive, so I can't give you a definite date for when the article will be
published. But in the meantime, if you have any favorite examples of
multiple POV, please share them with me in the comments!Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-25820726387608252202014-03-25T10:36:00.000-07:002014-03-25T10:36:26.607-07:00Steeping in silence<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW6Okut8NC0LwAM-3xx0MvXEFye1KFWLyxoDP6mFTNg8fqJjZYrrLOs39gpjF1z50sYwz3EtcEcBWVRSj-jp-e6hN6jqDzpZu3VAdES3-WYpV-lyWeLmdEoWaTsS9zh-XOLx3kRvn9qypT/s1600/DSCF0849+-+Version+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW6Okut8NC0LwAM-3xx0MvXEFye1KFWLyxoDP6mFTNg8fqJjZYrrLOs39gpjF1z50sYwz3EtcEcBWVRSj-jp-e6hN6jqDzpZu3VAdES3-WYpV-lyWeLmdEoWaTsS9zh-XOLx3kRvn9qypT/s1600/DSCF0849+-+Version+2.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Photo by Nancy Butts</td></tr>
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There is too much silence in my life; and there is nowhere near enough. <br /><br />That is the line that keeps echoing in my head as I sit down on this windy March day and try to find something worthwhile to say after a five-month absence from this blog. <br /><br />For the first time in months, a syzygy of events more rare than a conjunction of five celestial bodies has finally occurred: I have the house to myself at the same time that I have zero—count 'em—zero work deadlines to meet. Making it even more miraculous, I also do not have an appointment with either a physical therapist or an orthopedic surgeon. Since those both require driving anywhere from 80 to 140 miles round-trip, such appointments tend to devour most of the productive, creative hours of my day. <br /><br />And since last October, I've had a slew of such appointments. First it was the rather unsuccessful aftermath of my knee surgery, and then it was some still-mysterious tectonic event in my neck on Dec. 8th that led to twenty-six days of unrelenting, excruciating pain. That was not conducive to writing, let me tell you. Opinions differ as to what happened, but the MRI of my neck looks like something exploded in there, and the physical therapy isn't helping. So I don't know what lies in store for me on that score.<br /><br />Meanwhile, students and freelance clients and educational gigs have been flooding me with work. It's flattering to be in such demand, and it's good for my bank account, but it's also exhausting. I woke up one day last week feeling so depleted, both physically and mentally, that I could barely function. I had to declare the day a Work Free Zone and hide out from my email, so no one could find me and give me any more assignments with deadlines so tight that they require traveling back in time to get them done. <br /><br />All of this is to explain [<i>rationalize</i>?] my absence from this page; and also my pervasive creative silence. It may be a paradox, but my life is so filled with noise—in the sense of a bombardment of what electrical engineers and information scientists call "signal interference"—that I have fallen silent. I have nothing to say. <br /><br />At least, that's how I felt this morning when I uploaded the edits of a client's manuscript, checked both my work inboxes, looked at my calendar, and realized that I have an entire afternoon to myself. I don't have any assignments to correct, manuscripts to edit, or educational texts to research and write. I don't have anywhere to drive. And the house is blessedly silent, since both my husband and son are at their respective college campuses teaching. It's just me and Yukon, the neurotic Newf.<br /><br />The house is silent, and so am I. Or so I thought. Obviously, I found something to say, because I've just written six hundred words about it. But it's just a tease, a delusion. I can't hear any of my characters in my head right now; are they just sleeping, or did they give up on me and move away? I don't know.<br /><br />There isn't going to be a tidy end to this post; I haven't come to any epiphanies, or suddenly found my creative voice again. I just need to set this down: although the noise of my life has momentarily fallen silent, I still can't hear myself. And for a writer, silence is supposed to be this horrible thing. We're always running away from it, always scrambling desperately for characters and ideas and words and images—for something, <i>anything</i> to say. <br /><br />But maybe that's the epiphany I'm supposed to be having. Maybe silence isn't such a horrible thing; maybe we as writers need to stop fearing it. Perhaps we need to stop once in a while and let ourselves be filled up with it. Instead of struggling to drown it out with an increasingly frantic deluge of words, maybe we need to steep a while in silence and listen, really listen, to what it may have to say. <br /><br />"Without silence, words lose their meaning." The Belgian priest Henri Nouwen said that; I used it as the epigraph of my first novel, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002VWKF4G?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002VWKF4G&linkCode=xm2&tag=nabuwred-20" target="_blank">Cheshire Moon</a></i>. <br /><br />Time to listen. Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8488165188769447777.post-87283747413021694372013-10-29T07:11:00.001-07:002013-10-29T07:11:50.945-07:00Fiction is the lie that tells the truth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9LDBN7j9VIslQwHYxA2exzCsx_xtZPlmbJZcuFrkELzTWbfdcLTZF7xZX018wtWbbrJ79BA2VxyjoCubZaRW2IOVVkbh-k2aoQHrJxy7sixUYN2Db6-dpYR2Nn2VaL-yJ5sE2iRKXTwEw/s1600/IMG_0815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9LDBN7j9VIslQwHYxA2exzCsx_xtZPlmbJZcuFrkELzTWbfdcLTZF7xZX018wtWbbrJ79BA2VxyjoCubZaRW2IOVVkbh-k2aoQHrJxy7sixUYN2Db6-dpYR2Nn2VaL-yJ5sE2iRKXTwEw/s320/IMG_0815.jpg" width="320" /></a>I'm recovering from knee surgery six days ago–my third operation in 25 months. I often joke that I should just find those scientists who gave Wolverine his adamantine skeleton and get one myself! And check out what I call my Transformer crutches: much easier to use than the axillary crutches they give you in physical therapy, even if they do make people stop and stare at me when I hobble down the street. <br /><br />I'm up and limping around, feeling fairly good, all things considered. But surgery takes something out of you, mentally as well as physically, so I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on my writing, teaching, or editing at the moment. As a three-time veteran, I was prepared for that this time. So I'm logging lots of hours on my Kindle, catching up on seventy—yes, seventy—books in my " find time to read someday" pile. It's heaven, but I have to work hard not to feel guilty about "goofing" off this way.<br /><br />A few days before my surgery I came across <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming" target="_blank">this link in the Guardian to a speech that fantasy writer Neil Gaiman</a> gave in London earlier this month. I want to write something profound in response, but I'm reduced to saying, "Oh wow oh wow oh wow." Gaiman plucked every word I might ever think to set down about this glorious craft of fiction writing and said it so much better than I ever could. So please, please–if you love books, either as a reader or a writer, do yourself a favor and read his speech. I'd quote my favorite parts, but by the time I was done, I'd have reproduced the entire thing.<br /><br />What exploded in my heart most of all was when Gaiman said that fiction writers—especially those of us who write for children—have an obligation to daydream, to entertain, and most of all, to tell the truth. Gaiman didn't mean that writers should teach or moralize: far from it. He specifically lists as one of our obligations that we should avoid preaching at all costs.<br /><br />So what did he mean? I'll let him explain.<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
,,,truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are.</blockquote>
<br />To me, that is another way of saying that truth in fiction isn't a simple regurgitation of facts. There is an alchemy that happens when you enter a book, a combustible reaction between word and reader that can forever change the way you see life, the world—even yourself. That I think is what Gaiman meant when he said<br /><br />
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Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. </blockquote>
<br />Now if that doesn't get you to read his speech, I don't know what will!Nancy Buttshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09551831834813862861noreply@blogger.com5