Rosyth GE

These are some notes on writing that will hopefully provide insight and information as to how to make your writing better and more effective and make all of you more knowledgeable and creative writers.

Some of the points are repeated (though written/expressed in a different way) to reinforce some important/salient aspects. Bear with them!
Please feel free, as always to post comments, questions and points of clarification; or better still, try out some of the ideas here.

POV

First Person
This is the “I” story.
The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room…
The benefit of first person is its immediacy and intimacy. You are really inside the head of the person telling the story. This is good for character stories, but not as good for certain kinds of tension stories. You can therefore say that first person’s focus might not be on what happens so much as how it happens. In other words, we know a first person protagonist lives; we just don’t know what that means.
A first person narrator can therefore be what is called an Unreliable Narrator. This means that what the person says about a situation, character, or action, might not be true. Readers can sometimes enjoy discovering that the narrator is unreliable–discovering, for example, that in spite of the fervent dislike of the narrator for a certain young duke, he’s really not a bad guy after all.

FIRST PERSON “I” “me”

*Narrator as major participant

*Narrator as observer and major participant

*Non-participant narrator or reporter (less common)

Advantages of First Person

*Eyewitness account gives immediacy, realism

*Author can create dramatic irony

Disadvantages of First Person 

*No direct interpretation by the author

*Bias or limited knowledge of narrator

*Danger that narrator may transcend her knowledge

The First Person
A story written in the first person is told by an “I,” where “I” can be the main character, a less important character witnessing events, or a person retelling a story they were told by someone else. This point of view is often effective in giving a sense of closeness to the character. It can be very easy to get the reader to identify or sympathize with your main character when the reader is seeing everything through that character’s eyes.
There are some important things to consider when writing in first person, though. First of all, you need to decide how this story is being told. Is the character writing it down? Telling it out loud? Thinking it to their self? And if they are writing it down, is it something meant to be read by the public? Or is it a private diary? A story meant for one other person? The way the first person narrator is relating the story will affect how you write it, the language you choose, the length of your sentences, your tone of voice and many other things. The reader should have at least some sense of this as well. The way they interpret a story could be very different if it is told as a secret diary or if it is a public statement.
Another aspect to think about is how much time has elapsed between when the character experienced the events of the story and when they decided to tell them. If only a few days have passed, the story could be related very differently than if the character was reflecting on events of the distant past. Also think about why the character is telling the story. What is their motivation? Are they just trying to clear up events for their own peace of mind? Make a confession about a wrong they did? Or tell a good adventure tale to their beer-guzzling friends? The reason why a story is told will also affect how it is written, and you at least should know the answer, even if it never makes its way into the text. And not only Why? but Why now?
A first person narrative is often more effective when it is a first person narrator telling someone else’s story (in other words, when the narrator is not the main character). This allows a certain distance between the narrator and the events which is impossible for the main character. On the other hand, the inability to see the bigger picture can sometimes be exploited to good effect. Whether or not your narrator is actually telling the truth is another big question (and one your readers will ask, so you’d best think about it, too).
First Person Protagonist:

For this point of view, a character relates events that occurred to them; the “I” is the main character, telling her or his own story.
I missed the bus that morning because I couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed. It was just too cosy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me. I was going to have to walk all the way to work.
First Person Witness:

The story of the main character is told by another character observing the events.
She missed the bus. She’d probably spent an hour arguing with herself that she really should get up. I could picture her there, curled up in bed with the cat next to her. Now she was going to have to walk to work.

First Person Re-teller:

The story is told, not by a witness to the events, but by someone who has heard the story from yet another person.
She missed the bus. I don’t know why; probably couldn’t get out of bed. You know how warm it gets when you’re all curled up in the blankets. She had a cat, too, and somehow a cat makes it harder to get up in the morning. So she missed the bus, and would have to walk all the way to work

Point Of View–

By Carolyn Miller
When a person wishes to write a story, one of the first things he must do is choose how he wants the narrative voice to sound. In a story, the author is not the one who tells it, but the voice that has been created. The writer can decide which choice will best make his story come alive and stamp an impression on the reader. These choices, called point of view, are really not hard to understand or recognize. They are person, number, and tense.

The point of view, person, is divided into three choices: First Person, Second Person, and Third Person.

The First Person is when the narrative voice refers to itself, as I. An example would be: “Will we move away from here?” I ask, the thought of leaving disturbing me. (Taken from “I am Regina”)

The Second Person is more of a rare one that the others. This one refers to the reader as you, thereby putting the reader in the story. An example of this is: “You are walking down the street on a wet and cold night, when you suddenly hear a low growl behind you.”

The Third Person, most commonly used, is when the narrative voice refers to the other characters. For instance, “Ye got no call to be afeared,” he said roughly. “I ain’t aimin’ to hurt ye none.” (Taken from “Across Five Aprils”)

The next point of view, tense, is also divided into three parts: past, present, and future. The following are examples for each of these starting with past. She saw the expression on his face, but ignored it. Present: “Perhaps you would be surprised to hear, Dr. Carter, that Mr. Taylor went deaf very suddenly last week?” Anne sat back, having thrown her bomb. (Taken from “Anne of Windy Poplars”)  And last of all, “I will never blot out his name from the book of life…”

The last point of view is Number. Number is either singular or plural. There is one of each for First Person and Third Person. Singular First Person would be the narrator referring to himself, and is not part of a group, as in: “I watched the thunderstorm.” Plural First Person is when the narrative voice constantly refers to itself as part of the group. We watched the thunderstorm. Third Person Singular is when the narrative voice is observing one individual character. An example is He glared at his captor with intense hate. Or She watched her kitten play with the mouse. Third Person plural refers to a group of two or more people, as in, They watched the barn go up in flames. Or strange things always seemed to happen to them.

Perhaps now the choices of point of view are more clear and recognizable; this is my deepest hope. The three elements are what an author has to create a narrative voice for his story. Using just these three, authors have been able to create thousands of interesting stories. And thousands more are still out there to be created!

Narrative Voice

Someone in your story has to tell us that Jeff pulled out his gun, that Samantha smiled at the tall stranger, that daylight was breaking over the valley. That someone is the narrator or “author’s persona.”
The author’s persona of a fictional narrative can help or hinder the success of the story. Which persona you adopt depends on what kind of story you are trying to tell, and what kind of emotional atmosphere works best for the story.
The persona develops from the personality and attitude of the narrator, which are expressed by the narrator’s choice of words and incidents. These in turn depend on the point of view of the story.
First-person point of view is usually subjective: we learn the narrator’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events. In first-person objective, however, the narrator tells us only what people said and did, without comment.
Other first-person modes include:
¶the observer-narrator, outside the main story (examples: Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby)
¶detached autobiography (narrator looking back on long-past events)
¶multiple narrators (first-person accounts by several characters)
¶interior monologue (narrator recounts the story as a memory; stream of consciousness is an extreme form of this narrative)
¶dramatic monologue (narrator tells story out loud without major interruption)
¶letters or diary (narrator writes down events as they happen; narrative told through letters is also known as the epistolary novel)
If the point of view is first-person, questions about the persona are simple: the character narrating the story has a particular personality and attitude, which is plausibly expressed by the way he or she describes events.
The second-person mode is rare: You knocked on the door. You went inside. Very few writers feel the need for it, and still fewer use it effectively.
If the point of view is third-person limited, persona again depends on the single character through whose eyes we witness the story. You may go inside the character’s mind and tell us how that character thinks and feels, or you may describe outside events in terms the character would use. Readers like this point of view because they know whom to “invest” in or identify with.
In third-person objective, we have no entry to anyone’s thoughts or feelings. The author simply describes, without emotion or editorializing, what the characters say and do. The author’s persona here is almost non-existent. Readers may be unsure whose fate they should care about, but it can be very powerful precisely because it invites the reader to supply the emotion that the persona does not. This is the persona of Icelandic sagas, which inspired not only Ernest Hemingway but a whole generation of “hard-boiled” writers.
If the point of view is third-person omniscient, however, the author’s persona can develop in any of several directions.
1. “Episodically limited.” Whoever is the point of view for a particular scene determines the persona. An archbishop sees and describes events from his particular point of view, while a pickpocket does so quite differently. So the narrator, in a scene from the archbishop’s point of view, has a persona quite different from that of the pickpocket: a different vocabulary, a different set of values, a different set of priorities. (As a general rule, point of view should not change during a scene. So if an archbishop is the point of view in a scene involving him and a pickpocket, we shouldn’t suddenly switch to the pickpocket’s point of view until we’ve resolved the scene and moved on to another scene.)
2. “Occasional interruptor.” The author intervenes from time to time to supply necessary information, but otherwise stays in the background. The dialogue, thoughts and behavior of the characters supply all other information the reader needs.
3. “Editorial commentator.” The author’s persona has a distinct attitude toward the story’s characters and events, and frequently comments on them. The editorial commentator may be a character in the story, often with a name, but is usually at some distance from the main events; in some cases, we may even have an editorial commentator reporting the narrative of someone else about events involving still other people. The editorial commentator is not always reliable; he or she may lie to us, or misunderstand the true significance of events.
Third-person omniscient gives you the most freedom to develop the story, and it works especially well in stories with complex plots or large settings where we must use multiple viewpoints to tell the story. It can, however, cause the reader to feel uncertain about whom to identify with in the story. If you are going to skip from one point of view to another, start doing so early in the story, before the reader has fully identified with the original point of view.
The author’s persona can influence the reader’s reaction by helping the reader to feel close to or distant from the characters. Three major hazards arise from careless use of the persona:
1. Sentimentality. The author’s editorial rhetoric tries to evoke an emotional response that the story’s events cannot evoke by themselves—something like a cheerleader trying to win applause for a team that doesn’t deserve it. A particular problem for the “editorial commentator.”
2. Mannerism. The author’s persona seems more important than the story itself, and the author keeps reminding us of his or her presence through stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, or outright editorializing about the characters and events of the story. Also a problem for the editorial commentator. However, if the point of view is first person, and the narrator is a person given to stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, and so on, then the problem disappears; the persona is simply that of a rather egotistical individual who likes to show off.
3. Frigidity. The persona’s excessive objectivity trivializes the events of the story, suggesting that the characters’ problems need not be taken seriously: a particular hazard for “hardboiled” fiction in the objective mode, whether first person or third person.
Verb tense can also affect the narrative style of the story. Most stories use the past tense:
I knocked on the door. She pulled out her gun.
This is usually quite adequate although flashbacks can cause awkwardness:
I had knocked on the door. She had pulled out her gun.
A little of that goes a long way.
Be careful to stay consistently in one verb tense unless your narrator is a person who might switch tenses:
So I went to see my probation officer, and she tells me I can’t hang out with my old buddies no more.
Some writers achieve a kind of immediacy through use of the present tense:
I knock on the door. She pulls out her gun.
We don’t feel anyone knows the outcome of events because they are occurring as we read, in “real time.” Some writers also enjoy the present tense because it seems “arty” or experimental.
But most readers of genre fiction don’t enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluctant to let their authors use it.

NARRATIVE VOICE

An important decision an author must make before writing a story is who will ‘tell’ it to the reader. This ‘person’ supplies the story’s narrative voice and is called the story’s narrator. There are two main choices: a story can be told either through one of its characters (usually the protagonist – using the first person pronoun, ‘I’) or by a person outside the story itself (which seems often to be that of the author and which uses the third person pronouns ‘he’, ’she’ or ‘they’). Most importantly, it is the narrative voice that creates a particular kind of relationship with the reader that mediates all that the reader can understand about other characters and the events and ideas of the story.
Working out and considering the effects of the author’s particular choice of narrative voice adds to your understanding of the characters, the story and the themes. How obvious is this voice? What are its qualities – its effects on you, the reader? Does it seem entirely trustworthy? Is it reliable? Is it educated? Is it biased towards a particular character or way of viewing society? Working out how the narrative voice mediates what you come to know and understand about the characters, events and themes is a key exam and coursework skill – and is highly rewarded as it is classed as a high level skill.

First Person Narrative
The important thing to remember here is the limitations of this choice of narrator: a first person narrator is limited by time and place, by who they are, by what they know and what other characters tell them. But this choice of narrator is able to create a close relationship with the reader – indeed, it is highly possible for the reader to feel as if they are the narrator in this kind of narrative, so close is the relationship that develops.
Third Person Narrative
A third person narrator can ’see’ and ‘tell’ everything about each character, and be anywhere at any time, able to judge and comment upon events and characters at will; however, third person narrators are usually not neutral and are given limited and biased viewpoints by the writer such that the narrative voice leads the reader to support the ‘hero’ and criticise the ‘villain’. A third person narrator is sometimes referred to as an omniscient narrator when the viewpoint is more neutral and ‘all-knowing’.

Third person dramatic or objective
•    Like a camera, narrator reports only what can be seen and heard; no thoughts of characters are given except as spoken.

Advantages of Dramatic or Objective

*Impartial report
*Offers most speed, action
*Reader must interpret

Disadvantages of Dramatic

*Author cannot interpret
*Relies heavily on action and dialogue

Third Person Omniscient

*The all-knowing narrator (like God) gives thoughts of and judgments about the characters as well as details of action and dialogue.

Advantages of Omniscient

*God-like narrator gives thoughts of character, dimension to story

*Most flexible; author can control omniscience

Disadvantages of Omniscient

*Author can come between reader and story

*Shifting from character to character may destroy unity

Third Person Limited Omniscient

*Narrator focuses on actions, thoughts, feelings of a single major character.

Point of View Character

*In third limited point of view, the narrator stands by the elbow of this character and we experience the story as this person does. We only know the thoughts of this character.

Advantages of Limited Omniscient

*Realistic, we see world through one person
*Ready-made unifying element
*Useful characterization of point-of-view character
Disadvantages of Limited Omniscient

*Limited field of observation
*Difficulty having character aware of all important events

The Meaning of Life: Theme

Don’t confuse the theme with the topic; the former is a broad statement about reality; the latter, the subject of the narrative. A theme might be “War is hell”; the subject, World War II.
Effective narratives do more than entertain; they often suggest a truth about life, a theme. This observation touches a cord within your readers and makes your story memorable. It can even help lift your writing to the level of Art.
Here are some sample themes:
•    People are capable of great heroism when put to the test.
•    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
•    The world is a lonely and bitter place.
•    You can’t recapture the past.
•    It’s a dog-eat-dog world.