The second in a series on…

Write Away

We're picking up again at chapter seven, about a third of the way through the book. This book as a whole is much more substantiative than I expected it to be, on the whole; it has more individual pieces of craft than I had anticipated.

Here, Elizabeth talks about hooks. She categorizes them into eight categories:

Name a character in the book.
Tell the reader something significant about the plot.
Show the reader a personality quirk that one of the characters has.
Illustrate a character's attitude
Show the way the narrator's mind works.
Give a clue or trick in the plot or a foreshadowing of either.
Lead the reader into excitement.
Render a mysterious or suspenseful occurrence.

Some of these are less obvious than the others. How exactly do you "lead the reader into excitement?"

Well, let's look at A Housepet's Trade's opening scene. We start with:

Hyacinth wakes up in a soft pile of pillows, her body nude but covered in heavy blankets. She shifts slightly, stretching her body, and hears something rattle as her arms meet unexpected resistance. Her memory is hazy, vague and unfocussed. She was… somewhere else… It’s probably nothing to worry about.

We start by:

1: Naming a character in the book.

7: Leading the reader into excitement. (This is erotica; our protagonist starts out nude from the first scene, which is a promise that we'll get to the sex soon.)

8: Rendering a mysterious or suspenseful occurrence. Our protagonist is nude, chained up, doesn't know how they got here and seems to be suppressing the emotion from it. That's certainly mysterious and suspenseful!

Let's look at Virtually Indestructible's opening:

“This is not what I imagined when I said I’d like to get handsy with you,” I say as I prod at the nail-bed of Vivian’s recently-reattached hand. “Nerves reconnecting properly? Can you feel this?” I press down with my nail, Vivian lets out a little hiss, and I feel satisfaction flow through me - my magic is doing its work properly. The undertone of sadistic glee I feel is just a nice little bonus.

This is:

1: Naming a character in the book. (Vivian.)

3: Showing the reader a personality quirk one of the characters has. (Our unnamed protagonist's sadism & casual humor about it.)

8: A suspenseful occurrence. Someone's hand is being reattached.

I haven't always done this well. Zigzagging Through Hoenn instead opens with:

Autumn sits on the side of her bed in her room, hugging her Ziggy close. The zigzagoon's brown-and-white striped fur presses coarsely against her hands as she looks over at the lavender backpack sitting on the tiny desk next to her window.

This doesn't feel suspenseful or mysterious to me; it just feels like an ordinary scene. It's overall rather too placid a beginning - there's no hook here.

Going back to the classification of these:

2 and 6, telling the reader something significant about the plot, or a trick or clue in it, are fairly self-explanatory. You're telling the reader what's going to happen, so they can decide whether it sounds cool or not.

3, 4 and 5 are all aspects of showing what's unique about your protagonist. This makes me think about Questing. Questors, on forums like Sufficient Velocity, are always incredibly fast to jump on anything that seems characterizing. People just like experiencing what other people are like in fiction. It's one of the essential nutrients humans get from experiencing other humans' lives vicariously.

This settles the Hook section. The next part is the fun one, the reason I skipped to this book: Voice.

Voice

The section on Voice was the most eye-opening part of this whole book for me, so I'll make an attempt to relay it all faithfully. Elizabeth George says that there are eight viewpoints in total, eliding the difference between close viewpoints and far ones.

Her eight are:

The Objective Viewpoint, where only the facts - the physical actions of the story - are relayed. No thoughts or feelings are conveyed.
The Omniscient Viewpoint, where the narrator is a specific character in the story but not any of the actors in it. Instead they are an observer who relates the matter from a detached, godlike position where they can tell the thoughts and feelings of each character.
The Character Viewpoints, which break down further into:

First Person. A strong first-person viewpoint uses I, me, my, and has a narrator who has a distinct personality and tone. The story is filtered through their viewpoint and way of seeing the world, and that colors the whole thing.
Third Person. This is exactly like First Person, but we use "he did X" or "she did X" rather than "I did X". The narrative is still filtered through the viewpoint of the lead character.
Shifting First Person. A strong shifiting first person viewpoint is like the First Person viewpoint, but has several independent characters that the viewpoint is anchored to. The essential quality of this is that each individual character must have a unique way of speaking, seeing the world, and experiencing things, such that the same object seen by two different people takes on different casts in their minds.
Shifting Third person. A strong third-person viewpoint is much like Shifting First Person, but uses third-person pronouns for each viewpoint character.
Narrator as Observer. This looks like first person, but our protagonist is not the viewpoint character. Doctor Watson is one of the most famous examples of this, as well as Ishmael of Moby Dick.

The important shared characteristic of all these viewpoints, in Elizabeth George's view, is that if you are in the head of someone, you want the world to be flavored with their viewpoint. You want the world to change to become the world as seen through the eyes of that character.

This is, of course, easier said than done. To do this you have to have a good understanding of your character's worldview and opinions, and not wander away to a further perspective.

(This, in other words, means that Elizabeth George is a partisan for a close viewpoint over a far one. Far ones are possible, but they're not her style - and seeing the writing she cites as good examples of close perspective, I understand why. Seeing the world through another character's eyes is a little intoxicating when you get deeply enough in, at least to me. This is part of the reason why Virtually Indestructible is told through a first-person viewpoint rather than a farther one; I'm trying to train myself to occupy a close viewpoint rather than my more natural far one.)

Elizabeth George goes on to say that the character's voice - their viewpoint - should not and cannot be yours if you want to write a compelling character. I personally disgree, as a writer of many and varied self-inserts, but the fact I turned into a plural system to do it perhaps suggests she would get the last laugh.

She says a voice must be shaped by:

How the character thinks internally. The way they put sentences together.
The character's vocabulary (and thus their education level and background).
The character's tone.
And last but certainly not least, the character's attitude. You can forget the rest if you must as long as the attitude is kept.

I still struggle with this, personally. My characters all have some commonalities in the way they think, since they're all like me in different ways. My personal voice as author bleeds in too much. But it is possible to train - and train it I shall.

Going on into the next chapter, we deal with dialogue, where she hammers in these qualities again and again in manner of speech and background. From there, we're onward into scenes - and this post is plenty long enough. So I'll leave you there for the moment, and slip this article onto my blog under an unassuming [2] in the series.