Life

[chris_gerrib]

Has gotten in the way of blogging. I had a meeting Tuesday of the Naperville Science Fiction Writers Group (big name, little group - there are 3 of us) which was very interesting but ran long. Jackie Powers did a presentation on "Writing Believable Women Characters" which I found quite useful. She also handed out a guideline on points of view (POV). Jackie likes stuff written in a "tight third person," which is standard for romances. Me, as a guy SF writer, I prefer a looser third. For the two of you that have read my novel The Mars Run, yes, it's in first person. I'll not be making THAT mistake for a while.

We had a big series of thunderstorms roll through Chicago last night around 11:30 PM, and it managed to set off the alarms at the bank. Guess who had to go in and make sure all was OK? If that's not bad enough, I have to make a presentation to the audit committee today. Oh well, I'm golfing tomorrow afternoon, so not all is lost.

As soon as my review of "Visual Journeys" posts on TCM Reviews, I'll put it here. There's a bunch of LJ users that I'll need to link to.

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

I'd be curious to know how you prefer to loosen tight third person. I tried to keep a one-viewpoint-per-chapter rule in The Cunning Blood but the story got so complex toward the end that I had to break the rule. The key is to make it absolutely clear when the viewpoint changes.

First person is hard--I fooled with the technique for thirty years before I finally wrote an FP story I was satisfied with. ("Drumlin Boiler," Asimov's 4/2002.) I have another one that I dug out of the trunk and rewrote almost completely last year, and it's now doing the rounds. It reminded me how easy it is to do FP badly. I almost changed it to third person just to be done with it, but then I dared myself to do it right. No luck so far, but these things take time.

Mars Run is actually pretty well done, for first-timer FP. Practice TTP for thirty years and come back. It really is that hard. (I've now dared myself to do an entire novel in first person. We'll see if it ever happens.)

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

We may be having a bit of cross-talk. When Jackie talks of "tight 3rd" she means one POV character per story, and very "he saw / he did." Your book The Cunning Blood is more of the "loose third" I'm working in.

What frustrates me about The Mars Run is that I picked 1st person thinking it would be the easiest POV! (flushes). Oh well.