The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (7 page)

Having once gotten yourself thoroughly into Bob's viewpoint, however, you need to go a bit further in terms of technique. You need to keep reminding your readers who the viewpoint character is.

To that end, you constantly use grammatical constructions that emphasize Bob's seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.

For example, you would not write something like, "The meeting room for the speech was stuffy." Instead, you would phrase the statement to emphasize that it's Bob's awareness: "Bob felt the stuffy heat of the room close around him and knew he had to make a good speech to hold this audience."

By using clauses like "Bob
felt"
and words like "knew," the writer is showing unequivocally that we are in Bob's viewpoint. Only Bob can know how he feels. Only Bob can know for certain what he is seeing or noticing at that moment. This leads to reader identification with Bob, which is vital if the reader is to have a sense of focus.

Notice, too, that by establishing a relationship between the environment (the hot, crowded room) and the viewpoint (Bob), the professional writer goes on to set up a cause-effect relationship between the outside world from Bob's viewpoint and his interior, feeling-thinking life. Bob goes in, makes some observations, and as a result realizes he has to make the speech of his life. Thus the setting isn't just a static thing being examined for no reason; it has importance; it affects how Bob is feeling; as a result, he is going to
act
somewhat differently.

This movement, from outside the viewpoint character to inside that same character, is at the heart of moment-to-moment motivation in fiction. It is also a very powerful characterization device. You the writer can show the outside world from a viewpoint then, by relating that outside view to some internal reaction inside your character—which only your character can possibly know—you can share your first little secret with the reader as to what kind of a person this viewpoint character really is.

Does that make sense? Look at it this way: What if Bob's internal response, above, had been to feel amused? Abused? Frightened? Justified? Arrogant? In each case, this single shown response
would change his characterization
.

By picking a viewpoint and emphasizing it constantly, in other words, you do more than usefully limit your authorial problems, and you accomplish more even than making the story lifelike... and building sympathy for the viewpoint character. In addition to these benefits, you give yourself another powerful tool for showing your readers who and what your viewpoint character really is... in his heart of hearts, in that secret place within himself where there can be no lies or deception.

Of course the converse of what we've just been talking about is also true. You must not only establish and reiterate the viewpoint constantly with the proper kinds of constructions, but you must also make sure that nothing slips into your copy by accident that might lead the reader to assume the viewpoint has moved anywhere else.

If Bob is still your viewpoint character, for example, but you want to show that his boss, Max, is worried about the speech Bob is about to give, you
cannot
throw in a sentence like, "Max was worried about the speech." That construction implies that we are momentarily in Max's viewpoint.

How do we get around the problem? Two possibilities come immediately to mind:

"As he walked to the podium, Bob remembered how worried Max had said he was about the speech."

Or:

"Walking to the podium, Bob glanced at Max and saw the worried frown on his face."

In either case, we've conveyed the information about Max's worry without risk of losing our reader's sense of where the viewpoint is.

You would do well, I think, to test yourself on how you handle viewpoint, since it's such a vital technique in fiction. Here's one way you can do it.

Select a few pages of your own fiction copy. Then go through it with colored pencils and mark it up as follows:

Underline the name of your viewpoint character in red.

Underline in red every statement that clearly defines that character's viewpoint ("He saw," "she heard," "he thought," "she felt," "he intended" and the like).

Look for any intended or accidental statements establishing any other viewpoint. If you find a second viewpoint, underline that character's name in green, and then underline in the same color all the words that establish his viewpoint.

At this point, if you have found more than one viewpoint,
get it out of there!
Rewrite, if necessary, to make it all a single viewpoint.

Learning to handle viewpoint well is a crucial step for any fiction writer. It can be troublesome at first, but later it becomes second nature. That's good, because learning it is a necessity. For without good handling of viewpoint, your readers may forget whose story it is—and you might, too!

There you are, deep
in your story somewhere, and you realize that there's some vital information that your readers really ought to know. So you write something like:

Charlie had no way of knowing this, but it is a well-documented fact that Type A personalities suffer a high incidence of heart attacks, and his enemy Sam was definitely a Type A personality. Sam's troubles had begun early in his life, and an examination of his early background provides an interesting example of how compulsive Type A behavior can be destructive....

It's probably pretty obvious to you that this kind of lecture doesn't fit very well into contemporary fiction. There was a time, in the earliest days of the novel, and before the modern short story had begun to assume its present form, when a fiction writer could address "You, dear reader," and speak author-to-reader like a stage lecturer might speak to an audience. But fiction has become much more sophisticated since those long gone days, and readers now won't stand for lectures by the author.

Why? For at least two reasons: First, lectures by the author violate every principle of viewpoint, as just discussed in the two preceding chapters; second, such lectures completely stop the forward movement of the story, and so distract the reader from the plot, where he should be focused.

Another possible reason for avoiding author lectures in your fiction: you may find yourself deviating from the fictioneer's goal—the telling of a story—to that of a pamphleteer, which is trying to sell a belief. Fiction
may
convince readers about some moral, ethical or political issue, but if it does, the convincing is a by-product of the tale-telling. Fiction does not exist primarily to convince anybody of anything; it exists to tell a story, and by so doing to illuminate the human condition.

Let me make a suggestion: if you ever find yourself saying that you are writing a story to "prove" something political or whatever, shelve that story instantly, and don't work on it again until you can write it for its own sake.

Of course writers of fiction care about issues of the day. Often they have very, very strong opinions. But the
published
writers entertain. They don't write to prove anything. If their story happens incidentally to say something thematic, that's grand. Most stories do end up implying some idea or feeling. But the convincing—if any happens—is a by-product of the storytelling process, and cannot be its goal or the story almost certainly will come out like a very bad Sunday sermon rather than as a story.

So perhaps you have been convinced not to try to use fiction as a delivery system for your opinions. A soapbox is better. But what about those inadvertent, well-meaning technical slips that might also read like a lecture in your copy?

These are sometimes harder to catch. As we've mentioned in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, you'll establish a viewpoint and write in such a way as to remind the reader often where that viewpoint is. It should be relatively easy for you to slip in material that you the author want in the story
as long as the viewpoint character needs to think about it
.

What do I mean here? Simply this: Faced with the need to work some factual material into her story, the good writer does
not
say, "How can I get this into the story?" Instead, she asks herself, "Why does my viewpoint character need to learn (or recall) this information?" Or, "How can I get the viewpoint character to notice what I want noticed here?" Which is quite different from sitting back as the author and shoveling in data.

The more you practice your handling of viewpoint, the easier and more like second nature it will become. The more solidly you're writing in viewpoint, the less likely it is that you'll launch into a distracting lecture by the author.

Look
for lectures in your fiction. They tend to be chunks of information that you the writer stuck in there because of what
you
wanted in the story—rather than what the viewpoint character would be thinking or dealing with. If or when you find such obtrusive chunks of author intervention, figure out how to get them in through the viewpoint.

Ask yourself such questions as:

There are always ways you can devise to avoid dumping information into the story via the author lecture route. There are always ways... and you must always find one of them.

As discussed in chapter fourteen
, it isn't a good idea to dump factual information into a story via the author-intrusion route. Sometimes writers realize this, but unfortunately decide to use their characters as mouthpieces for the desired data, making the characters lecture at one another in a totally unrealistic way.

Usually dialogue is not a good vehicle for working in research information. Characters tend to make dumb speeches for the author's convenience, rather than talking like real people do. While dialogue does convey useful information in a story—and a lot of it—dialogue's primary function is not to give the author a thinly disguised way of dumping his lecture notes. Maybe you know the kind of lecture dialogue I mean:

Charlie walked up and said, "Why, hi there, Molly McBride, who was born in Albany in 1972, of poor but hardworking parents, your father was a store clerk! How nice you look today, wearing that red blouse that goes so nicely with your shoulder-length blond hair! My goodness, as I recall, you must still be married to Brad, the world-champion tennis player, whose last tournament appearance saw him reach the semifinals at Flushing Meadow, where—"

This kind of nonsense is every bit as obtrusive and dumb as the direct author lecture discussed in Chapter Fourteen.

Dialogue emphatically is
not
made up of sequential lectures by various characters intent on telling each other what they already know. Dialogue simply cannot be used as a disguise for author lectures. You the writer must find more clever ways of working your needed information into the story.

Finally, let me make one more impertinent observation about lectures by the fiction author. A large percentage of the information you think must go into your story will find its way into the characters' lives and actions without your much worrying about it
if it is truly relevant
.

On the other hand, you may need to question whether some of the stuff you want in there is really needed. If the characters don't talk about it, remember it, or act upon it in the course of your plot, how can it really be so important? And if it's just your opinion about something, who cares? Certainly not your reader!

Leave the lectures for the classroom or the Moose Lodge. Write fiction!

In the last chapter we warned
about letting characters for the sake of piling information into the story. But that's not the only way writers sometimes mess up their dialogue. Sometimes, without realizing it, they let their characters talk on and on, boringly, becoming windbags.

A windbag, in old-fashioned slang, is a person who talks and talks and talks... and talks some more... and never lets anybody get a word in edgewise.

Windbags in real life are colossal bores.

In fiction they're even worse.

That's important to remember, because so much of modem fiction is composed of dialogue—characters talking. You can't afford to portray windbag characters all the time, because if you do, your characters will be boring, your dialogue will look more like rampant soliloquies than real people talk, and your story will go right down the tubes.

So you have to write modem dialogue. That means that the only time you can let a story character talk like a windbag is when you
intend to
portray him as a windbag. The great majority of your characters have to be more terse and logical than we often are in real life, if the dialogue on the page is to
appear
realistic.

Which is to say: good,
realistic
story dialogue often has little actual resemblance to the way we really talk every day. It just looks that way.

How do you avoid the dread windbag syndrome?

You must
not:

But what, you may ask, can you do to prevent this sort of thing?

In the first place, recognize that a story conversation should almost always follow the rules of stimulus and response as explained in Chapter Eleven.