POV – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

An Experiment in Writing – Part 14: Exposition via Character Revelation via Deep POV

This experiment follows a thread/arc started in An Experiment in Writing – Part 12: Overwriting, Toing and Froing and continued in An Experiment in Writing – Part 13: Exposition via Dialogue, the latter being wherein I offered

Exposition – an ugly lump of glucky words authors plop into their work with the intention of getting information to the reader.

Usually because they’re either lazy or don’t know any better.

Especially if it’s glucky.

I use Deep POV a lot and suggest it for the very purpose I demonstrate here: to get necessary story information to the reader and reveal character simultaneously.

Efficient writing that, dual purposing a section to incapacitate two aerial habituators penecontemporaneously.

Yeah, I’m an author. Can you tell?

Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Get copies of Empty Sky and follow along.

For that matter, pick up several dozen copies of all my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, and I need the money.

An Example of the Experiments, 4 – Fains I – A John Chance Mystery

We left off in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I with the promise of sharing the original Fains I opening and the rewrite making use of multiple storycrafting techniques.

I shared the original first ~900 words in An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I and here I share the rewrite, now the first chapter in a work-in-progrWe left off in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I with the promise of sharing the original Fains I opening and the rewrite making use of multiple storycrafting techniques.

I shared the original first ~900 words in An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I and here I share the rewrite, now the first chapter in a work-in-progress, the Fains I – A John Chance Mystery novel.

My first question is, as a reader, does this appeal more to you than the original version? If yes, because…? If not, because…? Figure out what makes it better or worse and you’ll have some excellent handles on your own crafting.

Now to analyze…

First thing, what happened to Tim and his family?

Remember my writing “I realized the rewritten opening sucked because I didn’t know enough about the characters to really care about them. The shift from teenager going to the prom to elderly man on his deathbed drove the story in the correct direction and not enough.” in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I?

I was correct that the story had an older cast of characters (demonstrated in the rewrite above).

I also wrote “This brings us back to An Example of the Experiments – Fains I’s First Question: Who Owns the Story?”

As written earlier, the core piece – someone dies and Tim’s involved – was solid enough to carry the story, but nothing I came up with made Tim interesting enough to me to write about him and, as noted previously, readers will only be interested in your characters if you’re interested in you’re characters.

How to make “Tim” more interesting to me? Hmm…

The original story had a car accident resulting in a death. Too random. Yeah, there could be guilt and an accident is an accident is an accident, and accidents happen.

Give Tim

a reason to murder someone and
make him remorseless about the murder because
he feels justified in the killing.

Okay, psychosociopathic youngsters are interesting but can be limiting because a youth doesn’t have the life experience to have those attitudes fully realized, so an older “Tim” who feels justified and has no guilt.

Gosh golly gee. Tim’s becoming quite three-dimensional here. He’s interesting.

What if the older Tim had committed several murders, believed all of them justified and remains remorseless and guilt free?

This Tim’s obviously got a) a history and b) some issues.

And the best part is such psychosociopaths are usually pretty good at hiding who they are from public view.

Sometimes you can let the reader know more about a situation than the characters know about this situation.

Alfred Hitchcock gave a great example of creating audience interest, empathy, and tension: Have two people eating lunch or having a drink at a picnic table or a an outdoor cafe. Now put a ticking bomb under the table and make sure the audience sees it and knows what it is.

Doesn’t matter if the audience likes or dislikes the people at the table, they’re interested in what happens.

So there’s a psychosociopath loose, no one knows it, and the reader learns it. Great! Excellent.

But don’t tell the reader everything at once. Foreshadow. Hint. Mislead and misdirect, all of which now stars with the novel’s A John Chance Mystery subtitle (Search – The First John Chance Mystery has already signalled regular readers more John Chance novels are coming and new readers Fains I is part of a series).

Ooo. This is getting better already. We’re starting to have a story.

The last part mentioned previously was have an interesting person in an interesting place doing an interesting thing and “Give the reader an interesting person in an interesting place doing an interesting thing. If you only give one, it’s got to be incredibly strong. Two is good, three is dynamite.” along with Relatability and the four basic ways people relate to things:

they’re familiar with a place (Setting)
they’re familiar with what’s happening (Plot)
they’re familiar with the people involved (Character)
they’re familiar with what’s being said (Language)

and remember to throw in And add in what makes a great opening: conflict, tension, oddness, …?

Throw all this in the pot, let simmer, stir occasionally, season to taste, and we get (I hope) something closer to what’s the story, a first pass of which is shown above. A detailed (pretty much line-by-line) analysis is below:

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All Fains I posts.

An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I

We left off in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I with the promise of sharing the original Fains I opening and the rewrite making use of multiple storycrafting techniques.

First, the original’s first ~900 words

Tim screamed. His father kicked off covers and rose quickly. He didn’t bother with robe or slippers and hollered, “It’s okay, Tim. We’re coming.”
Mrs. Young lifted her gown and cursed the folds as her hands fought to find their place. Mr. Young wrenched the door open.
A hallway nightlight flooded their bedroom with dark colors.
“Put on a real light , ” he said as he and his wife raced down the hall to Tim’s room.
Mr. Young entered first. Mrs. Young caromed off the door at the end of the hall.
Mr. Young grabbed Tim as he landed on the bed, his tears washing Tim as he held his son against him, rocking and speaking softly.
Timothy continued to scream, unrelenting, unaware of his father’s arms, each scream higher than the last, longer than the last, each scream more hopeless than the last.
Mrs. Young flicked the light in Tim’s room. His bed held a sweat soaked outline of his body. “Can you move him? I should change the sheets.”
Mr. Young continued rocking Tim, his eyes closed, still holding his son against him, too big to sit in dad’s lap, too terrified not to. “Why bother? The covers are off the bed. Just let it dry out.”
Tim stopped shrieking. His eyes started to focus. He sat up, rigid, arms locked by his sides. He looked at his father.
“You’re home, Tim. Mom and I are right here. Do you know where you are?”
Tim clenched his father like a child seeking the security of its mother’s breasts, sobbing heavily. His body finally went limp and he slept again.
Mr. Young looked at his wife, framed in the doorway. “I’ll spend the night in here with him.

***

Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I“

An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I

We left off in An Example of the Experiments – Fains I with a rewrite of the first paragraph, which was much better craftwise than the original and still sucked.

It was better than the original because of the solid POV, the protagonist’s situation was clearly stated, the setting and tone were much stronger, more character roles were defined, …

And still it sucked, and I knew it sucked, hence I wrote “Still needs work, though.” at the end of the post.

The real problem was I didn’t know how to fix it because I wasn’t sure of the specifics of what wasn’t working.

Much of the answer came while I worked on An Experiment in Writing – Part 8: Worthy Antagonists when I talked about developing a character’s backstory, about why the character behaves, thinks, responds, interacts, does as they do.

Give the reader only as much character background as necessary for them to understand the story.

Let me give you a caveat at this point: Give the reader only as much character background as necessary for them to understand the story.

Empty Sky’s Earl Pangiosi, The Inheritors’s Seth Van Gelder, look at any of the main and primary characters in my work and you’ll find lots of their background woven into the story.

It seems I do this weaving well because readers constantly comment on how real and vivid my characters are.

Back to Fains I (or “Eye.” I’m still deciding).
Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I“

An Example of the Experiments – Fains I

Sometime in the mid- to late-1970s, my third time through college (and still having no luck with traditional education of the time), I sat in my study in a rented house on Willand Pond Road and flipped through my copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (the centenary edition revised by Ivor H. Evans). I wasn’t looking for anything in particular except to be distracted from exceedingly boring classwork.

I found it on pg 409: “Fains I.”

“Fains I” is “a schoolchildren’s term of unknown origin exempting the first to call: ‘Fains I goal-keeping.'”

Dig a little deeper and it’s used to offer protection for someone asserting an unprovable claim.

Dig lots deeper and there’s a reference to “Hercules’ Shirt,” meaning his wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion which was impervious to all but the most powerful weapons (can you say “arms race”?)

That prompted an ~2k word story which is now, thankfully, lost to antiquity.

BTW, that deepest reference is lost except in certain modern retellings of the Hercules legend (such as Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules) in which much of Hercules’ legend is called into question.

Yeah, okay, great.

What’s this got to do with the Experiments (in Writing)?

I mention in An Experiment in Writing – Part 7: Inciting Incidents that my current #work-in-progress is Fains I and that the opening sucks.

Well, of course it does.

And it’s fixable.

I’ve spent considerable neural horsepower over the past few weeks coming up with ways to a) make it better craft-wise and b) make it a better story, period (storytelling).

Some of the solutions point to the (currently 3,425 word) story becoming a novel.

I really don’t want to write another novel right now.

Okay, okay, okay.

What I can do is use Fain’s I as an example of some of the things I bring up in the Experiments in Writing.

Which we’ll begin now, with Fain’s I’s opening paragraph (anybody remember So I gave myself an exercise (eating my own dogfood)…? That’s what we’re going to do here for the next several weeks (or however long it takes for me to decide the story’s working and publishable).
Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments – Fains I“