The Novel Formula - A Novel Writing Method: Step Five

Character Viewpoints

This is a really fun step, in which you get inside the skin of your characters, discover if there are any impossibilities in your plot and give the story a level of depth that you just couldn't get by coming at it from your omnipotent author viewpoint.

What you're going to do, is write a synopsis of the story from the point of view of each of the major characters - taking about a page for each. You should let you imagination loose at this point, so don't worry too much if you run over, just don't burn out before you've done them all!

If your story is primarily told from the point of view of the lead character, you will have to be really strict about their synopsis - if you're getting to the point where you have five pages and you're still in the early stages - it's getting out of hand.

Do your best to try to really get into each individual character; speaking as they would speak, noticing what they would notice and even using metaphors that they would. Does your character use a lot of long words or a lot of slang? Do they immediately scope out the decor of a room, the people in it, or the escape routes? Do they use a lot of sporting metaphors or sea ones, or sensory ones?

Personally, I like to imagine the character sitting on a stool in the middle of a room, being asked to explain what happened - but you don't have to do it that way.

Before you write each character story synopsis, make sure you check over the notes you already have to remind yourself of what you've already learned about your character. This will help you keep it consistent and also inspire the synopsis.

The character story synopsis should not tell the entire history of the character, starting when they were a child (unless that's relevant), but should start at the first relevant point to the story. This may, however, be before the story begins for the lead.

Think about what the character is doing in-between encounters with other characters and appearances in the story. You don't have to know every single detail, but they should never vanish from existence.

By doing this sort of synopsis, not only will you get to know your characters better, but you will make them seem much more real, as it forces you to think about what they're doing when they're not in your main narrative. This starts to give them their own lives, and can affect how they behave when they are in the main narrative.

For example, if you haven't thought about what a character has been doing immediately before your lead encounters them, they may tend to be in a neutral mood, and just hanging around doing nothing, or doing something vague. Once you've walked through the story in their shoes though, you might know that they've just had an argument with their sister, or just received a long awaited letter, or simply just stubbed their toe. How will this affect how they receive your lead?

In this way you can add more interesting complications and conflict, adding depth and realism.

So go ahead and get started on your character story synopses.

Click here for the next step in the Novel Formula - extending your synopsis.

If you want the obvious, then you can say that point of view is the perspective from which you view the story. But what does this actually mean.

Well, there are two common writing styles - first person and third person.

In a first person story your point of view is easy. You view the whole story through the eyes of one character. This means that you show everything as it is experienced by your main character. Your main character is the narrator:

I woke up late. I went to the balloon shop. The man in the shop looked at me funny.

In the third person you tell the story at a level removed. You tell the story as an omnipresent narrator that shows the reader the actions of various characters:

John woke up late. He went to the balloon shop. The shop's proprietor gave John a funny look.

The easiest way to write in the third person is to use what is known as 'Third Person Limited'. This is similar to using first person in that the narrator only follows one character.

For the more complicated plot, there is 'Third Person Omniscient'. In this case the story is told from multiple, often conflicting, viewpoints.

When writing in the third person it's easy to get carried away and tell things that the current point of view character couldn't know. The narrator can theoretically tell the reader about anyone and anything. However, in practice this can cause all kinds of confusion for the reader.

As a reader, you want to get into the head of one character at a time, you want to view the world as they view it and sympathise with their point of view. The reader wants to feel their pain and joy. Using multiple viewpoints within a novel is common because there is time enough to get to know more than one person.

However, a general rule of thumb, it's a good idea to stick with one character for the duration of a scene. Switching viewpoints within a scene is a known as head-hopping and can be rather disorientating because the reader doesn't know who they are supposed to be identifying with.

So, that's first and third person - what happened to the second person?

Well, that's you.

Not much fiction gets written in the second person because it can feel quite intrusive and strange:

Like that time when you woke up late. You went to the balloon shop. The man in the shop gave you a funny look.

It's tolerable in a short section, but can you imagine a whole novel informing you of the things you'd supposedly done? There's always the temptation to think: No I didn't. I wouldn't do that.

Well, don't look at me; I didn't do it and it must have been one of us.

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