From the first poem you show a friend or a teacher, to five-page editorial letter from an agent who might take you on if you get the novel right, to a TLS review of your twentieth book, as a writer you never stop getting feedback on your writing. I've talked before about the basic decision about accept-adapt-ignore. But sometimes even that isn't enough to stop you agonising about whether you should change something in your writing because of what someone's said. And I would suggest that who that Someone is, is part of the decision.

These days it would be very un-PC not to say that everyone's opinion of your writing is valid, and in one sense that's true. But the flipside of that is that no one's opinion is valid in any meaningful sense, unless you choose to accept its validity. It's not arrogant to decide that you don't need someone's opinion of your writing: it's part of being a writer. I've seen so many aspiring writers have their confidence - and therefore their writing - wrecked, sometimes permanently, by being in the wrong environment (and not just that one particular, cultishly vicious online group). Even in good groups I've seen writers ruin a piece by trying to write by writers'-circle-committee, or by believing the all-too-many critiquers who critique by the rule book. Some of that is lack of confidence in a critiquer who doesn't know good writing when they see it, so they look for boxes ticked. Some is lack of confidence or experience in the writer, who can't hear their own instincts, or doesn't trust them.

Having said that, here are some questions to ask yourself about that Someone, when you're trying to decide if you should accept what they say.

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Over on her excellent blog, The Elephant in the Writing Room, Sally Zigmond's been talking about Showing and Telling. And as well as flattering the Itch by linking to my own post about it, she makes a very good point that trying to Show often leads writers into endless, endless details about missing the alarm-clock switch, and scrambling out of bed and tripping over the dog and dropping things and running out of breath and tumbling onto the train and feeling sweaty when shaking the MD's hand.... and all to Show what could be told: John arrived at the office late, hot and flustered.

Undoubtedly, lots of beginner writers do this - and lots of more experienced writers find that in revision they have done it too, and cut a lot of it. So it's obvious that this kind of too-much-stuff comes naturally to many of us. But I have heard aspiring writers say "showing takes longer", and I don't think it's necessarily true, as the examples in my post about Showing and Telling prove. In other words, I'm not sure that it's fair to blame Showing, in itself, for the problem of Too Much Stuff. I think it comes from various, very natural, aspects of the process.

Writing to find out what you're really trying to say. If you're a Cutter, as a writer, then it's by putting words on the page that you find out which are the words you really need, and which you don't. You just have to remember, when revising, that you need to dust down each sentence to see which ones are really earning their keep.

Leaving in the scaffolding. This is a slightly different matter

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Of course, this week’s post is inspired by the whole NaNoWriMo phenomenon – God, as though we haven’t got enough reasons to hate November already!

For anyone who hasn’t come across this yet, the link is here:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/about/whatisnano

Billed as a ‘fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing’, the idea is that you start writing on 1st November, with the aim of writing a 50,000 word novel (or I suppose 50,000 worth of a longer one) and finish by midnight on 30th November...

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Once upon a time there was a Tortoise. Her name was Ms Plotter (Beatrix, if you were on first name terms with her, but that took a loooong while) and she lived in a carefully constructed box at the bottom of the garden. Ms Plotter had many fine qualities: she was steady as a rock, methodical and tenacious. Somewhat shy and retiring, but hey, who's perfect? Ms Plotter minded her own business, which happened to be the Writing of a Novel entitled Slow. Every few years she would add another chapter to her oeuvre. This chapter perfectly echoed the stepsheet made of colour-co-ordinated index cards that she had created before writing a single word. She would then spend several months refining and editing said chapter until it was perfect. All this made her very happy.



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Why I never want to hear back from the agent who has my novel.

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‘Right,’ said my editor, ‘This time round, how about planning a fairly detailed skeleton of the book before you start writing? That way,’ she added sweetly, ‘we can avoid any complications or snags with the plot right at the start.’


She made it sound so reasonable. ‘Okay,’ I replied in a strangled voice, ‘I’ll certainly give it a go.’ And then I rhythmically banged my head on the wall for several minutes, keening a little at the same time.

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MOVING POINT OF VIEW: how to do it

If you give your narrator access to more than one consciousness, and/or to a "god's-eye" point of view, then at some point you have to think about moving between them. This is where so many writers trip up, and I assume why so many of the more narrow-minded teachers and editors tell you not to do it. But it's not complicated, and it's not difficult to get right.

What usually goes wrong is that the narrative is fairly deep in Ben's point of view as he sits sulking in the corner, scorning his horrible family in detail and wondering if the dog has found his stash of weed under the sitting room carpet. But the writer then realises that some bits of plot need to be caught up with, and "head-hops" out, to tell us what Aunty Mary thinks of Ben's Motorhead tee-shirt, or that Uncle Joe's having a heart attack in the kitchen. The writer then drops us straight back into Ben's ruminations. At the best it just means we feel a bit lost, as the connection we felt with Ben is broken, but then we have to pick it up agin. Feeling a bit lost, with no connections, makes the world and the characters less vivid... and a reader who doesn't feel the world is vivid is likely not to bother to pick the book up again. At the worst we don't know what's going on.

The other thing that goes wrong is that the writer just hops us from head to head, sentence after sentence, so the reader has no special emotional involvement with any one character.

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There was relatively little information about Degas at the RA, and, for some visitors, too few of his paintings. He seems, going by the evidence, to have been not so much a stage-door Johnny as a backstage Peeping Tom with an eye for young girls in unusual poses. The emphasis in this exhibition was on early photography and its ability to capture movement, a quality that was to prove so useful to painters

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See This Itch of Writing for links to the other three parts of this four-part series

EXTERNAL NARRATORS

A narrator who isn't a character in the story will tell everything in third person, because as an "I" they're not present in the events. Evelyn was thinking about seducing Alex, while on the other side of town Joanna was planning to seduce Evelyn. But, of course, it's up to the storyteller - you - which consciousnesses you get the narrator to lead the reader inside. And it's up to you whether the narrator can tell things that no character in the story knows.

And, of course, that also means that the narration may not enter any individual consciousnesses. This objective point of view is sometimes (and perhaps more usefully) called dramatic point of view. 'Dramatic', that is, in the sense that it tells nothing that the audience of a play couldn't see: dialogue, setting, and physical action. We're told nothing of what characters think or feel: nothing of the inside of their heads or bodies. Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants" is a classic example, although as that Jauss article points out, he twice breaks the "rule" of objectivity, to immensely powerful effect. That effect is partly the result of what John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes as the "savage sparsity" of this kind of narrative.

If the narrator does give us access to individual characters' thoughts and perceptions of what's going on - shows us the world through characters' eyes and minds, and perhaps with their voices colouring the narrative - then it's called subjective point of view. That's much the most common kind of narrative, because the normal project of fiction in our culture is to admit us to characters' minds and feelings until we're convinced by them: until we feel that these characters-in-action are real.

So, assuming you do want your narrative to take on at least one subjective point of view, how many might you, the storyteller, choose to let the narrator narrate from?

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This is Part Two of a four part post. Part One: the basics is here.

INTERNAL NARRATORS (i): The character as narrator

If your narrator is internal, a character-narrator, then the question of point of view is usually assumed to be simple. A character who is inside the story tells their story in first person, because "I" was there. So Andy narrates: I saw John with the stolen brooch in his hand - I guess he stole it, but I don't blame him. His baby was crying in the next room, so he must have stolen it to buy milk. I frowned, because I didn't think I could bring myself to report him. And generally speaking the narrative will take on at least some flavour of Andy's voice, because voice is the combination of what is said, and how it's said - and here Andy's character will shape that.

A character-narrator such as Andy, it's usually said, is limited to narrating what he can perceive, and what he knows: his consciousness is the lens through which we're granted access to the scene, and it's our first tool in understanding it.

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