Welcome to my first guest blog for Love is an exploding cigar. At first I thought I'd rant about one of the realities of publishing, but then I decided to share something with you I hope you'll find more practical in your own writing and more insightful for your reading. Be my guest....

With publishing’s continuing emphasis on novels that are more character driven than plot driven, selecting an effective point of view (POV) is one of the writer's most important decisions. Each offers a different advantage—and comes with its own disadvantages. The following may help you evaluate your choices and avoid the POV problems that sabotage most submissions.

FIRST-PERSON

Let’s suppose your story is told from your protagonist’s first-person POV. You write: I parked at the branch office and did a quick check in my rearview mirror: short red hair, green eyes, freckles—

Oops! The reflection-in-the-mirror self-description is a cliché typical of the average writer. More imaginative alternatives follow. Meanwhile, back at the branch. . . .

Before I could knock on the manager’s door it flew open, and I found myself face-to-face with a man who glared at me, wanting me to get lost.

Whoa! A first-person narrator cannot know what others want — or think or feel. She knows only what she wants, thinks, and feels with her own five senses. It's up to the writer to capture the objective data that leads readers to their own subjective interpretation.

Here’s a revision incorporating three of those five senses, which lead to an informed conclusion: He glared at me (sight), poked me sharply on the shoulder (touch), and growled (sound), “Get out of my way.”

Okay, let’s try this once more. The front of his tee-shirt read “Builders do it with . . .” and the back bore the words—

No, no! When two people come face to face for the first time, Ms. First Person cannot see what’s on the other person’s back. Or what’s behind her unless she’s gifted with a mother’s third eye, the one in the back of your mom's head.

One manuscript I edited permitted the main character to describe two women he never met having lunch in the booth behind him. Review your writing for slips like these, which pull observant readers right out of a story. One clumsy slip, slide, or shift in POV can be enough to cause a busy screener to slide a submission onto the “no” pile.

LOOK MA, NO MIRROR

If you want to include a description of your first-person narrator, you need a more original device than the amateur, clichéd reflection in a mirror or store window. In this scene from Death and Taxes, Susan Dunlap has a fresh take on a familiar source of I.D.—the driver’s license that officer Jill Smith produces for a cautious homeowner:

As she looked from my license to me, her finger moved across it from Brn (hair) to Grn (eyes) to 5-7. (I had the feeling she knew I’d stretched the truth there, but maybe that’s just the paranoia of the shortest officer in Detective Detail....)

Observe how self-deprecation works for the following self-descriptions. After all, who could pull off a flattering self-portrait without sounding insufferably conceited? Here’s a fresh take by Denise Dietz from Footprints in the Butter. In this first title of Dietz’s second mystery series, she subjects Ingrid Beaumont to a fumble at a football game.

The Broncos blitzed. The Cowboys fumbled. The Broncs recovered. I roared my approval, then performed a high-five with the fat man sitting next to me. He fumbled for my breast, I don’t know why. I’m not a ravishing beauty, quite the opposite, yet men always try to ravish me. I’ve been told I look like Bette Midler. When people tell me this, they usually stare at my bust, then, embarrassed, raise their eyes to my slightly crooked front teeth, which are frequently clenched.

Peggy Ehrhart’s first novel, Sweet Man Is Gone, features Maxx Maxwell (first name Elizabeth but she doesn’t like it). In this scene, Maxx, the leader of a blues band, has just entered a rehearsal studio:

A bunch of guys with assorted tattoos and facial piercings are perched on the folding chairs strung out along the back wall. One of them whistles at me. In my mind I’m still a skinny chick nobody’d look twice at, but I got my nose fixed before I went off to college—not that I stayed there long—and I went blond when I hooked up with my first band. And it’s amazing how a push-up bra can help you fill out a T-shirt.

Enjoy the variety of situations that authors create to facilitate their characters’ self-descriptions. For example, in Kathleen Anne Barrett’s Milwaukee Winters Can Be Murder, in the trilogy Homicide for the Holidays, Beth Hartley’s looking for a murderer causes this argument between friends:

I rolled my eyes and looked away.

“What are you going to do,” Emily said, “wrestle the guy to the ground when you catch him? You don’t even weigh enough to donate blood, for Pete’s sake. I mean, you’re even smaller than my nine-year-old niece. . . . my dog sat on you once and you couldn’t even get up, do you remember that?”

How unique is the situation that sets up your character's self-description so it seems to occur naturally?

MORE FIRST-PERSON PITFALLS

First-person POV may seem the easiest, most natural way to tell a story, but it’s not as simple as it looks. Inviting us into your character’s consciousness means playing fair with your readers, not withholding information the protagonist knows or learns in the course of the story.

However, nothing prevents you from underplaying a clue, disguising its significance, or intentionally diverting attention, as with a red herring.

Another first-person requirement is that the protagonist-as-narrator must be present in every scene. If your plot makes this impossible, you don’t want to discover that major problem three-quarters of the way through your first draft. I’ve seen too many first-person submissions that attempt to later accommodate point-of-view problems by awkwardly manipulating the plot or by having the main character hear or read about key events second-hand, after they occur off-stage. Key events need to be dramatized.

Second-hand action is weak and cancels the value of a you-are-there POV. As for plot maneuvers, anything awkward is amateur. So are observations such as A shadow crossed my face and The lines in my forehead deepened. Not possible for the narrator to see, even with your mother’s third eye.

In addition, first-person writing tends to ramble, to rely on internal thoughts when dialogue could occur, to rehash the same thoughts, and to slip from the protagonist’s voice into that of the author. (More on writing thought in a later chapter.) In first-person POV more than any other, your main character should be so interesting, quirky, and insightful that readers will want to see the world through her eyes for an entire novel.

If your fiction reveals any first-person weaknesses, fix them or use a more versatile, flexible point of view, such as third-person.

The above is adapted from Don't Sabotage Your Submission, the second edition, for writers in all genres, of my Agatha Award-winning Don't Murder Your Mystery. The rest of my POV chapter analyzes the pros and cons of all the points of view popular today.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer them here. Thank you for tuning in!