John Dean – Crime Writer

Best-selling crime writer John Dean has considered the challenges in writing Point of View in his latest article to help aspiring writers.

You can read it here or drop into the Handy Hints sections of this website which has many such pieces. This article has also been added to Handy Hints – Characters where it joins many more tips on creating and developing characters.

How spiders can help writers to create compelling characters

One of the important elements of writing is Point of View (you may see it referred to as POV), which gives the reader a sense of what characters are thinking.

There are three ways of describing a character’s POV, one of which is through what the character says and does. If a character shudders when they see a spider you know what they think of spiders.

The second way is to enable characters to cast light on another character’s POV; if a character tells you that the person they were with shuddered when they saw a spider you know what they think about spiders.

The third way is by far the most contentious, namely taking the reader into the character’s head to eavesdrop on their thoughts.

Why contentious? Because there is the danger that the author overdoes it, that nothing is happening while we are in the character’s thoughts.

How do you avoid the danger? Yes, by all means have the character thinking that they do not like spiders, but three or four sentences should do it unless you have a brilliantly compelling scene describing why the character hates spiders eg locked in a room with a lot of them when they were a child.

Whatever you do, use only the amount of information that is required then return quickly to the story itself.

Crime fiction fans have become increasingly intolerant of anything that takes them away from the story (and single it out in reviews on the likes of Amazon) so you can bet your last dollar that they won’t let the author get away with pages and pages of a reader musing about spiders – do that and you will be able to hear the reader yelling ‘get on with it!’

One final point. Aspiring writers sometimes ask if it is OK to jump into different characters’ heads – the answer is yes but readers will often become irritated if the author overdoes it and is bounced from head to head so if you have to do it, do it only when necessary and make it clear that you are dropping into a character’s thoughts with a new paragraph.

Picture used courtesy of Pixabay