Episode 062 - Mastering Point of View with Jon McGoran
January 19, 2021
Jon McGoran discusses point of view, the pros and cons of first-, second-, and third-person point of view, and reader expectations based on considerations such as genre. He discusses the importance of narrative economy and triangulation--how one character's observations of another character can give the reader a lot of information about both the observed character and the observer. And he shares a formatting tip for helping to keep track of POV characters, and to see where POV shift occur throughout your manuscript.
Jon McGoran is the author of ten novels for adults and young adults, including the award-winning YA science fiction thrillers SPLICED, SPLINTERED and SPIKED, and the acclaimed thrillers DRIFT, DEADOUT, and DUST UP. He cohosts THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST, a podcast about writing and creativity. He is a freelance writer, developmental editor, and writing coach.
"The more I worked on <point of view>, the more I appreciated just how powerful it is. How it's really important to get it right, because if you get it wrong, you can really damage the relationship between the character and the reader, between the author and the reader, between the book and the reader. You can leave them scratching their head. You can leave the reader wondering who's thinking what, but also you can leave them with the wrong impression, and that can be devastating to the reader's understanding of what you're trying to lay down." —Jon McGoran
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Jon McGoran. Hey, Jon, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Jon: Hey, Matty. How are you? I'm very happy to be here.
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm happy to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
Jon McGoran is the author of ten novels for adults and young adults, including the award-winning YA science fiction thrillers SPLICED, SPLINTERED and SPIKED, and the acclaimed thrillers DRIFT, DEADOUT, and DUST UP. He cohosts THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST, a podcast about writing and creativity. He is a freelance writer, developmental editor, and writing coach.
[00:00:37] And I myself have benefited from Jon's expertise in that area because Jon edited an Kinnear book three, THE FALCON AND THE OWL, as well as a standalone thriller that's going to be coming out later this year called KEEPING FAITH. And today we're going to be talking with Jon about mastering point of view.
[00:00:55] Jon, I know mastering point of view is a hot topic with you, and I was wondering if we could start out talking about what was it about your own experience as a writer, as an editor, or as a reader that made point of view something that you were really interested in examining and helping others with?
[00:01:13] Jon: Yeah. My first serious, horrible experience with point of view was the first novel that I wrote, which is as yet unpublished and probably forever will be. It was just this sprawling tech thriller, four or five different plot lines and eight or nine different point of view characters, which was way too much.
[00:01:31] But I actually got a few nibbles. I got offers of representation from a couple of agents, which I ended up not taking because I was already moving on with some other stuff. But early on a friend of mine another published author, offered to read the manuscript very graciously and she said, yeah, it's really good, but the point of view is a mess. And I was like, what do you mean? And she told me, and then once I understood it, I realized that yes, there was head hopping all over the place. There were, all sorts of points of view inconsistencies. And I basically had to rewrite the entire novel just to straighten out all the point of view errors.
[00:02:08] When you do something like that, it sucks. It's really awful. But I learned a lot just by slogging through it and by really parsing each passage and figuring out where everything was. It helped me to appreciate basically how not to screw it up.
[00:02:22] But the more I worked on it, the more I appreciated just how powerful it is. How it's really important to get it right, because if you get it wrong, you can really damage the relationship between the character and the reader, between the author and the reader, between the book and the reader. You can leave them scratching their head. You can leave the reader wondering who's thinking what, and that sort of thing, but also you can leave them with the wrong impression, and that can be devastating to the reader's understanding of what you're trying to lay down.
[00:02:49] But also just how it's such an important way of getting across character and doing it seamlessly and in a way that doesn't rely on exposition. Excess exposition can be really damaging to the book. It can really bog things down. It gives your readers a great chance, a great opportunity to stop reading and maybe come back to it and maybe not. So avoiding exposition is hugely important in writing and taking full advantage of the tools that point of view gives to you can really go a long way towards helping with that, towards conveying character without telling the reader things. ...
[00:00:06] Jon: Hey, Matty. How are you? I'm very happy to be here.
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm happy to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
Jon McGoran is the author of ten novels for adults and young adults, including the award-winning YA science fiction thrillers SPLICED, SPLINTERED and SPIKED, and the acclaimed thrillers DRIFT, DEADOUT, and DUST UP. He cohosts THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST, a podcast about writing and creativity. He is a freelance writer, developmental editor, and writing coach.
[00:00:37] And I myself have benefited from Jon's expertise in that area because Jon edited an Kinnear book three, THE FALCON AND THE OWL, as well as a standalone thriller that's going to be coming out later this year called KEEPING FAITH. And today we're going to be talking with Jon about mastering point of view.
[00:00:55] Jon, I know mastering point of view is a hot topic with you, and I was wondering if we could start out talking about what was it about your own experience as a writer, as an editor, or as a reader that made point of view something that you were really interested in examining and helping others with?
[00:01:13] Jon: Yeah. My first serious, horrible experience with point of view was the first novel that I wrote, which is as yet unpublished and probably forever will be. It was just this sprawling tech thriller, four or five different plot lines and eight or nine different point of view characters, which was way too much.
[00:01:31] But I actually got a few nibbles. I got offers of representation from a couple of agents, which I ended up not taking because I was already moving on with some other stuff. But early on a friend of mine another published author, offered to read the manuscript very graciously and she said, yeah, it's really good, but the point of view is a mess. And I was like, what do you mean? And she told me, and then once I understood it, I realized that yes, there was head hopping all over the place. There were, all sorts of points of view inconsistencies. And I basically had to rewrite the entire novel just to straighten out all the point of view errors.
[00:02:08] When you do something like that, it sucks. It's really awful. But I learned a lot just by slogging through it and by really parsing each passage and figuring out where everything was. It helped me to appreciate basically how not to screw it up.
[00:02:22] But the more I worked on it, the more I appreciated just how powerful it is. How it's really important to get it right, because if you get it wrong, you can really damage the relationship between the character and the reader, between the author and the reader, between the book and the reader. You can leave them scratching their head. You can leave the reader wondering who's thinking what, and that sort of thing, but also you can leave them with the wrong impression, and that can be devastating to the reader's understanding of what you're trying to lay down.
[00:02:49] But also just how it's such an important way of getting across character and doing it seamlessly and in a way that doesn't rely on exposition. Excess exposition can be really damaging to the book. It can really bog things down. It gives your readers a great chance, a great opportunity to stop reading and maybe come back to it and maybe not. So avoiding exposition is hugely important in writing and taking full advantage of the tools that point of view gives to you can really go a long way towards helping with that, towards conveying character without telling the reader things. ...
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[00:03:23] Matty: Yep. So just to make sure that we're all on the same page about exactly what we're talking about, can you just give an overview of point of view and the different types of points of view?
[00:03:34] Jon: Sure. There's a lot of different gradations of point of view. First person is writing, "I did this," "I did that." A third person is, "he did this," "she did this," "they did that," that kind of thing, that outside, external point of view. The third person can be either very close or very distant. Close means that you're really in the character's head. You're really privy to their innermost secrets and thoughts and desires. Maybe not desires, but yeah, probably desires.
[00:04:00] And also there's omniscient, which is having a bit of a resurgence. I think it's still generally considered someone outdated, although more writers are revisiting it. But it’s kind of old fashioned having the all-knowing narrator who can go inside of a character's head and then go inside the next character's head -- you know, "Joe was thinking this and Sheila felt that." That sort of thing. I mentioned head hopping before, and that's when you slip out of one point of view and into another, without any concrete delineation or intentionality.
[00:04:31] The other point of view is second person point of view, which is pretty unusual. There are some writers who are experimenting with that. That's when the narrative is "you open the door, you walk in, you look around and you're wondering what's going on, and you do this and you do that." I find it kind of feels bossy. I was like, stop telling me what to do.
[00:04:50] Matty: It sounds like a video game.
[00:04:52] Jon: Yeah. But I have read some books, I think Chuck Wendig has explored that a bit. I might be mistaken about that, but I have read some books that use it really to pretty spectacular effect. And some of them do it in present tense, which it seems to go hand in hand. But it also lends it a kind of a temporal immediacy that I think can be really effective, especially for thrillers and things like that. Things where there's action.
[00:05:16] Matty: Are those examples that you're thinking of ones where they use the second person throughout the entire book? Wow.
[00:05:25] Jon: Wow, exactly. I would never do it.
[00:05:29] Matty: I don't think I would ever read that. I do like it when it's in little bits, but the whole book of that would be off putting, I think for me as a reader.
[00:05:39] Jon: It's a bit much, I didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I did, though. I was more skeptical before reading it than after.
[00:05:45] And then people also do hybrids where you'll have multiple points of view and one is written in first person and the rest of it in third person, that sort of thing. And that brings a lot of benefit. I have not done that. Jonathan Maberry does that a fair amount, and really well. He writes a lot of thrillers among, you know, science fiction and horror and other stuff, fantasy. But especially in thrillers, one of the things that is great to do is to meet your antagonist early in the action, so that you have both sides of the equation. And I like to write in first person. I've done that a lot and that can be really limiting, are to, it's great. Because you really get absolute unmediated access to the protagonist's mind, and you can really put the reader inside the protagonist head. But because it's all from their point of view, it's hard to show action that takes place outside of their experience.
[00:06:37] If you bring in multiple points of view and you can introduce the antagonistic point of view as well, then you can show the kind of parallel action and you can show both sides of what's going on. But by putting the protagonist in first person and giving the reader this intimate connection to the protagonist, you establish a much closer bond between the reader and the protagonist, which obviously is what you want. But you can also give the antagonist point of view and the action that goes along with that. I haven't actually done that. I haven't actually written a book with that kind of hybrid point of view structure. But it's one of the things that I would really like to do, because I think there's a lot of benefit to it.
[00:07:14] Matty: What is the term for a third person point of view story, but where the only internal view you're getting is of the protagonists. So for everybody else, it's limited.
[00:07:26] Jon: So the thing with third person is most books that are in third person point of view -- I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm going to say it anyway, I think it's true -- have multiple points of view. And that's one of the great things about third person is that you can jump around. And you have to delineate, you can't just from one paragraph to the next head hop from one character's point of view to another character's point of view. You have a chapter break or a section break or some sort of indication to the reader that there is a change coming so that the reader can adjust to the change in point of view.
[00:07:55] So basically, they all just, I don't really have that jumping around. So with a close third person, whichever the point of view character you were writing from, you have intimate access to their thoughts. And then you can jump to another character. I'm not sure if that is, is that what you're asking about?
[00:08:12] Matty: I think so. It's just that it in third person, there are then gradations of to what extent the author is just describing the main actor of that scene, their actions, and to what extent are they delving into their thoughts as well?
[00:08:26] Jon: Yeah, that's what's referred to as the closeness of the point of view. Some works are written in a distant third person where you have some access, but not a deep access, not an intimate access to the point of view character's thoughts and emotions, but you're still seeing everything through their eyes. Literally it's the point of view, so everything is observed through their sensory experience. The closer it is, the more access to emotion and thought and memory and everything you have.
[00:08:58] And I should have mentioned this earlier. There's a cinematic point of view which is also on the table. And that is where you don't have any internal access at all, basically you're just describing everything as it is. You're not privy to anybody's head. That's not done a whole lot. We were talking about this on THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST and Greg Frost pointed out that Shirley Jackson's THE LOTTERY is cinematic. That's a good illustration of that, where you do not have access to any of the character's internal dialogue or thoughts or anything. It's just a description of what one might see, and it's called cinematic because that's one of the great, limitations of cinema is that you don't have the internal dialogue that you can have in prose.
[00:09:43] And that's the challenge is to convey those things through external means. Through the actors' expressions, through the music, and how you convey mood and that sort of thing, you try to get across the characters' thoughts and feelings through these external means.
[00:09:58] Matty: Yeah, I find that for my own writing. I tend to draft in more of a cinematic mode and then occasionally I'll be dropping in something about the character's internal workings. And then in subsequent drafts, I have to even that out a little bit so it's not so jarring when you've had five pages of a cinematic view and then suddenly you hear what somebody is thinking. I think that consistency is important.
[00:10:25] Jon: Yeah, consistency is very important, and that's one of the things, you have to establish your ground rules and then you have to follow them. And that's one of the things that's really crucial for point of view, because as the writer, if you're not really aware of and cognizant of the point of view structure that you're writing in, you're much more likely to violate it. That's where the head hopping comes in. I just read the THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel and she hops around a bit. And she kind of lays that out as a ground rule.
[00:10:51] It's funny. I had a conversation with my agent a couple of years back, we were talking about point of view because I am kind of fascinated by it, and she handles a lot of genre authors. She also handles a lot of literary authors, and she's also very involved in editorial, which is great. I'm very lucky in that regard. She says that when she's editing her genre authors' work, she'll cross something out and say "You're head hopping, fix this." And with her literary authors, she says, "Well, you seem to be head hopping. You might not want to do that," because they're given a little more leeway in that regard.
[00:11:23] And that's great. That's all well and good. I do feel, even if you're allowed to do it, if you're intentionally violating it for whatever reason, if you have a good reason, okay, sure. But I think most of the time that people do violate it or slip out of one point of view structure to another, I think it's usually unintentional and unknown.
[00:11:42] And I'll tell you, I see critically acclaimed bestsellers from well-established authors with massive point of view errors. So you might not want to listen too much to what I'm saying. But I do think that still it hurts the work. I think it's to the detriment of the work.
[00:11:57] Matty: They can probably get away with it because they're bestselling authors. They probably didn't become bestselling authors because they were head hopping.
[00:12:03] Jon: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that is true.
[00:12:05] Matty: So we had talked a little bit about how the omniscient view is a little bit old fashioned, but it's maybe coming back into some use in certain things. And you had said that first person is very effective for thrillers because it's more engaging and immediate. Are there any other guidelines about what's current and what the expectations are regarding genre as far as point of view goes?
[00:12:29] Jon: That's an interesting question. I think the conventional wisdom is still the conventional wisdom and, yes, some people are experimenting, working in omniscient and bringing that back and trying to make it feel more contemporary. And some people are experimenting, as we said, with second person and that sort of thing, but mostly it's first person and third person and if it's third person, it's multiple third person. As I said, there are people who are experimenting with alternating first and third. so I don't think that, apart from a certain openness to experimentation a little bit more than might've been a while ago, I think it's still people have expectations of certain things.
[00:13:06] So a couple of things that I'll say about second person, I have edited some work in second person and one of the things that's really tricky about these less usual structures is that the writer's slipping out of them constantly. It's hard to maintain because it's just kind of awkward. It really is, it's very limiting and one of the things I will say is, if you're in the position where you're about to embark on a new work, you want to think very carefully about what point of view structure you're going to adopt because they do have pros and cons.
[00:13:38] As you said, first person is very immediate with action, but it's really very intimate. If you want to write in a very voicey style, if the character's voice is important to you, then having it unmediated like that I think is a huge boon, which is why I have chosen to do it for both of my trilogies. So six of my 10 books are in first person. And one of the reasons why I chose that was because I wanted the protagonist voice to be very prominent for different reasons. But for DRIFT, DUST UP, and DEAD OUT, the protagonist had this sense of humor that kind of imbued the book with a certain sense of humor.
[00:14:19] And in my mind, the difference between first person and third person is the difference between hearing a joke and being told about a joke. Few things are less funny than having a joke explained to you. So being able to have the reader privy to the protagonist's internal snark really goes a long way towards allowing you to get that voice across and to really let the reader really get to know the character in an intimate way.
[00:14:44] But again, then you have these huge limitations of you cannot show the action that's outside of that character's experience, which really can undermine suspense. One of the hallmarks of suspense is when you let the reader know something's going to happen, but you don't let the protagonist know something's going to happen. And the protagonist is rushing headlong into the situation that the reader knows is fraught with peril. It's very hard to do that, it's very hard to telegraph to the reader things that you don't want the protagonist to know. There are ways to do it. It's tricky, but you can do it, but if you do it too much, then all of a sudden, your protagonist starts to look stupid, which maybe you want, but generally you don't.
[00:15:23] Matty: As you were talking about the advantages of getting to know the character intimately through first person, I started thinking, oh man, I wish I had done the Ann Kinnear stories in first person because, not so much anymore but with the first one, one of the pieces of input I got was that people wished they knew Ann better. And I thought, oh first person would have solved that problem, but it totally would have wrecked the storyline because as you're saying it's a suspense storyline.
[00:15:51] Jon: But the flip side of that is that if it's in first person and all of it is in first person, then you never get an exterior view of the protagonist. And that can be really important too. One of my rules of character, is, you never have a character do something that a character wouldn't do. And I think one of the things that a lot of beginning writers do, whether it's third person or first person, but from a certain character's point of view, they start talking about that character's appearance.
[00:16:18] And if your character is this gruff, grizzled police veteran and he walks into a room and he's disgusted with what's going on and he has crystal blue eyes and steely gray hair. What kind of grizzled police veteran in the middle of this internal rant starts thinking about his eye color and his hair color. It just doesn't happen.
[00:16:37] So in order to get these things across, you have to give the character a reason to think of them. And it's hard to do so if you're writing a first person. In a lot of books that are written first person, at some point early on, they have the character looking in a mirror and appraising the lines and giving them an excuse to describe themselves. It's fine. We all do it. But you're putting the character in a certain position and you're making them evaluate their own appearance.
[00:17:07] I think it's much more organic and much more naturalistic to have another character observe them. And to do so in a way that's not filtered through the observed character's prejudices, their predispositions, and their history and tendencies or whatever. So you do give up a lot in first person, unless you do this hybrid structure where you flip back and forth and have first person protagonist, third person antagonist, or other character, you lose the ability to paint your protagonists with an external brush, which is a big consideration.
[00:17:37] Matty: You had mentioned earlier about the number of points of view and said that in the first novel that you wrote, you had many, many points of view, and I'm assuming that as you worked with your agent or an editor, that number came down. So using that as an example, can you describe what problems that was causing to have so many points of view characters, and then how the book changed as you address that?
[00:18:04] Jon: Yeah. I think there's a number of things to consider in this. And apart from anything else, you can do anything, there are no rules. One ironclad rule of writing is, never believe it when anybody says "always" about anything. Because it's true, there are no rules. But some things are going to be harder for the reader to comprehend or to appeal to their taste. Chief among those writers are agents and editors that you're trying to appeal to, that you're trying to get to represent you, that you're trying to get to publish you.
[00:18:36] And you can have as many point of view characters as you want. I'm not going to say it's wrong. But the further that you go afield, the less likely you're going to find somebody willing to represent you or publish you. It's a challenge. It's going to be more of a challenge to them to think if they can sell it or if they can get readers to buy it.
[00:18:55] That said, though, I hate it when authors say character's everything, because nothing's everything. If anything was everything, there wouldn't be anything else. And it just annoys me when they say, because it's so precious, but character is really important. And the reader's relationship with the character, it really is magical, what you are trying to do as an author. And what readers are trying to do as readers is, you are trying to make it possible for them to inhabit the mind of a made-up character and to really transport themselves, put themselves into their shoes and into their lives and into their universe.
[00:19:27] And that's a pretty cool trick, but it's not easy, it's a challenge, and it's worth it because it's such an amazing thing. The more characters you ask the reader to inhabit, the less intimate of a connection they're going to have with any of them. If you have one point of view character, if your book is written in first person and the entire thing is from that character's point of view, if you're doing your job well, then the reader is going to really identify with that character. When they're reading that book and they're reading that story, they're going to be in that character's head, in that character's life. They're going to be forgetting about their day-to-day existence while they're reading and focusing on this.
[00:20:05] And if you have two point of view characters, you're asking the reader to hop out of one and hop into the other and hop back and hop back and that's fine, they can do that, but it’s a little bit less powerful of a relationship. But with each point of view character that you add, you're asking the reader to readjust and readjust.
[00:20:25] And every time they make that switch, they have to make all these subtle adjustments of what their expectations are. What's their backstory? What are they bringing to this point of view from the previous sections of that point of view? And with each character that you add, you're making it that much difficult. Just by simple math, the more point of view characters that you're presenting in your work, the less time the reader is going to spending in any one of them.
[00:20:53] So now not only do you have the fact that they're constantly readjusting, but they're not going to have a chance to get as settled because they're not going to spend as long in it. If you start to really have a lot, if you get more than -- and there are no rules, as I said, but I think that four is a lot -- and if you go more than four, you're running into some of those things. And maybe it's worth it. And maybe you as a writer have such skill that you can so economically transport the reader into each of these points of view that it's a non-issue. And if that's the case, then kudos, that's great.
[00:21:24] But you raise the risk of tiring the reader, but also of confusing the reader. And that is the thing that can really be the death knell. If you're being intentional about how you're creating these characters and what they do in the plot, what role they have, what actions they do, what backstory, what emotional, psychological nuances they bring, if you're doing that well, then all of these characters are going to be quite distinct, no matter how many of them there are. And if the reader starts to conflate characters or confuse characters, then that can be just devastating to the reader's understanding of those characters, obviously.
[00:22:01] And I think that's one of the reasons that clarity always has to trump style in fiction. When you have these long stretches of unattributed dialogue, stylistically, that's great. And there are ways you can pull that off. But if you're not pulling it off, the risk is that your reader's going to get mixed up with the back and forth and start ascribing dialogue to the wrong character. And that can just have devastating implications to the reader's understanding of what's going on.
[00:22:28] Matty: When you were making the decisions about whittling down the number of point of view characters, what was driving those decisions? Was it how central the character was to the scene or did you look across the whole story and say, Oh, I can tell this whole story with three points of view? I think it would be hard once you've written the book and you probably were bought into knowing each of those characters at that level, and then having to pull back from some of them.
[00:22:54] Jon: Yeah. It hurt a lot. This was quite a long time ago, but my process, as I recall, was that there were, I guess, three characters that were main characters. Their points of view were essential. And not just as characters, but structurally. Enough action took place in each of their points of view that took place out of the experience of the other point of view characters that structurally they had to be the point of view characters.
[00:23:24] So then what I did was looking at the remaining point of view characters, seeing which ones could be taken out of their point of view. And structurally, logically, if this character had five point of view sections, and two of them were in the presence of this other point of view character, and two of them were in the presence of this second point of view character, and then there was one that I just had to either reconceptualize or rewrite or get rid of or whatever, address in some other way, that's what I had to do.
[00:23:58] Obviously, we all know this, there are ways to convey what's going on inside a character's head without being in their point of view. You use their facial expressions; you use the other characters' perceptions of them. You can do that. One point of view character can think the other character seems distraught or seem sad. Obviously, we want to do it with a little more finesse than that. But using your point of view character's perception to imbue meaning to a non-point of view character's expressions or demeanor or whatever can be a very economical way to get that across. You have to do it in a way that it's plausible that the point of view character would be able to perceive these things.
[00:24:38] And one of the things that I do recall, thinking about it now, is that it did end up rearranging how the different characters fit in. There were some characters who became more essential, more important to the narrative because I had realized that structurally, they had to maintain their point of view. And instead of being one of eight point of view characters, now there are one of four point of view characters. Just mathematically you're signaling to the reader, this is a more important character now. So you have to write them that way, reappraise them and say, Oh, okay this is now a secondary character, not a tertiary character. I need to give them enough weight that that placement is justified.
[00:25:24] Matty: I've had a couple of episodes recently on author newsletters -- Episode 058 was AUTHOR NEWSLETTERS with Lee Savino and Episode 059 was AUTHOR NEWLSETTER SWAPS with Evan Gow. And one of the things we talked about was what can you offer readers to entice them to sign up for your newsletter. And I think that if an author finds themselves in that position where they've written something with lots of different point of view characters, and now have to change that to whittle down the number, a really cool offering would be those original point of view chapters, Offer a reader, Oh, would you be interested in reading this chapter from this other character's point of view? Sign up for my newsletter and you can get that extra. And I always find that having another purpose for those kinds of things makes it a little less painful.
[00:26:10] Jon: Yeah, you're right. It's like they say you have to kill your darlings sometimes. And I always have a cut file, whenever I'm editing something, so I don't just delete it. I cut it and paste it into another document. I like to say, since you're not actually getting rid of it, you're just putting it in this other file, you don't have to kill your darlings. You just have to lock them in the basement.
[00:26:29] An exercise that I know some writers do in order to get into the head of all of their characters is as part of their preparation they will write some sort of passage from each character's point of view, just as an exercise to get to know that character's voice. Because the thing is, every character, whether you're writing it or not, every character has a point of view. All the stuff that you have to keep in mind when you're writing a point of view character, all your non-point of view characters have that. They have backstory, they have psychology, they have history, they have prejudices and fears and all those things. And really, you should be aware of them whether they're point of view characters or not. So I can totally see the benefit of writing it, but those things as well, that kind of auxiliary content that you could give away as a little bonus. That's a great idea.
[00:27:20] Matty: I was looking at over the notes. I had taken one of your point of view seminars many years ago, and you had been kind enough to send me your most recent notes, and I want it to read a part in a section called economy of point of view / triangulation, and then ask you to comment on what you mean by this and how this illustrates it. So here's the sample passage that you provided.
[00:27:45] "Jimmy was staring at them Kardashian bobbleheads like they was ..." Her eyes closed and a crease bisected her vast forehead, as she struggled to find the words. "Like they was magical treasure or something."
[00:27:56] Comment on what you mean by triangulation and how that illustrates that, and also the idea of economy of narrative.
[00:28:05] Jon: Yeah. I'll take economy of narrative first. There was a time I actually, when I first thought of it, I thought, Oh, I thought of this, but of course other people have thought of this.
[00:28:11] Matty: It doesn't mean you didn't think of it too.
[00:28:14] Jon: I did think of it too. But you know, one of the challenges as an author, one of the things that readers want is information. They want information about the characters. A lot of times, especially if you're writing a lot of world-building, whether it's historical fiction or science fiction or fantasy or whatever, they want to know about the world that it's in. But definitely they want to know a lot about the character. A lot of genres, they want to know about the world that is being built. But exposition is a death knell to narrative.
[00:28:45] In a lot of these genres in historical fiction and in some science fiction and in various genres, some readers want that, and some writers deliver it to them. They want lots and lots of description. That's one thing. But a lot of exposition, stepping out of the story and giving backstory or giving this really kind of minute descriptions and background on certain technologies or whatever, and that's fine.
[00:29:06] But even then, I think that you as the writer wants to convey to the reader as much information as possible. And the challenge is to do it in a way that the reader doesn't know it has been done. You want to put information into their head without them knowing that you're giving them information so that their experiences that they're enjoying a story, a narrative, and they don't really know that they're being given the information that they need to know to understand the rest of it.
[00:29:38] I talk a lot in classes and stuff about exposition and how to avoid that, and that's an important part of it. So economy in getting information into the reader's head I think is really important. My style does tend to be fairly lean. But even among writers who spend a lot of time with description of setting or clothing or whatever, which some readers really enjoy, I think they also face the challenge of when they're describing a character's costume or wardrobe, they're painting a picture, but they're also doing it in a way that tells reams and reams of information about character and about backstory there. If they're doing it well, they're giving you two or three or four different layers of information when they're describing these visual things.
[00:30:27] So with that passage that you just read, what I want to get across is that sometimes through point of view, with a single passage of dialogue or a single paragraph, you can convey information about three different characters. So in the passage that you just read, we learned about Jimmy. "Jimmy was staring at them Kardashians bobbleheads like they was ..." Her eyes closed and a crease bisected her vast forehead as she struggled to find the words. "Like they were magical treasures or something."
[00:30:56] So we learned about Jimmy, right? Because Jimmy is being talked about. So we learned that Jimmy is the type of person who might think that Kardashian bobbleheads are on a par with magical treasures. And in my mind that says a lot about Jimmy. But we also learned that the speaker is the kind of person who would say "them" instead of "they" or "those" and "they was" instead of "they were," that the way they speak tells you a lot about character. And that she might have to concentrate to get her words, this "crease bisected her forehead."
[00:31:23] But then we also learn about the point of view character, which is not her, which is the person who is observing her. So she's talking about one character. The point of view character is observing her. We learn about the first character, Jimmy, because he's being talked about. We learn about the second character, by the way she's speaking. And we learned about the third character by the way that this character is observing that character. Probably looks down on both of these characters, right? He probably feels a little snobbish over them, a little superior. He observes disdainfully " crease bisected her vast forehead. She struggled to find the words." So in that one little passage of dialogue, we've gotten really important insights into three different characters.
[00:32:05] And I think that's really powerful. And just to kind of illustrate how the economy of point of view well done, that if everything is being observed through the point of view character's eyes, which it should be, then everything that the reader is learning, whether, they're learning about the car that's driving down the street or they're learning about whatever it is that the point of view character is experiencing, they're getting that, but they're also learning more and more about the point of view character through the way that these things were observed, through the context that they're observed, through the backstory that is brought to them and that sort of thing.
[00:32:41] Matty: Yeah. I love that example that is packing a lot of information into a very short amount of text. I wanted to wrap up with one of the tips you had offered, which was, when writing a draft, use different colors for each point of view. Can you elaborate on what that means and what the writer would be getting out of that?
[00:33:00] Jon: Yeah. I think that, you, especially if you're not writing in a particularly close point of view, you can lose track of whose point of view you're in. I advise the writers that I work with that whatever you change point of view, unless you have a compelling reason not to, I think it's important to reestablish point of view as quickly as possible. Let the reader know as soon as possible and ideally in a subtle way, but in a way that they'll pick up on let them know whose point of view they're in because it's important for them to know what point of view they're in.
[00:33:30] But for the writer, it's important as well, even more so, I guess and especially, once you start, once you go into revision and maybe you're hopping around through a manuscript and you're like, Oh, if I make this change on page 257, I have to go back and make this page on one 80 and blah, blah, blah.
[00:33:45] It can be hard to know at a glance what point of view you're in. And a lot of times these point of view errors, the first draft may have been impeccable, but then when you go in and you start rewriting and revising and editing, errors can creep in. If you have three or four point of view characters, if you use a different color font in each of those points of view, then you know at a glance wherever you are, whatever you're doing, immediately what point of view you're in. And it gives you this visual cue to not only assume the right backstory and the right history and that sort of thing, but to assume the right voice, which is really important.
[00:34:24] And the other thing, and I've done this for a number I'm trying to think of what else maybe it was setting, but anything where you're worried about structural consistency. If you're writing a novel and you've got two point of view characters, and the first two thirds of the book are three quarters character A and one quarter character B. And then the end of it is they're flipped, that might feel odd. That might be what you want to do for whatever reason. And if you set it up and you're intentional about it, that might achieve what you're trying to achieve. But you don't want to do it unintentionally. You don't want to just do it.
[00:35:00] So one of the things that's really handy with the color-coding thing, in Word, and I imagine whatever software you're using, you can zoom out a great extent. And one of the things that I advise the writers that I work with to do is to color code the point of view characters, but then you can also pull out, so like a 10% zoom, and you can really see your entire story there in thumbnails and you can see, Oh, you know what, there's too much green here. And there's a huge stretch with no brown. I know this character is being unrepresented. Again if you have a good reason to do that, if you're doing it intentionally, then that's great. That's fine. There's all sorts of different structures that can work. But if you're not being intentional and if it's just an oversight, then you've neglected that point of view character. The reader is going to start to forget who they are. It's going to be jarring when you reintroduce them, maybe.
[00:35:51] Say you're doing this thing with the alternating first and third protagonist / antagonist, you might start out having five or six chapters of the protagonist before you have a single chapter, short snippet of the antagonist. You might want to do it that as the narrative progresses, You get more and more of those hits of the antagonist and they're closer and closer together, to give the sense of building action and rising tension, and that sort of thing. You don't want to just say, one of these, one of those, one of these, one of those, one of these, one of those. There's all sorts of different structures, but it's really handy, no matter what structure you're trying to do, it's really handy to be able to very easily and quickly visualize it by having the color coding by zooming out.
[00:36:34] Matty: And if you run out of Microsoft Word text colors, it might be a clue that you've gone overboard with number of points of view characters.
[00:36:40] Jon: Yes, exactly.
[00:36:42] Matty: Well, Jon, this has been so helpful. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your books, and your work online.
[00:36:49] Jon: Sure. As you said at the beginning, I co-host THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST, which is a podcast on writing and creativity and it's available on all the platforms, wherever podcasts are found. My website is JonMcGoran.com. And that's where I am on all the social media. Look me up on social media, visit me online.
[00:37:09] My most recent trilogy. it was the near future YA science fiction trilogy SPLICED, SPLINTERED, and SPIKED, which is about this near future where genetic engineering technology has matured to the point where it's available in the street as a form of body modification. And these young people who call themselves chimeras alter themselves in different ways with splices of animal DNA. So if you go to JonMcGoran.com, if you click on this splice yourself link, you can upload a picture of yourself, choose what animal you want to be spliced with, and see what you'd look like. Part polar bear or part snow leopard, or house cat or whatever. It's hysterically funny. It's a hoot.
[00:37:46] Matty: It is. I did that and I had a lot of fun with that. So I can recommend that as a good way to kill half an hour for people to play around with that. Great. Thank you so much, Jon.
[00:37:56] Jon: All right. Always a pleasure.
[00:03:34] Jon: Sure. There's a lot of different gradations of point of view. First person is writing, "I did this," "I did that." A third person is, "he did this," "she did this," "they did that," that kind of thing, that outside, external point of view. The third person can be either very close or very distant. Close means that you're really in the character's head. You're really privy to their innermost secrets and thoughts and desires. Maybe not desires, but yeah, probably desires.
[00:04:00] And also there's omniscient, which is having a bit of a resurgence. I think it's still generally considered someone outdated, although more writers are revisiting it. But it’s kind of old fashioned having the all-knowing narrator who can go inside of a character's head and then go inside the next character's head -- you know, "Joe was thinking this and Sheila felt that." That sort of thing. I mentioned head hopping before, and that's when you slip out of one point of view and into another, without any concrete delineation or intentionality.
[00:04:31] The other point of view is second person point of view, which is pretty unusual. There are some writers who are experimenting with that. That's when the narrative is "you open the door, you walk in, you look around and you're wondering what's going on, and you do this and you do that." I find it kind of feels bossy. I was like, stop telling me what to do.
[00:04:50] Matty: It sounds like a video game.
[00:04:52] Jon: Yeah. But I have read some books, I think Chuck Wendig has explored that a bit. I might be mistaken about that, but I have read some books that use it really to pretty spectacular effect. And some of them do it in present tense, which it seems to go hand in hand. But it also lends it a kind of a temporal immediacy that I think can be really effective, especially for thrillers and things like that. Things where there's action.
[00:05:16] Matty: Are those examples that you're thinking of ones where they use the second person throughout the entire book? Wow.
[00:05:25] Jon: Wow, exactly. I would never do it.
[00:05:29] Matty: I don't think I would ever read that. I do like it when it's in little bits, but the whole book of that would be off putting, I think for me as a reader.
[00:05:39] Jon: It's a bit much, I didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I did, though. I was more skeptical before reading it than after.
[00:05:45] And then people also do hybrids where you'll have multiple points of view and one is written in first person and the rest of it in third person, that sort of thing. And that brings a lot of benefit. I have not done that. Jonathan Maberry does that a fair amount, and really well. He writes a lot of thrillers among, you know, science fiction and horror and other stuff, fantasy. But especially in thrillers, one of the things that is great to do is to meet your antagonist early in the action, so that you have both sides of the equation. And I like to write in first person. I've done that a lot and that can be really limiting, are to, it's great. Because you really get absolute unmediated access to the protagonist's mind, and you can really put the reader inside the protagonist head. But because it's all from their point of view, it's hard to show action that takes place outside of their experience.
[00:06:37] If you bring in multiple points of view and you can introduce the antagonistic point of view as well, then you can show the kind of parallel action and you can show both sides of what's going on. But by putting the protagonist in first person and giving the reader this intimate connection to the protagonist, you establish a much closer bond between the reader and the protagonist, which obviously is what you want. But you can also give the antagonist point of view and the action that goes along with that. I haven't actually done that. I haven't actually written a book with that kind of hybrid point of view structure. But it's one of the things that I would really like to do, because I think there's a lot of benefit to it.
[00:07:14] Matty: What is the term for a third person point of view story, but where the only internal view you're getting is of the protagonists. So for everybody else, it's limited.
[00:07:26] Jon: So the thing with third person is most books that are in third person point of view -- I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm going to say it anyway, I think it's true -- have multiple points of view. And that's one of the great things about third person is that you can jump around. And you have to delineate, you can't just from one paragraph to the next head hop from one character's point of view to another character's point of view. You have a chapter break or a section break or some sort of indication to the reader that there is a change coming so that the reader can adjust to the change in point of view.
[00:07:55] So basically, they all just, I don't really have that jumping around. So with a close third person, whichever the point of view character you were writing from, you have intimate access to their thoughts. And then you can jump to another character. I'm not sure if that is, is that what you're asking about?
[00:08:12] Matty: I think so. It's just that it in third person, there are then gradations of to what extent the author is just describing the main actor of that scene, their actions, and to what extent are they delving into their thoughts as well?
[00:08:26] Jon: Yeah, that's what's referred to as the closeness of the point of view. Some works are written in a distant third person where you have some access, but not a deep access, not an intimate access to the point of view character's thoughts and emotions, but you're still seeing everything through their eyes. Literally it's the point of view, so everything is observed through their sensory experience. The closer it is, the more access to emotion and thought and memory and everything you have.
[00:08:58] And I should have mentioned this earlier. There's a cinematic point of view which is also on the table. And that is where you don't have any internal access at all, basically you're just describing everything as it is. You're not privy to anybody's head. That's not done a whole lot. We were talking about this on THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST and Greg Frost pointed out that Shirley Jackson's THE LOTTERY is cinematic. That's a good illustration of that, where you do not have access to any of the character's internal dialogue or thoughts or anything. It's just a description of what one might see, and it's called cinematic because that's one of the great, limitations of cinema is that you don't have the internal dialogue that you can have in prose.
[00:09:43] And that's the challenge is to convey those things through external means. Through the actors' expressions, through the music, and how you convey mood and that sort of thing, you try to get across the characters' thoughts and feelings through these external means.
[00:09:58] Matty: Yeah, I find that for my own writing. I tend to draft in more of a cinematic mode and then occasionally I'll be dropping in something about the character's internal workings. And then in subsequent drafts, I have to even that out a little bit so it's not so jarring when you've had five pages of a cinematic view and then suddenly you hear what somebody is thinking. I think that consistency is important.
[00:10:25] Jon: Yeah, consistency is very important, and that's one of the things, you have to establish your ground rules and then you have to follow them. And that's one of the things that's really crucial for point of view, because as the writer, if you're not really aware of and cognizant of the point of view structure that you're writing in, you're much more likely to violate it. That's where the head hopping comes in. I just read the THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel and she hops around a bit. And she kind of lays that out as a ground rule.
[00:10:51] It's funny. I had a conversation with my agent a couple of years back, we were talking about point of view because I am kind of fascinated by it, and she handles a lot of genre authors. She also handles a lot of literary authors, and she's also very involved in editorial, which is great. I'm very lucky in that regard. She says that when she's editing her genre authors' work, she'll cross something out and say "You're head hopping, fix this." And with her literary authors, she says, "Well, you seem to be head hopping. You might not want to do that," because they're given a little more leeway in that regard.
[00:11:23] And that's great. That's all well and good. I do feel, even if you're allowed to do it, if you're intentionally violating it for whatever reason, if you have a good reason, okay, sure. But I think most of the time that people do violate it or slip out of one point of view structure to another, I think it's usually unintentional and unknown.
[00:11:42] And I'll tell you, I see critically acclaimed bestsellers from well-established authors with massive point of view errors. So you might not want to listen too much to what I'm saying. But I do think that still it hurts the work. I think it's to the detriment of the work.
[00:11:57] Matty: They can probably get away with it because they're bestselling authors. They probably didn't become bestselling authors because they were head hopping.
[00:12:03] Jon: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that is true.
[00:12:05] Matty: So we had talked a little bit about how the omniscient view is a little bit old fashioned, but it's maybe coming back into some use in certain things. And you had said that first person is very effective for thrillers because it's more engaging and immediate. Are there any other guidelines about what's current and what the expectations are regarding genre as far as point of view goes?
[00:12:29] Jon: That's an interesting question. I think the conventional wisdom is still the conventional wisdom and, yes, some people are experimenting, working in omniscient and bringing that back and trying to make it feel more contemporary. And some people are experimenting, as we said, with second person and that sort of thing, but mostly it's first person and third person and if it's third person, it's multiple third person. As I said, there are people who are experimenting with alternating first and third. so I don't think that, apart from a certain openness to experimentation a little bit more than might've been a while ago, I think it's still people have expectations of certain things.
[00:13:06] So a couple of things that I'll say about second person, I have edited some work in second person and one of the things that's really tricky about these less usual structures is that the writer's slipping out of them constantly. It's hard to maintain because it's just kind of awkward. It really is, it's very limiting and one of the things I will say is, if you're in the position where you're about to embark on a new work, you want to think very carefully about what point of view structure you're going to adopt because they do have pros and cons.
[00:13:38] As you said, first person is very immediate with action, but it's really very intimate. If you want to write in a very voicey style, if the character's voice is important to you, then having it unmediated like that I think is a huge boon, which is why I have chosen to do it for both of my trilogies. So six of my 10 books are in first person. And one of the reasons why I chose that was because I wanted the protagonist voice to be very prominent for different reasons. But for DRIFT, DUST UP, and DEAD OUT, the protagonist had this sense of humor that kind of imbued the book with a certain sense of humor.
[00:14:19] And in my mind, the difference between first person and third person is the difference between hearing a joke and being told about a joke. Few things are less funny than having a joke explained to you. So being able to have the reader privy to the protagonist's internal snark really goes a long way towards allowing you to get that voice across and to really let the reader really get to know the character in an intimate way.
[00:14:44] But again, then you have these huge limitations of you cannot show the action that's outside of that character's experience, which really can undermine suspense. One of the hallmarks of suspense is when you let the reader know something's going to happen, but you don't let the protagonist know something's going to happen. And the protagonist is rushing headlong into the situation that the reader knows is fraught with peril. It's very hard to do that, it's very hard to telegraph to the reader things that you don't want the protagonist to know. There are ways to do it. It's tricky, but you can do it, but if you do it too much, then all of a sudden, your protagonist starts to look stupid, which maybe you want, but generally you don't.
[00:15:23] Matty: As you were talking about the advantages of getting to know the character intimately through first person, I started thinking, oh man, I wish I had done the Ann Kinnear stories in first person because, not so much anymore but with the first one, one of the pieces of input I got was that people wished they knew Ann better. And I thought, oh first person would have solved that problem, but it totally would have wrecked the storyline because as you're saying it's a suspense storyline.
[00:15:51] Jon: But the flip side of that is that if it's in first person and all of it is in first person, then you never get an exterior view of the protagonist. And that can be really important too. One of my rules of character, is, you never have a character do something that a character wouldn't do. And I think one of the things that a lot of beginning writers do, whether it's third person or first person, but from a certain character's point of view, they start talking about that character's appearance.
[00:16:18] And if your character is this gruff, grizzled police veteran and he walks into a room and he's disgusted with what's going on and he has crystal blue eyes and steely gray hair. What kind of grizzled police veteran in the middle of this internal rant starts thinking about his eye color and his hair color. It just doesn't happen.
[00:16:37] So in order to get these things across, you have to give the character a reason to think of them. And it's hard to do so if you're writing a first person. In a lot of books that are written first person, at some point early on, they have the character looking in a mirror and appraising the lines and giving them an excuse to describe themselves. It's fine. We all do it. But you're putting the character in a certain position and you're making them evaluate their own appearance.
[00:17:07] I think it's much more organic and much more naturalistic to have another character observe them. And to do so in a way that's not filtered through the observed character's prejudices, their predispositions, and their history and tendencies or whatever. So you do give up a lot in first person, unless you do this hybrid structure where you flip back and forth and have first person protagonist, third person antagonist, or other character, you lose the ability to paint your protagonists with an external brush, which is a big consideration.
[00:17:37] Matty: You had mentioned earlier about the number of points of view and said that in the first novel that you wrote, you had many, many points of view, and I'm assuming that as you worked with your agent or an editor, that number came down. So using that as an example, can you describe what problems that was causing to have so many points of view characters, and then how the book changed as you address that?
[00:18:04] Jon: Yeah. I think there's a number of things to consider in this. And apart from anything else, you can do anything, there are no rules. One ironclad rule of writing is, never believe it when anybody says "always" about anything. Because it's true, there are no rules. But some things are going to be harder for the reader to comprehend or to appeal to their taste. Chief among those writers are agents and editors that you're trying to appeal to, that you're trying to get to represent you, that you're trying to get to publish you.
[00:18:36] And you can have as many point of view characters as you want. I'm not going to say it's wrong. But the further that you go afield, the less likely you're going to find somebody willing to represent you or publish you. It's a challenge. It's going to be more of a challenge to them to think if they can sell it or if they can get readers to buy it.
[00:18:55] That said, though, I hate it when authors say character's everything, because nothing's everything. If anything was everything, there wouldn't be anything else. And it just annoys me when they say, because it's so precious, but character is really important. And the reader's relationship with the character, it really is magical, what you are trying to do as an author. And what readers are trying to do as readers is, you are trying to make it possible for them to inhabit the mind of a made-up character and to really transport themselves, put themselves into their shoes and into their lives and into their universe.
[00:19:27] And that's a pretty cool trick, but it's not easy, it's a challenge, and it's worth it because it's such an amazing thing. The more characters you ask the reader to inhabit, the less intimate of a connection they're going to have with any of them. If you have one point of view character, if your book is written in first person and the entire thing is from that character's point of view, if you're doing your job well, then the reader is going to really identify with that character. When they're reading that book and they're reading that story, they're going to be in that character's head, in that character's life. They're going to be forgetting about their day-to-day existence while they're reading and focusing on this.
[00:20:05] And if you have two point of view characters, you're asking the reader to hop out of one and hop into the other and hop back and hop back and that's fine, they can do that, but it’s a little bit less powerful of a relationship. But with each point of view character that you add, you're asking the reader to readjust and readjust.
[00:20:25] And every time they make that switch, they have to make all these subtle adjustments of what their expectations are. What's their backstory? What are they bringing to this point of view from the previous sections of that point of view? And with each character that you add, you're making it that much difficult. Just by simple math, the more point of view characters that you're presenting in your work, the less time the reader is going to spending in any one of them.
[00:20:53] So now not only do you have the fact that they're constantly readjusting, but they're not going to have a chance to get as settled because they're not going to spend as long in it. If you start to really have a lot, if you get more than -- and there are no rules, as I said, but I think that four is a lot -- and if you go more than four, you're running into some of those things. And maybe it's worth it. And maybe you as a writer have such skill that you can so economically transport the reader into each of these points of view that it's a non-issue. And if that's the case, then kudos, that's great.
[00:21:24] But you raise the risk of tiring the reader, but also of confusing the reader. And that is the thing that can really be the death knell. If you're being intentional about how you're creating these characters and what they do in the plot, what role they have, what actions they do, what backstory, what emotional, psychological nuances they bring, if you're doing that well, then all of these characters are going to be quite distinct, no matter how many of them there are. And if the reader starts to conflate characters or confuse characters, then that can be just devastating to the reader's understanding of those characters, obviously.
[00:22:01] And I think that's one of the reasons that clarity always has to trump style in fiction. When you have these long stretches of unattributed dialogue, stylistically, that's great. And there are ways you can pull that off. But if you're not pulling it off, the risk is that your reader's going to get mixed up with the back and forth and start ascribing dialogue to the wrong character. And that can just have devastating implications to the reader's understanding of what's going on.
[00:22:28] Matty: When you were making the decisions about whittling down the number of point of view characters, what was driving those decisions? Was it how central the character was to the scene or did you look across the whole story and say, Oh, I can tell this whole story with three points of view? I think it would be hard once you've written the book and you probably were bought into knowing each of those characters at that level, and then having to pull back from some of them.
[00:22:54] Jon: Yeah. It hurt a lot. This was quite a long time ago, but my process, as I recall, was that there were, I guess, three characters that were main characters. Their points of view were essential. And not just as characters, but structurally. Enough action took place in each of their points of view that took place out of the experience of the other point of view characters that structurally they had to be the point of view characters.
[00:23:24] So then what I did was looking at the remaining point of view characters, seeing which ones could be taken out of their point of view. And structurally, logically, if this character had five point of view sections, and two of them were in the presence of this other point of view character, and two of them were in the presence of this second point of view character, and then there was one that I just had to either reconceptualize or rewrite or get rid of or whatever, address in some other way, that's what I had to do.
[00:23:58] Obviously, we all know this, there are ways to convey what's going on inside a character's head without being in their point of view. You use their facial expressions; you use the other characters' perceptions of them. You can do that. One point of view character can think the other character seems distraught or seem sad. Obviously, we want to do it with a little more finesse than that. But using your point of view character's perception to imbue meaning to a non-point of view character's expressions or demeanor or whatever can be a very economical way to get that across. You have to do it in a way that it's plausible that the point of view character would be able to perceive these things.
[00:24:38] And one of the things that I do recall, thinking about it now, is that it did end up rearranging how the different characters fit in. There were some characters who became more essential, more important to the narrative because I had realized that structurally, they had to maintain their point of view. And instead of being one of eight point of view characters, now there are one of four point of view characters. Just mathematically you're signaling to the reader, this is a more important character now. So you have to write them that way, reappraise them and say, Oh, okay this is now a secondary character, not a tertiary character. I need to give them enough weight that that placement is justified.
[00:25:24] Matty: I've had a couple of episodes recently on author newsletters -- Episode 058 was AUTHOR NEWSLETTERS with Lee Savino and Episode 059 was AUTHOR NEWLSETTER SWAPS with Evan Gow. And one of the things we talked about was what can you offer readers to entice them to sign up for your newsletter. And I think that if an author finds themselves in that position where they've written something with lots of different point of view characters, and now have to change that to whittle down the number, a really cool offering would be those original point of view chapters, Offer a reader, Oh, would you be interested in reading this chapter from this other character's point of view? Sign up for my newsletter and you can get that extra. And I always find that having another purpose for those kinds of things makes it a little less painful.
[00:26:10] Jon: Yeah, you're right. It's like they say you have to kill your darlings sometimes. And I always have a cut file, whenever I'm editing something, so I don't just delete it. I cut it and paste it into another document. I like to say, since you're not actually getting rid of it, you're just putting it in this other file, you don't have to kill your darlings. You just have to lock them in the basement.
[00:26:29] An exercise that I know some writers do in order to get into the head of all of their characters is as part of their preparation they will write some sort of passage from each character's point of view, just as an exercise to get to know that character's voice. Because the thing is, every character, whether you're writing it or not, every character has a point of view. All the stuff that you have to keep in mind when you're writing a point of view character, all your non-point of view characters have that. They have backstory, they have psychology, they have history, they have prejudices and fears and all those things. And really, you should be aware of them whether they're point of view characters or not. So I can totally see the benefit of writing it, but those things as well, that kind of auxiliary content that you could give away as a little bonus. That's a great idea.
[00:27:20] Matty: I was looking at over the notes. I had taken one of your point of view seminars many years ago, and you had been kind enough to send me your most recent notes, and I want it to read a part in a section called economy of point of view / triangulation, and then ask you to comment on what you mean by this and how this illustrates it. So here's the sample passage that you provided.
[00:27:45] "Jimmy was staring at them Kardashian bobbleheads like they was ..." Her eyes closed and a crease bisected her vast forehead, as she struggled to find the words. "Like they was magical treasure or something."
[00:27:56] Comment on what you mean by triangulation and how that illustrates that, and also the idea of economy of narrative.
[00:28:05] Jon: Yeah. I'll take economy of narrative first. There was a time I actually, when I first thought of it, I thought, Oh, I thought of this, but of course other people have thought of this.
[00:28:11] Matty: It doesn't mean you didn't think of it too.
[00:28:14] Jon: I did think of it too. But you know, one of the challenges as an author, one of the things that readers want is information. They want information about the characters. A lot of times, especially if you're writing a lot of world-building, whether it's historical fiction or science fiction or fantasy or whatever, they want to know about the world that it's in. But definitely they want to know a lot about the character. A lot of genres, they want to know about the world that is being built. But exposition is a death knell to narrative.
[00:28:45] In a lot of these genres in historical fiction and in some science fiction and in various genres, some readers want that, and some writers deliver it to them. They want lots and lots of description. That's one thing. But a lot of exposition, stepping out of the story and giving backstory or giving this really kind of minute descriptions and background on certain technologies or whatever, and that's fine.
[00:29:06] But even then, I think that you as the writer wants to convey to the reader as much information as possible. And the challenge is to do it in a way that the reader doesn't know it has been done. You want to put information into their head without them knowing that you're giving them information so that their experiences that they're enjoying a story, a narrative, and they don't really know that they're being given the information that they need to know to understand the rest of it.
[00:29:38] I talk a lot in classes and stuff about exposition and how to avoid that, and that's an important part of it. So economy in getting information into the reader's head I think is really important. My style does tend to be fairly lean. But even among writers who spend a lot of time with description of setting or clothing or whatever, which some readers really enjoy, I think they also face the challenge of when they're describing a character's costume or wardrobe, they're painting a picture, but they're also doing it in a way that tells reams and reams of information about character and about backstory there. If they're doing it well, they're giving you two or three or four different layers of information when they're describing these visual things.
[00:30:27] So with that passage that you just read, what I want to get across is that sometimes through point of view, with a single passage of dialogue or a single paragraph, you can convey information about three different characters. So in the passage that you just read, we learned about Jimmy. "Jimmy was staring at them Kardashians bobbleheads like they was ..." Her eyes closed and a crease bisected her vast forehead as she struggled to find the words. "Like they were magical treasures or something."
[00:30:56] So we learned about Jimmy, right? Because Jimmy is being talked about. So we learned that Jimmy is the type of person who might think that Kardashian bobbleheads are on a par with magical treasures. And in my mind that says a lot about Jimmy. But we also learned that the speaker is the kind of person who would say "them" instead of "they" or "those" and "they was" instead of "they were," that the way they speak tells you a lot about character. And that she might have to concentrate to get her words, this "crease bisected her forehead."
[00:31:23] But then we also learn about the point of view character, which is not her, which is the person who is observing her. So she's talking about one character. The point of view character is observing her. We learn about the first character, Jimmy, because he's being talked about. We learn about the second character, by the way she's speaking. And we learned about the third character by the way that this character is observing that character. Probably looks down on both of these characters, right? He probably feels a little snobbish over them, a little superior. He observes disdainfully " crease bisected her vast forehead. She struggled to find the words." So in that one little passage of dialogue, we've gotten really important insights into three different characters.
[00:32:05] And I think that's really powerful. And just to kind of illustrate how the economy of point of view well done, that if everything is being observed through the point of view character's eyes, which it should be, then everything that the reader is learning, whether, they're learning about the car that's driving down the street or they're learning about whatever it is that the point of view character is experiencing, they're getting that, but they're also learning more and more about the point of view character through the way that these things were observed, through the context that they're observed, through the backstory that is brought to them and that sort of thing.
[00:32:41] Matty: Yeah. I love that example that is packing a lot of information into a very short amount of text. I wanted to wrap up with one of the tips you had offered, which was, when writing a draft, use different colors for each point of view. Can you elaborate on what that means and what the writer would be getting out of that?
[00:33:00] Jon: Yeah. I think that, you, especially if you're not writing in a particularly close point of view, you can lose track of whose point of view you're in. I advise the writers that I work with that whatever you change point of view, unless you have a compelling reason not to, I think it's important to reestablish point of view as quickly as possible. Let the reader know as soon as possible and ideally in a subtle way, but in a way that they'll pick up on let them know whose point of view they're in because it's important for them to know what point of view they're in.
[00:33:30] But for the writer, it's important as well, even more so, I guess and especially, once you start, once you go into revision and maybe you're hopping around through a manuscript and you're like, Oh, if I make this change on page 257, I have to go back and make this page on one 80 and blah, blah, blah.
[00:33:45] It can be hard to know at a glance what point of view you're in. And a lot of times these point of view errors, the first draft may have been impeccable, but then when you go in and you start rewriting and revising and editing, errors can creep in. If you have three or four point of view characters, if you use a different color font in each of those points of view, then you know at a glance wherever you are, whatever you're doing, immediately what point of view you're in. And it gives you this visual cue to not only assume the right backstory and the right history and that sort of thing, but to assume the right voice, which is really important.
[00:34:24] And the other thing, and I've done this for a number I'm trying to think of what else maybe it was setting, but anything where you're worried about structural consistency. If you're writing a novel and you've got two point of view characters, and the first two thirds of the book are three quarters character A and one quarter character B. And then the end of it is they're flipped, that might feel odd. That might be what you want to do for whatever reason. And if you set it up and you're intentional about it, that might achieve what you're trying to achieve. But you don't want to do it unintentionally. You don't want to just do it.
[00:35:00] So one of the things that's really handy with the color-coding thing, in Word, and I imagine whatever software you're using, you can zoom out a great extent. And one of the things that I advise the writers that I work with to do is to color code the point of view characters, but then you can also pull out, so like a 10% zoom, and you can really see your entire story there in thumbnails and you can see, Oh, you know what, there's too much green here. And there's a huge stretch with no brown. I know this character is being unrepresented. Again if you have a good reason to do that, if you're doing it intentionally, then that's great. That's fine. There's all sorts of different structures that can work. But if you're not being intentional and if it's just an oversight, then you've neglected that point of view character. The reader is going to start to forget who they are. It's going to be jarring when you reintroduce them, maybe.
[00:35:51] Say you're doing this thing with the alternating first and third protagonist / antagonist, you might start out having five or six chapters of the protagonist before you have a single chapter, short snippet of the antagonist. You might want to do it that as the narrative progresses, You get more and more of those hits of the antagonist and they're closer and closer together, to give the sense of building action and rising tension, and that sort of thing. You don't want to just say, one of these, one of those, one of these, one of those, one of these, one of those. There's all sorts of different structures, but it's really handy, no matter what structure you're trying to do, it's really handy to be able to very easily and quickly visualize it by having the color coding by zooming out.
[00:36:34] Matty: And if you run out of Microsoft Word text colors, it might be a clue that you've gone overboard with number of points of view characters.
[00:36:40] Jon: Yes, exactly.
[00:36:42] Matty: Well, Jon, this has been so helpful. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your books, and your work online.
[00:36:49] Jon: Sure. As you said at the beginning, I co-host THE LIARS CLUB ODDCAST, which is a podcast on writing and creativity and it's available on all the platforms, wherever podcasts are found. My website is JonMcGoran.com. And that's where I am on all the social media. Look me up on social media, visit me online.
[00:37:09] My most recent trilogy. it was the near future YA science fiction trilogy SPLICED, SPLINTERED, and SPIKED, which is about this near future where genetic engineering technology has matured to the point where it's available in the street as a form of body modification. And these young people who call themselves chimeras alter themselves in different ways with splices of animal DNA. So if you go to JonMcGoran.com, if you click on this splice yourself link, you can upload a picture of yourself, choose what animal you want to be spliced with, and see what you'd look like. Part polar bear or part snow leopard, or house cat or whatever. It's hysterically funny. It's a hoot.
[00:37:46] Matty: It is. I did that and I had a lot of fun with that. So I can recommend that as a good way to kill half an hour for people to play around with that. Great. Thank you so much, Jon.
[00:37:56] Jon: All right. Always a pleasure.
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