The new Star Wars trailer came out recently, official teaser #2, and it contains a rather brilliant example of the effective use of 2nd Person Point of View (PoV) I was talking about in an article a few weeks ago.* Check out the trailer below and you’ll see what I mean.
When I was 19 I wrote a novel called “A Peculiar Betrayal.” I feverishly typed it out between watches on ship, scribbled its chapters in notepads on buses and trains; I filled it with all the angst and spelling mistakes I could muster. Of the handful of literary agents I dared sent it to, two were kind enough to send back personal notes[i] alongside their standard rejection letters. Both were surprisingly encouraging, but both said the same thing: show, don’t tell. This article is my attempt, almost twenty years later, to understand what that means. (more…)
Last July my father and I decided to have a go at one of the exercises from Scott McCloud’s book Making Comics[i]. Each of us would draw a 16-frame comic, one frame at a time, emailing the other a copy of the new frame after each was done. We would then email back instructions for what would happen in the next frame. It was fun, mildly anarchic experience. In this article I am going to share my completed comic and talk about the useful things I got from the exercise as a storyteller. (more…)
It’s that time of year again; Camp Nanowrimo is back, and this time it’s serious.
Camp Nanowrimo is an extension of the popular National Novel Writing Month, where participants join other writers to try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Just in case it isn’t immediately clear, 50,000 words in a month is a lot. Last year I took a swing and managed 30k towards my target. This year I’m going to do better. So how have I gone about preparing to beat my previous score?
Narrative Perspective or Point of View (PoV) controls how the reader interacts with the world of the story. In part one of this series of articles I talked about the balance between intimacy and clarity in first and third person. In part two I used the second person to illustrate the ways in which the reader enters into the text, and how this can be used to influence their sympathies. In this final part I’m going to briefly talk about omniscient PoV and how you decide what the reader knows. This will bring us back full circle to the question of intimacy and clarity, before I finish with a few pointers I have assembled from my reading on how to manage PoV in your story. (more…)
