My Ideas on How to Enrich a Manuscript by Brenda Whiteside

Last week, on my personal blog, Discover Yourself, I threw a request out to "help me write my book." Although I had hundreds of views, only three readers voiced their opinions...and two of them are fellow authors from this blog. But what is really interesting for me, all three agreed on how I should approach my next series. So I'll be taking that advice and running with it. First, I need a learning curve because I'll be attempting a style I've never used.

I love getting input on my manuscripts. I love, love my editor and I love, love my critique partners. When I lived in Minnesota, I belonged to two critique groups. One group consisted of four writers and the other group was a small group of two, including me. When I moved to Arizona, two of the first group agreed to keep up our relationship via email. My partner in the other also agreed. In Arizona, I joined another group, but I have since moved too far to be part of that group. I remain in contact with one of those writers. I send my chapters to four critique partners via email. These ladies are great and come from varied experiences and genres--erotic paranormal romance, sweet historical westerns, historical romance, and romantic suspense.

The viewpoints and suggestions can be as varied as the genres they write in. But sometimes they actually agree, and when that happens, I listen and learn. If they don't agree, I weigh their critiques and get inspired. For instance:

She’d been in one of her funny-odd moods since the stranger entered the shop earlier during the day. Although her father always called her funny-odd whenever she grew quiet, the term explained exactly the state of mind Zack Peartree’s appearance caused.

In the draft I sent to my critique partners, the funny-odd description was just funny. One CP said they didn't get it. One made a suggestion to use another word, and the other two CPs said nothing. The varied reactions made me think, and I changed it to funny-odd. My tweak pleased all of them.

I guess my point is you can't please everyone all of the time. What I see in a phrase or turn of words or in an approach to a style will certainly be viewed differently by at least some of the readers. But no matter what feedback I get, I can't write without it. My books can only be improved by the viewpoints of others. I won't sacrifice my creative intentions to please everyone, but my writing can always be enriched. And I welcome the criticism.

Promiscuous Point of View by Alison Henderson

No, I don't mean your heroine is a shameless tart. I'm talking about frequent, almost random head-hopping in fiction. After having been schooled in the highly-focused point of view promoted in modern romance fiction, I thought head-hopping was a thing of the past. Oh, no; not so!

For the past couple of months, I've been doing most my leisure reading outside our genre. I think it's healthy for a writer to expand her exposure beyond her own genre, but also--and there's no gentle way to put this--I'm bored with romance. 

First, I chose a contemporary village mystery set in Quebec. I enjoyed the setting,exotic but not too much so, and the plot was sufficiently intricate to keep me guessing. However, the author made a habit of popping in and out of characters' points of view for a paragraph or two here and there. And these weren't just the major characters, either. There was a large cast of characters, and nearly every one managed to score a brief place in the sun. By the time I was half-way through the book, my head was spinning. To be fair, this was the author's first book, written a number of years ago. She's become very successful, and I need to read a more recent volume in the series to see if she's still doing it.

My most recent read was a VERY long literary novel written by a well-known and well-regarded Minnesota author that followed the life of an ordinary woman in a small town in Minnesota from the turn of the twentieth century through the nineteen fifties. To my amazement, this author did the same thing--giving a POV paragraph to whichever of the umpteen characters struck her fancy, seemingly willy-nilly. This woman has also been writing for many years and has won a number of awards.

When I first started writing twenty-seven years ago, the issue of POV was largely ignored in popular fiction and certainly in romance. Nora Roberts ignored it, so I ignored it, too. I wrote intuitively; I wrote what I read. It was only after joining RWA and my first critique group in the mid-nineties that I was introduced to the term. I will always be grateful to the leader of that group, who patiently explained and corrected my manuscript until I figured it out.

Most romance writers these days employ deep, third-person POV because it is best for conveying characters' feelings, and that's what we strive to do. Neither of the books I mentioned above focused on feelings, but that's the primary reason our readers buy our books. I know that even if I decide in the future to experiment with other genres, I'll stick to limited, deep POV. I can't imagine writing any other way.

I wonder if the successful authors I mentioned write the way they do because they've always written that way and their editors don't try to change them, or if POV isn't important in other genres the way it is in romance. What is your experience reading outside our genre? Do you think POV matters, or is it merely a stylistic technicality we get wrapped up in when we should be concentrating on the meat of a story?

Alison
www.alisonhenderson.com