![]() ![]() To the right: railings and a handset with a call button. ![]() She took a few breaths, lifted an arm: ID bracelet and an IV taped to her hand. It hurt like a bitch and made her want to throw up. But most of all how this time next year she’ll have dished up a decree nisi rather than a roast for her arse of a husband and his prickless cronies. Good – then grabbed the paperwork and got the fuck out. How she checked the woman – still breathing. How the leg of beef – frozen solid – made a thwack as it connected with the back of the woman’s head, and the way she just flumped down. How she climbed the stairs and found that woman rifling through a filing cabinet containing all their Very Sensitive Information. Her handling security? What did they expect? This is Norwich, not New York. Like she didn’t already have enough on her plate. A possible security breach at the Wickers building. The call on the way back from the supermarket from you-know-fucking-who. She chops vegetables and thinks about how damn weird today was. ‘Dinner will be ready bang on 8 pm, darling,’ she says. Gerry swings into the kitchen as Patty puts a leg of beef into the crockpot. How much of this information I can convey without dropping viewpoint will depend on how many POV characters I have in the novel, which narration styles I feel confident using, and when I decide to reveal this information so that I maximize reader engagement. Police officers took statements from the kids, who, naturally, omitted the spliff from the story and said they were just hanging out listening to music and shooting the breeze.Three kids snuck into the office building to share a spliff and found her.Patty then legged it, taking with her the evidence of her group’s nefarious activities she cooked up a roast, and ensured her weapon was eaten.Alicia was bonked on the head with a frozen joint of beef by someone called Patty (who is one of the targets).That’s where the chapter ends.īecause I’m the writer, I know the following: Next thing she knows, the floor’s coming towards her face. ![]() Part way through her search, she feels a blow to the back of her head. ![]() She scopes the place out and enters once she’s confident the coast is clear. She’s also the protagonist.Īlicia’s received a tip-off from an old contact that her targets are using a derelict office building on the edge of an industrial estate for nefarious purposes.Įarly in the evening, she decides to snoop around. Our current viewpoint character is Alicia, a private investigator. Lumping multiple viewpoints into a single scene is often an indication of head-hopping. However, it’s conventional in commercial fiction for each POV character to tell their story in distinct chapters or sections. How many viewpoint characters can a novel have?Ī novel can have multiple viewpoint characters sharing their experiences through various narration styles such as first person (I) and third-person limited (she, he, they). Third person is a narration style that most writers find easy to master at the beginning of their journey, and is popular with writers and readers of commercial fiction. With first person, the ‘I’ personalizes the experience more deeply because we’re reading the same language we’d use if we were talking about ourselves. With third person, the distance is wider because those pronouns are a constant reminder that the character is someone else. The difference lies in the narrative distance – how close the reader feels to the character. The difference is the pronouns – he/she/they/it for third person I/we for first person. In that sense, it’s not unlike first-person narration, another in-skin POV. Readers get to sit in their skin it’s as if we’re them. Third-person limits readers to a single character’s experience – what they see, hear, feel and think. Rather than readers getting in the heads of everyone, they engage with and invest in no one because they are never in one place long enough to do so. That convenience is usually a problem in commercial fiction because it rips out the suspense. Head-hopping is convenient because it lets readers know what everyone in a scene is thinking and feeling all at once. When readers are forced to jump from one character’s thoughts and experiences to another’s in a single scene, head-hopping is in play. ![]()
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