I’ve started making a record of things that I’ve learnt when reading other author’s work. As I love stationary, I bought a beautiful taupe leather bound book and start each book on a new page. First I read the book without making notes just for my enjoyment. Then when I’m finished I go back through the book and start listing off interesting things. I surprise myself at how much I don’t notice while reading and how much technique is hidden by good authors. Some of the things that I note down are:
– the character viewpoint(s) (first or third person) and how many there are,
– the tense (usually past),
– the number of chapters, the average length and if they are ordered chronologically or not,
– if there are parts or groupings of chapters, and
– how the chapters are named/numbered or referenced.

I can sometimes see other things of interest like how the author tells/shows the reader how to navigate through the book through the age of the character or flash backs. I follow up with any other style points that stood out to me and what I thought of the book, what worked and what I think didn’t.

Why have I gone to all this bother? Well, I guess I haven’t had a formal education in writing so I’m catching up. I’ve read a few good how to write a novel books but until you start pulling apart a novel yourself it doesn’t quite have the same meaning. I hope that this will make it easier to make decisions about the novel I’m writing and the ones that I would like to write in the future.

Jumping time periods

I was struggling with a section in the Wilful Murder novel where I needed to jump quite a few years and only have a couple of scenes included. There are a couple of ways to go about it, just do it and explain how many years have passed in the opening of the scenes,  or bunch up the scenes in time so that I only have to have a big jump in time less often. Karen Brooks tackles the same problem in the Brewer’s Tale by referencing the date at the start of each chapter – though I never read them while I was reading the book. I relied on the prompts at the start of the scene which she included quite a few – maybe too many – such as ‘at the end of the week’, ‘one week later’, ‘the following day’. In Diana Gabaldon’s Go Tell the Bees that I am Home she also uses prompts at the start of scenes but when she switches characters she could also be switching time. As a reader, it’s not always clear what year it is but it doesn’t seem to matter, you know that it is sometime around the last part of the story and then when you go to the next part of the story it will be after that. Actually, she’s more likely to mention that the two scenes are connected in time with ‘later that day’ and ‘the next day’. She uses the seasons and the weather to indicate time passing but it is often unspecified how much.

Though both of the books only cover a couple of years with their stories, so the characters themselves aren’t changing age greatly, unlike in Wilful Murder which covers a decade.

Introducing backstory in first person

I’ve also been confused introducing backstory when writing in the first person, so when my character reflects on past events it doesn’t feel comfortable. Robin Hobb’s Sharman’s Crossing again (first published in 2005), is was one of the first – first person narratives that I read and I remember thinking how different it was to the usual third person books.  Sharman’s Crossing starts off with two stories from the POV character’s past where he names up his age, one when he is eight years old and one when he is twelve and then it jumps rather quickly into when his is about seventeen.  I’m going to go back over the work I have already done and look for opportunities for the main character to tell someone about something that has happened in the past rather than having to live through that scene. Hopefully, it will be easier to write than the main character just remembering the past which still needs to be triggered by something in the present.