Hop To It

One of the biggest traps for newcomers to romance writing is head hopping and point of view switches.

I know it is something I struggled with Moonstone Obsession.

Actually, I didn’t know I had a problem with it until I received some excellent critiquing from the judges of the Romance Writers of Australia’s Emerald Awards for unpublished manuscripts and received a lovely rejection letter from a publisher.

Fortunately the wonderful team at Etopia Press decided to take a punt on a new author and assigned a patient editor to work me through the manuscript.

After the initial rejection I was askance, to put it mildly. I read a lot of classic and literary fiction where the authors often play fast and loose with the perspective – Kurt Vonnegut and John Fowles are two authors which come readily to mind – even Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell’s work has some ‘head hopping’.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about regarding ‘head hopping’ and POV switching, then author Annie Grace has an excellent primer.

One of the most difficult things new writers struggle with is managing character point of view [POV]. It is difficult partly because some of the conventions surrounding its use are relatively new.

Many of the classics of literature used the omniscient POV — a narrator told the story. Sometimes the narrator was the author, sometimes it was the main character. sometimes it was someone else. The omniscient authorial voice has become virtually obsolete in modern fiction (with some exceptions).

In modern fiction, particularly popular fiction, the story is most frequently told through the eyes of the stakeholders – one or more central POV characters. In romance, it is the hero and heroine’s POV we expect to see. Rarely are other character’s P’sOV included, though there is no “rule” against it.

Queensland’s own historical romance queen – the wonderful Anna Campbell goes into more detail in this excellent article.

Skilful use of point of view is a really powerful technique for drawing out suspense and creating a compelling story that will keep your reader sitting up past midnight to finish the story. And isn’t that just what we want?

Indeed!

I was still learning about this process doing the edits for Moonstone Obsession while writing Warrior’s Surrender (to be published on November 7). While Warrior’s Surrender’s first draft was free from head-hopping, I did have several characters with deeper points of view than is generally accepted in romance where the POV is from the hero, the heroine and a sufficiently motivated villain.

Again, working with my wonderful editor, this issue was overcome by pulling back on the POV and making those scenes (in which the hero and heroine are absent) simply tell itself without articulating their motivations through the use of internal dialogue.

What is said and done occurs as though the reader is standing in the corner of the room watching the byplay. They are eavesdroppers.

What has surprised me is how much more suspenseful those scenes have become because of the lack of POV.  The reader will have to guess those characters feelings and motivations – and therefore guess their next move against our hero and heroine.

This also has the added benefit of ensuring the deep emotional connection given to Lady Alfreya and Baron Sebastian de la Croix through viewing the story from their point of view and that it will resonates (I hope!) even stronger with the reader.

I hope this slightly different perspective on the subject will encourage new writers to avoid thinking that limited POV is restrictive and actually see it for what it is – an opportunity to make the reader empathise and fall in love with the hero and heroine as they fall in love and enjoy the suspense created by those characters who would thwart them and then enjoy the satisfaction of a Happily Ever After.