The Easy Way to Write Thrillers That Sell by Parnell Rob

Author:Parnell, Rob [Parnell, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Easy Way To Write Thrillers That Sell
Publisher: R&R Books Film Music
Published: 2013-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Point of View

Now, before you go on from here, you will need to make a decision about who’s going to be telling your story. Remember that it is inappropriate to tell the story from a god-like perspective. No, you want the characters to tell the story – and preferably as much as possible the lead character, your hero.

Who is telling your story is crucial. It will dictate whether certain actions and events are experienced first hand by the protagonist (and therefore by the reader), or whether (in the case of an “I” story) some information is simply relayed to the hero second hand. First person “I” stories are compelling because they put the reader right in the action. But that means the hero can’t experience everything – which can make it difficult to let the reader know what is happening with the other characters unless the hero directly witnesses those events. Limited third person gets around this problem by allowing the writer to tell the story from different perspectives – just not all at the same time.

It used to be that you either chose third or first person but never both. However, nowadays there’s no rule saying you can’t use multiple viewpoints and the first person. Thomas Harris, James Patterson, Dan Brown and Jonathan Kellerman, to name but a few, all prove it can be done successfully, if you handle it correctly. It’s just about being consistent about your viewpoints, staying with one character’s thoughts at a time and having a break in the text before you switch point of view.

In modern bestsellers, point of view stays with the protagonist for over 80% of the time – with brief forays into the mind of the antagonist, secondary characters and events impossible to relate without some degree of omniscience.

Whatever you do, you need to play fair. Your story needs to be logical. Don’t hold back information that should be obvious to the characters. Foreshadow information and solutions to problems. Don’t hide facts that the characters should be able to work out. In other words: don’t cheat!

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