Our schedule is back to normal – the first Wednesday of the month – after last month’s temporary shift.

Introductions and progress reports

We had a couple of new faces, along with some of the usual suspects this month. As ever, it’s lovely to see new people coming to the meetings – and they even said they’d come back!

Our zombie-apocalypse enthusiast Greg is revisiting the first novel of his trilogy. Two members are embarking on new projects after completing their first. Nic is into Japanese crime fiction for her creative writing degree, which is a new topic for our table. Our playwright and poet Kevin continues with his play, while coming up with electric poetry on the side. Finally, we have Sarah, who is fairly new to writing, and who was in another writing group during lockdown.

We love to hear about who’s writing what and where we get our inspiration from. Caity was inspired just before this month’s meeting by something she read in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody 1. Brody was talking about where the titular cat comes into writing a novel. It’s a device to make the reader like a character: if a character saves a cat from a burning building or from up a tree, the reader will think more positively about that character. It doesn’t have to be saving a cat, of course; it could be some other heartwarming deed.

In Caity’s novel, she’s been dithering over whether Mrs G has a cat or not. Reading Save the Cat has given her the answer. She just has to remember it’s not a real cat.

Our new-to-writing member was inspired by people she saw on the train, which reminded Caity that she was intrigued by a couple she saw when walking the South Downs Way; it would be fun to devise the stories of these people.

What about you? Where do your ideas come from?

Free writing

We didn’t have anything in particular planned as this month’s prompt for the free-writing session, but we remembered how you can pick a random word from a book, so we used Save the Cat, which Caity had taken with her to explain where she’d got her inspiration from. The group chose a page number, a line number and a word number; together, we picked the word confident.

We wrote for our usual five minutes, then discussed what we’d written.

None of us had written anything even remotely like anyone else’s, which is great. We’re all different; we’ve each had different experiences; we each react to things in different ways. This comes out in our writing, and we can use that to find our own unique style, our own unique voice.

Readings

This month, we heard a poem by Kevin. It was very short, but it grabbed us and pulled us in, so that by the end we were squeezed like a boa constrictor’s prey.

Another member commented that it could be interpreted in different ways. He imagined different people – each with their own set of unique experiences – hearing it and understanding it in their own unique way.

It really was a great piece of work.

The website is released!

We released this website on the day of this month’s meeting, and we loaded it up on Caity’s laptop and showed the group. They all seemed to like it, and we got some good feedback from them. We’re in the process of wrangling WordPress to our group will. We also asked permission to use their names and give more details about their work than we have previously given.

We aim to make the website a hub for Ely Writers away from social media like Twitter and Facebook because not everyone wants to use them.

Discussion

We discussed Japanese crime fiction, which is apparently a lot gentler than Western crime fiction, which focuses more on the plot, and the resolution is different. It seemed to Caity to be a cosy mystery2; the only example she could think of off the top of her head was The Cat Who… books by Lilian Jackson Braun3, the first of which is The Cat who could Read Backwards.

Another feature of Japanese crime fiction is that not much happens, apparently. This reminded Caity of Washington Square by Henry James4, which she studied at school, and in which nothing much happens. [Spoiler alert!] As I recall, the protagonist lives indolently with her father; a young man comes on the scene and ruffles two feathers, then goes off again; the protagonist’s life is unchanged afterwards.

Other examples we came up with were Stoner by John Williams5, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams6 and Something Happened by Joseph Heller7. Caity read that last one because she’d enjoyed Catch-228, but when she finished Something Happened, she concluded that nothing had happened.

Workshop

We skipped through the basics of point of view (POV) this month, focusing mainly on the difference between first/second/third person and the question of whose head we’re in9. The former are morphosyntactic properties10 and don’t address POV. The latter is how to think of point of view.

First person (I/we) and is used when the character addresses the reader directly. Second person (you) is used infrequently, but is found in choose-your-own-adventure books11 and in (short) novels such as Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney12. We didn’t discuss second person any further. Third person is how most novels are written, with you the author acting as a conduit through which the story is told.

Whose head we’re in tells us whose POV the story is being told from. First person limits the point of view to that one character, so is a good choice if you’re having trouble keeping inside one person’s head at a time. Third person can be used in the same way as first person so that we’re deep in the psyche of the viewpoint character; it can also be used for omniscient POV, as Nic reminded me. We agreed it feels a bit old-fashioned, but she has noticed its use is on the rise.

When you’re thinking about POV, there are various questions that you, as a writer, need to answer:

1. How many viewpoint characters should there be?
2. How will you decide whose viewpoint(s) to use?
3. If you have multiple viewpoint characters, how often will you switch between them, and how will you do it?
4. If you have a single viewpoint character, how will you ensure that all necessary information is conveyed to the reader?

Having a lot of viewpoint characters can be confusing for the reader, but it can be difficult to sustain a single viewpoint for an entire novel.

When considering whose viewpoint to use, consider how using different characters would affect how the story is told. Think of a favourite book and imagine how the story would unfold if a secondary character told it instead of the one that does.

Caity has read books that switch between viewpoints in a single paragraph and even mid-sentence, jolting her out of one head and into another with barely time to breathe. In the A Song of Ice and Fire series13, Martin starts a new chapter with every POV change and uses that character’s name as the chapter title; this makes it clear to the reader whose head they’re in at any one time. Even without such chapter headings, the reader should be able to discern whose head they’re in just from the voice of the viewpoint character. (Developing a character’s voice is made easier by having scribble chats with them.)

In a novel, it’s often necessary to share information that only a secondary character has (e.g. to solve a crime or to provide information about events that happened elsewhere; a celebration is a good place for the single viewpoint character to mix with characters they wouldn’t otherwise, and hence find out what they know. Other sources might be the media (e.g. TV/radio, newspapers, social media), letters, emails, books, etc.

We didn’t have time to go into more depth, but we hope enough was covered to make us think.

Next meeting

Our next meeting is in Prosper on 5 July 2023.

See you there?

References

1. Jessica Brody 2018. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. California and New York: Ten Speed Press.
2. Cosy mysteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_mystery.
3. Lilian Jackson Braun 1966. The Cat who could Read Backwards. The Cat Who … series.
4. Henry James 1880. Washington Square.
5. John Williams 1965. Stoner.
6. Douglas Adams 1987. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Dirk Gently series.
7. Joseph Heller 1974. Something Happened.
8. Joseph Heller 1961. Catch-22.
9. Choose your own adventure books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure.
10. Thomas E Payne 2006. Exploring Language Structure: a Student’s Guide, pp. 1–10 (excerpt). Cambridge University Press.
11. Jay McInerney 1984. Bright Lights, Big City.
12. Rosie Johnston 2018. Point of View made easy. Rosie Johnston Writes.
13. George R. R. Martin 1991–. A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Other resources

• Helen Corner-Bryant and Kathryn Price 2018. On Editing. Great Britain: John Murray Learning.
• Tim Clare: award-winning author, poet and creative writing podcaster.