There are three people in the scene, three stories intersecting, regardless of which one you choose to tell. It lets me test out the emotional impact of the scene on each character.įor example, a man and a young girl walk into a jewelry store and speak to a clerk. I do that because it gives me a chance to look at elements that may not be visible to any one character. If I have three characters in a pivotal scene, I may write a version of the scene from each character’s point of view, even though only one will make it into the book. When I write, I tend to overlap in multiple layers. It may even give you a new perspective on the whole story. That life should inform the way they interact with the main character, and it can also give you (and your readers) a perspective on your main character that you may be missing. They had a life before they entered this scene and they’ll have one after they leave. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you forget that all your characters, even the props, have narrative arcs. If your main characters go into a store to purchase something, the clerk who sells it to them is likely a prop. The characters you need to make the action move, but who aren’t at the heart of the action. If you look through your manuscript, you’ll see the props. We can fall into the trap of treating those secondary characters as props. If we only focus on our main characters in a scene, we’re in danger of making the other characters flat. Today, though, I want to talk about the ways that multiple narrators can elevate, alter, and complicate–in a good way–the story you want to tell. My urge to look at stories from all angles, to investigate all the characters, to excavate a dozen layers below the surface. When asked why I go to such extremes, I usually forget to talk about the craft of storytelling, and end up talking about my own idiosyncratic obsessions. By the time I sold my most recent novel, multiple POVs had become so popular, nobody even flinched at the fact that my novel had sixteen narrators. By walking a mile in their shoes, we can learn even more about our protagonists.įifteen years ago, when I was querying agents with a novel that had three different point-of-view characters, most of my rejections cited that element as a problem. As writers, we’ve probably heard it in relationship to getting to know our main characters, but we’d do better to apply it to the myriad secondary and peripheral characters who interact with our main characters. Don’t judge me until you walk a mile in my shoes. We’ve heard that old gem so many times we don’t listen to it anymore. Our community is struggling but YOU can help.Bryn Greenwood, the author of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will and Lie Lay Lain, is filling in for Therese Walsh today. These problems existed for women, girls and gender diverse individuals before the pandemic but COVID-19 has compounded them to levels that we have never seen before. A 2021 Canadian Women’s Foundation report found that 64% of people in Canada know someone who has experienced physical, sexual or emotional abuse. While gender-based violence (GBV) is finally getting the air time it deserves following its staggering increase during the pandemic, we still are not seeing a concerted effort to put an end to it. They are often struggling with their own mental health and navigating living in unsupportive and unsafe homes, which are sometimes not accepting of who they are. Similarly, youth in our programs increasingly need support as they experience many of the same stressors, all while being heavily relied upon to care for siblings. YWCA Cambridge has seen a dramatic increase in the need to support to participants who are experiencing social isolation, increased stress of financial insecurity, mental health concerns, challenges to care giving and child care constraints, limited access to food and household essentials and increasingly, individuals who are experiencing violence in their homes because of their gender identity.
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