The Advantage of the KNOW-NOTHINGS

 

Conventional wisdom, CW for short, is that there are the right times and the wrong times to query agents and editors. The month of December, especially the week between Christmas and New Year’s, is the very wrong time.

 

I got the attention of my second agent, a consummate experienced professional, during that very “wrong” time. Before being agented, I got a request for the full manuscript of my eventually acquired and published novel during that (very) wrong time, also.

 

I wasn’t breaking the rules, I just didn’t know them.

 

I also got the best job I ever had back in my pre-motherhood life by breaking a few rules because I didn’t know them. Not going into details here, but trust me. I learned later that, innocently, I stepped over a few faux-pax.

 

I write this as a reminder to self and also a public service to share, so that fear of standing out mustn’t paralyze, and could also be recognized as a possible advantage.

 

The same goes for writing and constructing stories. Distinctiveness for its own sake is a vice when it’s a pathology. But innocence of conventions is not, and it’s more than all right.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Thomas Edison

 

Thomas Edison should be the lodestar to every person who ever heard the victimization narrative and fell for it.

Don’t.

Just don’t buy it. Because if you do, you will have victimized yourself times ten.

 

 

Thomas Edison was almost deaf.

He had only a few months of formal schooling.

He started working at age 12.

He was viewed as “odd.”

He didn’t come from any ruling elite or so-called “right families.”

 

 

He went on to be the holder of (arguably) more patents than anyone, and we owe him much of what is fueling the engines of modern technology, not least of which is what is driving this blog I am typing on right now.

 

Which is a good reason to celebrate his birthday, February 11^th, not with gratitude for Edison's inventions but as a reminder not to focus on the obstacles life deals us. Instead, let's celebrate the amazing opportunities that being alive presents.

POINT OF VIEW (aka POV)

 

The voice of a story comes to me in the form of a line. For me, it’s usually the first sentence/paragraph.

 

This line also contains the point of view. I don’t recall ever “choosing” it, it chose itself.

 

This post explains how pivotal the POV is to the rest of the story. It is more important than plot points or list of characters or even theme. The first two evolve and change as one drafts and later revises, the last emerges on its own if the story is worth its salt and pepper.

 

But the POV determines almost everything, and if (unlike me) you aren’t seeing it clearly and wonder whose it is, consider how much difference it would make if the narrative thread is seen from, say, Aunt Olga’s vantage point or Cousin Vladimir’s. It makes all the difference.

 

There is also the so-called omniscient POV, less humbly called G-d’s. I don’t write this all-seeing POV because 1. I don’t know how to do it justice, and 2. The remove feel of it doesn’t drive my writerly engine.

Long ago, a writing friend asked me to read part of a novel she was working on and asked if the POV was omniscient.

“Actually, it isn’t. It’s ‘head hopping’,” I said.

Head hopping is moving from different characters inner most awareness without so much as taking a breath, which causes a jumble and disjointed state in a reader. Omniscience requires some remove. A lot of novice writers confuse the two.

My friend resolved to pick one character’s vantage point and stick with it.

 

When writing in first person, it’s clear whose POV it is. When writing in third person, it’s important not to stray from what the character could know or see or even overhear. If more than one POV is needed, there are good novels that alternate different chapters clearly marked for changing the POV. A classic example of multiple POV is The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg.

 

I will continue to let my stories choose, because it works for the way I work.

POV^