Tara Maya's Tales

Since I decided to write my Secret Novel in first person, I've been rereading some of my favorite first person novels. There are two major approaches to first person: Immediate First Person: Sometimes this means first person present tense, which is as intimate and immediate as it gets. However, even first person past tense can feel very much "in the now"; the narrator tells what she felt at the moment she is describing, nothing more. She doesn't "cheat" by implying she knows more about what happens next any more than the reader. If she misjudges someone, this is revealed only when she herself discovers it. I turned around when I heard the shot, crying, "Edwin, don't!" My eyes fell on the smoking gun first, then the body, and in my shock it took me a dozen heartbeats to make sense of the French manicure on the hand holding the gun, or the fedora hat soaking in a pool of blood. Gloria met my eyes. "That's right. I was the one who went t...

A friend of mine in a writing group said this about writing in First Person: In general, I think the key to writing effectively in first is about not treating it like third person with a find-and-replace button, he or she swapped out for I in the same sentences, structures, and techniques. For first person present to be truly sustainable at novel length -- and, well, more readable in shorter lengths -- it has to be more experiential. If I'm telling a story, "No shit, there I was," I'm telling you about what I saw, how I felt, what my emotional reactions were; how I tell you and even what I tell you will be coloured by what I think of the whole thing. So the major thing I'd put out there for writing effectively in first would be this: Think about how people actually do tell stories about themselves. What kind of language they use, how casual or formal they are, how they get across their personalities in the style and what they omit and what kinds of things they me...

This interview with Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha is ten years old, but new to me. A friend in a writing group passed the link to me, and I pass it on to you, with these thoughts: 1. This" overnight night success" took fifteen years to research, write, rewrite and sell. 2. Golden wrote a complete draft before he was able to interview a real geisha. "But I wrote a draft based on a lot of book-learning. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the world of a geisha was like, and wrote a draft. Then a chance came along to meet a geisha, which, of course, I couldn't turn down. And she was so helpful to me that I realized I'd gotten everything wrong, and I ended up throwing out that entire first draft and doing the whole thing over again." 3. He then rewrote the entire book again, this time changing from third person to first person. And I also found this insight to the point: O'BRIEN: What's it like, sitting there at the comput...

I'm trying to decide the proper Point of View for my new novel. This isn't the most urgent question. I still have a ton of  research to do before I can commit to more than jotting down notes and hypothetical scenes. I have my Short Outline for the novel. If I wrote out a few hypothetical scenes, I could always change the Person they're in later. (That sounds so odd to say, "the Person they're in" but how else would you say it?) There are pros and cons for each Person. The question is which will best tell this particular story? Third Person:  Third ("he said, she said") is standard and also my usual favorite. I like to have a lot of PoV characters, which rules out First. Third Person is the most flexible, and at the same time, the least obtrusive. In all probability, I will write the novel in third, unless another Person offers something to the story which third cannot.  Omniscient:  Omniscient ("he thought, she thought") used to be stand...