Q&A: Braided narratives in first person; bones showing in your third draft; is it worth entering competitions?

Almost every week, usually on a Tuesday, Itch of Writing supporters and super-supporters and I have a live Ask Me Anything Chat, where everyone posts their current questions and puzzlements, and I do my best to answer them. With supporters’ permission, I collect and lightly edit some of the questions and answers to be shared more widely.

Q: I am writing a braided narrative and have two characters - lovers, but with their own stories - which I automatically write in first person. I am confident enough to stick with that for both, but they spend four out of thirty chapters together. Is that enough to prevent a first person PoV? I am happy to try it out but also mindful of the fact that I haven’t seen it done anywhere so there must be a good reason for that. It is my first novel, so not getting ahead of myself. Just read The Things They Cannot Say, which has both protagonists in first but they don’t meet.

Emma: Great question! I think the straightforward answer is that for the chapters where they’re together, you should pick one of them as the ‘I’ - the internal narrator - and keep the other as ‘s/he’, and operate by the normal point-of-view rules. In other words, it works exactly as the other chapters work: chapters narrated by A think of A as ‘I’, and B as ‘s/he’, whether B is not there or (occasionally) physically there. And vice versa, of course.

As to which of them to pick for the narrator of a together chapter, a good rule-of-thumb question for choosing viewpoints is to ask yourself which character has most at stake in this scene: generally speaking that creates the most narrative tension. Mind you, if there’s something crucial in one of their heads which they would be very conscious of but you don’t want the reader to know yet, you probably want to stay out of that head, and use the other one as the narrator/viewpoint character.

What is crucial is that when the reader lands in a new chapter, there are enough specifics that the reader senses immediately whether the ‘I’ is A or B. More here about handling dual- and parallel- narratives. (Top tip: don’t just rely on headings, because so many readers’ eyes shoot straight over them.)

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible works exactly this way, absolutely brilliantly. We get deeply involved with the ‘I’ of a certain strand, but we also see them from the outside in the other characters’ strands, so our experience of the novel’s events has all the layered complexity of actual life.

It always helps - to the point of being crucial, I’d say - if you take care to make the narrative voices of the different strands as distinct as you can, so the whole narrative is shaped by the narrator/viewpoint character’s personality, point-of-view and use of language, as well as the events and actions. Ideally, the reader will always know, without having to think about it, which the ‘I’ is in any given paragraph.

For the sake of anyone else reading this, I should say that this is the kind of question that does end up with some writers switching to third person - i.e. using a single, external narrator - because it does give you more flexibility within a single narrative setup. In switching viewpoint it still needs care to take the reader securely with you, but you can use psychic distance to get as close in to each characters’ experience as you can in first person, while also going places no character’s mind or memory can go. But if first person feels right for you and the story, then there’s every reason to stick to it.

Q: I’m knee or even hip deep in a third draft. But a creeping feeling that not enough planning and too much pantsing has produced a plot stuck together by too many coincidences. Short of a full deconstruction, are there techniques or tricks of the trade to make twists and turns seem more inevitable than contrived?

Emma: Ah, yes, the bones are showing? A well-known editor-turned-agent, long dead, said to me that you’re allowed one thundering coincidence per novel: any more, and the reader stops trusting that the writer is dealing honestly and responsibly with them in creating a plausible ‘fictional dream’ which it’s safe to read as if it really happened.

In other words - when separate elements of a story turn out to coincide at random, or surprising things happen, the reader wants to feel, if only in retrospect, that it’s not unconvincingly unlikely: that the writer isn’t ‘cheating’ to make their story work.

But sorting out each coincidence-too-many may need a different approach, depending on what the elements are. I’m so not a crime writer, but for example:

• Look at a coincidence, and retro-fit actions, situations, or references, to make it not so very unlikely that these two people would coincide, or someone would stumble on whatever they have conveniently just stumbled on, or whatever. Late one night, the MC’s in the office looking for evidence to exonerate himself from being accused of fraud, and it’s surprising that an accountant from the other division suddenly appears ‘because I left my phone behind’ and catches the MC apparently red-handed. Plonked in like that, it looks awfully like the fell hand of the author trying to make the plot work. But if ages ago we got a glancing sight of the accountant having an affair with the intern in the next cubicle to the MC (which at the time we just took as world building) then it feels much less unlikely that she would have left her phone on the intern’s desk.

• If you have two separate coincidences that you need to make more convincing, and can make them both products of the same essential situation, it helps even more. For example: you need the MC to be stumbled on, and separately you need the intern to turn out at the denoument to have Helpful Friends in High Places. If Accountant has a massive chip on her shoulder and is committing fraud to maintain a posh lifestyle her career so far can’t support, then Intern Who Has Friends In High Places is the sort of girl they might fall for, and the affair, the phone-leaving-and-stumbling-on-MC, and the involvement of Intern, all stem from the same essential situation.

• Thinks like mis-dials and lost letters do happen, of course - but it’s more convincing if the dialler is stressed or in a hurry - and the hall floor the letter drops on to is a mess.

• Retro-fitting the Accountant’s affair with the Intern makes it conform to Chekhov’s rule that you should only put a gun on the wall in Act One if it will be fired in Act Three, but don’t forget my Reverse-Chekhov rule: ‘if you need a gun to be fired in Act Three, you should make sure it’s on the wall in Act One.’

• If all else fails, you could try ‘hanging a lampshade on it’ as Ruth Ware puts it: just make the MC be astonished that X should turn up - what are the odds? - etc. etc. Probably only one per book, but if you’ve successfully shoved the other coincidens underground, you can get away with it.

In trying to figure out this stuff, it can help to write yourself a crib sheet: a parallel ‘What’s happening meanwhile offstage’ narrative (bullet points is fine!) to track e.g. the affair, and when it manifests bits of itself in the main narrative.

Another kind of crib sheet that can help when your story is all about uncovering the past is the one that tracks ‘What actually happened’: it helps whether your story is a classical whodunnit with a body on page one - how did the murder happen and the body get here? - or the sort which is all about the protagonist finally understanding their baffling childhood as a hanger-on of messy adult lives: write yourself a run-down of who did what to whom back then.

It might be worth deconstructing someone else’s work to see how they do it: Having been hugely enjoying Slow Horses on the TV, I’m thinking Mick Herron’s Slough House books might be fruitful. See what Herron does, to make sure that the big dramatic encounters are plausible outcomes of what has come before.

OP: Right, got it. Put some solid flesh on the bones. I like the ‘what’s happening offstage’ approach, adds depth and shadow to the world as well as authenticity to the twist.

Emma: Yes, it does add depth, I think - you may find all sorts of small aspects of ‘offstage’ peeking through in ‘onstage’ bits. When I’m planning, I often actually have a column in the grid for ‘offstage’ (or different-coloured index cards in Scrivener, say). It’s mostly to keep myself straight with plotting, but it definitely encourages me to think ‘What actually happened while X was away, which means they now now do whatever?’

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Q: Is it worth while entering competitions? I’ve entered quite a few, local and national and have never got anywhere. It’s expensive and time consuming and contributes to my general sense of my book being simply not good enough. I find myself becoming a little cynical that there are so many people out there and here on Substack who are exploiting gullible wannabe writers like me when there’s not a cat in hell’s chance. I hasten to add that I do not include my subscription to the Itch in this category. Wondering whether I should spend my time and money on cruises and mini breaks like my other pensioner friends!

Emma: Oh, I can so see why you’re feeling that way! Even the simple maths of some competitions suggests that the odds are not high (though some don’t have as many entries as you might suppose) and that’s before you’ve factored in who’s judging, and who else is entering.

But please don’t think of yourself as gullible! It’s not a stupid decision to give these things a go - at least, once you’ve checked out the competition’s credentials and are confident it’s not a scam.1 And it’s never a waste of time for a human being to put effort and disposable time and income into creative work, growing and developing skills and understanding. Creativity is fundamental to human life.

So it’s worth holding on to a version of my basic philosophy for sustaining a creative life: never embark on writing something which, if it doesn’t win the extrinsic reward you hope for (the longlisting, shortlisting, winning, commission, money, invitations, readership, contract, esteem, prize, uniform five stars, whatever) you will forever feel was a complete waste of your writing life.

Having said that, the only way to be sure the ratio of effort to success in competitions is 1:1 is if it’s actually 0:0, so it’s worth finding ways to motivate yourself to have a go.

Back on my Masters, I remember the late, great poet and writer Helen Dunmore talking about using short story and poetry competitions as a way of commissioning yourself. The length, theme and deadline give you something to start from, and in a curious way therefore take the pressure off, because if you’ve fulfilled the requirements then in a way you’ve succeeded: you’ve created something that didn’t exist before. And if it gets longlisted, or does even better, that’s even better of course, but it’s not the only value. Thinking this way can be less daunting that taking an existing story you’re super-proud of, and sending that in for judgement.

It can also help to enter more, not less: more stories, more poems, more competitions. I know money comes into it, and it’s harder with novels because there are fewer comps, but if it’s financially feasible, trying to make sure you always have some work out there dilutes the misery of any one shot not having hit the mark.

But I wonder if you just need a break? To go back to some fun writing for the hell of it, instead of the Next Major Project. Try some Appointments to Write or something similar: playful, nothing riding on it, if it doesn’t come off, tomorrow is another day ...