Our 2007 First Chapter Contest is now open! Win a "Chappy!"

Download and listen to our 20-minute contest 2007 podcast here

First Prize: A "Chappy" Award

• $500
• The two-volume print version of Literary Market Place (LMP) (a $299.95 value)
• An interview on The Writing Show
• Chapter posted on The Writing Show Web site.

Two Second Prizes:

• $100
• Chapter posted on The Writing Show Web site.

All Entrants Receive:

• 750 words of feedback
• One week's free access to LiteraryMarketPlaceOnline.com (a $19.95 value)!

Dates

• Early deadline May 15, 2007
• Late deadline June 15, 2007

Winners will be announced on November 15, 2007.

Entry fee:

• $35 if received by our early deadline of May 15, 2007
• $45 if received between May 16 and June 15, 2007

POPULAR CRIME FICTION AUTHOR C.J. BOX, who writes the Joe Pickett novels, will be part of our celebrity panel selecting the winners from the judges' short-list.

What We're Looking For

We want to find the world's best first chapter of an unpublished novel. Above all, you must tell a compelling story. That means that you have to grab us so quickly, so completely, that we can't stop reading, come earthquake, fire, flood, or pizza.

Your writing will be judged on the following five criteria:

1. Story. Is it a compelling read with a great hook? Are we engaged?
2. Style. Is the writing smooth and tight, without awkward constructions, extraneous verbiage, and redundancies?
3. Dialog. Is the dialog natural and does it move the story along?
4. Character. Are the characters interesting? Do we care about them?
5. Mechanics. Are grammar, spelling, and punctuation correct?

We're not necessarily looking for great literature or fancy writing. We just want an absorbing story. The point is to write tightly and economically. You don't have to write in a spare style like Hemingway, but you must make every word count. And please, watch those extra commas, capricious capitalization, overuse of individual words, and "it's" where you mean "its" and "their" where you mean "there!"

For more information about the contest, including rules and how to enter, see our Web site.

Sponsored by Literary Market Place, the ultimate insider's guide to the U.S. book publishing industry, covering every conceivable aspect of the business

Every story is told from the perspective, or point of view, of a narrator. The narrator is there to:

• Propel the story forward
• Set a pace for the story by revealing thoughts, events, and actions at critical times
• Create and reveal character
• Create suspense
• Control the reader's distance from characters and events.

How do you decide what sort of narrator to use? You have several major choices:

• First person
• Third person omniscient
• Third person limited omniscient.

In this part 1 of our mini-series on point of view in fiction, we'll explore the first-person narrator. Later we'll cover the other two popular choices and some lesser-used ones.

In the first person point of view, the narrator is a character in the story, which is told through his eyes using "I." A first-person narrator can be the protagonist of a story, a participant in a story, or a disinterested observer.

One advantage of first-person narration is that the narrator can present his own feelings and perceptions and build intimacy with the reader. "I" is so much more personal than "he." However, because he can't see everything that's going on or get inside others' heads, the narrator can only tell what he knows or has experienced personally. First-person narrators can be especially effective in crime novels, where the narrator uncovers the mystery at the same pace the reader does.

A caveat about first-person narrators: people (and therefore, characters) aren't always objective; some writers purposely exploit this reality and employ unreliable narrators to fool the reader. That's perfectly okay, and often a lot of fun.

When a first-person narrator tells a story, he almost always uses the past tense, which usually (but not always) implies that he knows how the story will end. For that to happen, he can't die before the story is complete, so the possibility of his death is removed. First-person stories told as diaries and letters are different, though. There the narrator may use past or present tense, but because each diary entry or letter is usually written around the time of the events rather than with hindsight, you can't conclude that the narrator will survive till the end.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens is a classic example of first-person narration. Look what Dickens does in the very first sentence:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

This narrator is capable of building a heady suspense. He knows how the story will turn out, but he's not going to let us in on the secret. You might suspect from this caginess that he's trying to manipulate us and isn't afraid to let us know that he's in control. Or, you could conclude that he's wishy-washy: perhaps David isn't sure whether he's strong or dependent, and he's attempting to resolve the question through the act of autobiography.

Note how David doesn't use the past tense, but the future ("I shall," "will be"). Not only does the future tense foreshadow, but it's intimate: the narrator is letting us in on his intentions and the questions he hopes to answer.

Contrast the sentence with something like this:

Whether David Copperfield turned out to be the hero of his own life, or whether that station was held by someone else, these pages will show.

In this case, the third-person narrator, who uses the past tense, comes off as paternalistic. There's no angst, no sense of mission. A third-person narrator can't say that the pages "must" show anything because he's just telling a story, not rising to a challenge. And trying to build suspense by asking the same questions David does makes the narrator seem precious. Changing the sentence to the future tense doesn't solve any of these problems:

Whether David Copperfield will turn out to be the hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by someone else, these pages will show.

That just sounds stupid. The narrator has no stake in whether David turns out one way or another. Only David does, so if the story is to be opened with that question, only David can tell it.

Consider these other examples of first-person narration:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down to the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Crazy Quilt, by Paula Paul. I am passing through this part of West Texas that used to be my home, on my way to visit my Aunt Cora in Lubbock. I will stay only a day or two. From there, I don't know where I'll go. I told Jeff, I told my husband, that I would be back in a week. The real reason for this trip is not to visit anyone. It is that Jeff and I need some time apart. That's my idea, not Jeff's.

This woman is straightforward (no fancy talk, no attempt to shift responsibility to someone else: "That's my idea, not Jeff's"), restless ("I will stay only a day or two"), pained ("Jeff and I need some time apart"), and on a quest ("passing through this part of West Texas that used to be my home," which means she's going back to her past to try to sort out her present). She's troubled, but there's no angst there: just the facts. We suspect that she'll be a clear, reliable narrator who will reveal herself through action rather than thought.

Next time we'll look at the third-person omniscient point of view. And don't miss my special podcast on point of view, coming up soon on The Writing Show.

I've just started playing around with the much-awaited Sophie, a "digital media assembly tool" for non-programmers from The Institute for the Future of the Book. This is an early release, so things are still a bit rough and undocumented, but I highly recommend trying it. You can embed remote images, videos, and audio in your text pages, and, if you want, make them play automatically at designated points by dragging them onto a timeline.

How might you use Sophie? Let's say you want to make reading your novel a sensory experience. You could include background music or other sound, similar to the way we at The Writing Show jazz up our annual Halloween readings. You could run a video behind a text-based poem, or your home movies next to your memoirs. You could create a Web 2.0 experience in which one person's marginal comments appear on every copy of the book wherever it lives, whoever owns it. Or, upload your book to a server and stream it over the Internet for a distance learning experience.

The impetus behind Sophie? The Institute for the Future of the Book says: "Sophie's raison d'etre is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats."

I highly recommend watching the QuickTime demonstration (click on "Watch a demo movie."). Then once you've created your masterpiece, let us know how it turns out!

Download Sophie here.

Here's an exercise to try any time you feel blocked.

Pick a word, an idea, or a song title and just go. Then take what you've written and expand on it: rhyme the word or phrase, add a character to it, examine its history, detail its sensory qualities, watch it interact with another object or idea, imagine how it sees the world, and so on.

Here's an example. Watch how each thought leads to the next:

1. "Strawberry Fields" (song title)
2. "Nothing is real" (line from the song)
3. Illusion vs. reality (idea)
4. A delusional character (character)
5. A character who gives the impression of sanity but who isn't completely in touch with reality (character)
6. A character who gives the impression of insanity but who is wiser than the rest of us (alternate character idea)
7. This reminds me of Kpax (fictional character based on this idea, use as inspiration)

In this little romp, I went from a song title to some character ideas. If I like the idea of a character who isn't what he or she seems, I can go deeper.

Here's another example:

1. Eagle (thing)
2. Legal (rhymes with "eagle")
3. Legal system (expanding on the idea of "legal")
4. Flaws in the legal system (further expansion on "legal" and an opportunity for conflict)
5. A crackerjack lawyer who gets guilty clients off (character)
6. Crime victim who comes face to face with the lawyer (character)

I've come up with two characters, and a plot driver! All because I was thinking of birds.

And a third:

1. Checkbook (a thing)
2. Balancing a checkbook (what you do with that thing)
3. Balance (an idea)
4. Losing one's balance (free associating with the word "balance")
5. Accidentally falling from a great height (an example of losing one's balance)
6. A would-be suicide who's threatening to jump, but doesn't really want to die (character)
7. Losing one's physical balance because of a loss of emotional balance (character development)

From my checkbook to a potentially interesting character.

Pretty cool, eh? A quick route from blocked to creative.

A 2006 Bowker survey of 13,000 American novels found that the most popular settings were England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

London and Rome were the only non-U.S. cities to make the top 10. In the U.S., California was the most popular state for setting novels, followed by Texas, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Where is your story set?

Press release here.

Upcoming shows:

April 23, 2007. Horror writer and filmmaker Darryl Sloan.

April 30, 2007. Corporate refugee Jean Durbahn opens her own editing business.

And coming up soon, we'll talk with novelist Rahsaan Ali (Carmello, a story about gangsters), extraordinary marketer L. Diane Wolfe (the Circle of Friends series), humorist Robert Skole (Jumpin' Jimminy: A World War II Baseball Saga), and thriller writer Jan Evan Whitford (Mystic Island).

We'll also hear from a writer who thinks self-publishing "exists solely to fill the wallets of the POD companies with money from writers' generally empty pockets."

On the drawing board: in-person writing groups, more on screenwriting,and point of view in fiction.

Have a question or topic you'd like covered on the show or in the newsletter? Want to write for us or be a guest host? See mistakes in my writing? Let me know.

--Paula B.

Last month we asked:

Which literary work inspired physicist Murray Gell-Mann to propose the name “quark” for a group of hypothetical subatomic particles?

The answer is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The line is, "Three quarks for Mr. Mark!"

This month's trivia question:

Which well-known English writer wrote a poem about metrical feet?

Answer next month.