Our 2007 First Chapter Contest closes June 15th!

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)!

Deadline June 15, 2007

Winners will be announced on November 15, 2007.

Entry fee: $45

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We want to find the world's best first chapter of an unpublished novel.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.

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

Last month we probed how first person narration works. This time we'll examine the third person narrator, both the "omniscient" and the "limited." I thought I understood this stuff, but in researching it, I've discovered whole new worlds.

Unlike the first person narrator, the omniscient narrator isn't a character. He's a disembodied being who can get inside all the characters' heads and see everything that is going on, or has gone on, or will go on in the story and beyond. This point of view gives the author unlimited freedom. He or she can focus on multiple characters simultaneously, go off on tangents about how things work or what's happened in history, and know things that no one in the story does.

But the price for all this power is keeping the reader at arm's length, affording us a limited view of what's going on inside characters' heads. Third person omniscient stories contain few moments in which we see the actual words characters are thinking. More likely, you'll see this kind of construction from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss Bingley warmly resented the indignity he had received, in an expostulation with her brother for talking such nonsense.

In this passage, we get a bit of a look at the characters' feelings and perceptions ("Elizabeth thought she could perceive," "Miss Bingley resented), but not much. Instead we get almost a bird's eye view of the action and dialog. We don't hear Elizabeth's thoughts; we're merely told that she thinks them.

If we were actually inside the characters' heads, we might get something like this:

Bingley has offended him, Elizabeth thought. I had better bite my lip.

Do you see the difference? Rather than the omniscient narrator telling us what Elizabeth thinks, we hear her thoughts. I've slipped into the third person limited point of view.

I misunderstood the difference between these two points of view until I started looking for examples of third person omniscient. Confident that most fiction was told from this point of view, I became increasingly confused when I couldn't find any--except in 19th century novels. I had been wrong. Most fiction is not told from the third person omniscient point of view. Not anymore.

I discovered this amazing fact by reading Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint. Card says that most fiction these days is told from the third person limited or first person point of view. The third person limited follows only one person at a time and looks over their shoulder. I didn't believe him. I thought third person limited would put the author in a straitjacket.

I was wrong. I looked through book after book. To my surprise, the stories I had thought were told in third person omniscient were almost all told in third person limited! The way authors can get out of the straitjacket is by switching points of view from one chapter or section to another. Start following one character, then switch to another. This way, you don't have to be limited to what just one character knows.

I was confused because the difference between the omniscient and limited points of view can be subtle, particularly because there are different degrees of third person limited narratives, as Orson Scott Card tells us:

• Light penetration. We see what the narrator sees and get inside his mind, but we don't experience the action through his eyes.
• Deep penetration. We see what the narrator sees and experience the action through his eyes.
• Cinematic. We see what the narrator sees and never see inside anyone's head.

Yikes! How can you tell the difference, and why would you even try to split these hairs?

We'll talk more about third person narration next month.

There are three basic responses you can use in dialogue:

1. Verbal (speech or talking)
2. Internal monologue (thoughts)
3. Body language/physical action.

The last two responses often serve as either a counterpoint or as an echo of what has been said. If you use them carefully, you change the meaning of what has been said. Examples:

"Why are you so late?" she asked.
Joel slung his keys across the room, barely missing her ear. "I told you I had to work."

"Why are you so late?" she asked.
"I told you I had to work." If you knew what I was really doing, he thought as he stared at her trusting face, you'd be afraid to ask.

And with no body language or internal monologue you get:

"Why are you so late?" she asked.
"I told you I had to work."

You should start a new paragraph every time you have a new speaker. Here are some other rules you might find helpful to remember as well:

• "Said" is one of the most invisible words in the English language. Readers will blip right past "said," but words like croaked, spit, hissed, snarled, snorted, etc. all call attention to themselves and detract from the conversation. And there is nothing worse than reading a descriptive tag that doesn't make sense, such as the following:

  "Put down the gun," she hissed.
  (Note that "hissing" implies the use of sibilants, and there are no "s sounds" in that bit of speech.)

• Avoid tagging dialogue attributes with adverbs. Adding such words as "loudly, quickly, happily, angrily" does not make good dialogue. Instead, show these emotions and/or actions with an action. Show anger by having your character do something that exhibits anger, such as pounding on the table with his shoe.
• Beware the talking heads. Some people try to drop all attributions, but this can lead to the reader counting lines of dialogue to figure out who is talking. You do need some identifying tags so that we can follow who is speaking, especially if your characters don't have any unusual speech patterns.
• All dialogue has beats--pauses in the conversation where the character is taking time to react to what has been said. These reactions are expressed in the form of physical action or thoughts and give the writer the opportunity to control the pace of the dialogue.

Jeanne Lyet Gassman is an award-winning writer whose works of fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers. She writes a regular column, "Jeanne's Writing Desk," for Mike's Writing Newsletter and teaches writing classes and workshops in her metro area. To learn more about Jeanne, please visit her Web site at jeannelyetgassman.com.

The May 7, 2007 issue of The New Yorker has a great article called "The CSI Effect: The truth about forensic science," by Jeffrey Toobin.

Surprise, surprise, it turns out that real forensic scientists, as opposed to those who play them on TV, express less than absolute certainty about the evidence they analyze. In evaluating hair and fibers in particular, practitioners experience high rates of error. Despite what Hollywood and the BBC depict, only DNA tests provide reliable conclusions.

A real forensic scientist, Lisa Faber, says, "We never use the word 'match.'" (ellipsis) "On TV, they always like to say words like 'match,' but we say 'similar' or 'could have come from' or 'is associated with.'"

The article explains that there are two types of DNA subject to forensic testing: nuclear and mitochondrial. Mitochondrial DNA can be extracted from hairs without roots; nuclear DNA cannot. Mitochondrial DNA tests cannot establish exact matches, but they do provide a basis for eliminating some suspects.

Television shows like CSI take great liberties with the truth. If they can do it, so can you. But you may just want to know what real scientists do.

Check it out!

R.R. Bowker reports that 8,970 new spoken word audio titles were published in the U.S. in 2006, down from the most recent five-year average of 10,900. Since the introduction of the spoken word audio format, a grand total of 202,111 audiobook titles have been released; 40 percent of those titles (79,038) have been published since 2000. There are more than 3,000 audiobook publishers in the U.S., with Brilliance, Random House, Blackstone, Recorded Books, BBC America, and Simon and Schuster accounting for most of the new releases.

The data come from Bowker's analysis of its Books in Print database.

Upcoming shows:

June 4, 2007. Literary manager Candace Lake discusses packaging scripts for Hollywood producers.

June 11, 2007. Roundtable #4: Face-to-Face Writing Groups with Gary Cheski, David Roth, and Sue Nading.

June 18, 2007. Mark Putnam of Plotastic explains why he's asking the world to help him decide what to write about.

June 25, 2007. Author Jeff DeRego takes a contrarian view of self-publishing and book marketing.

On the drawing board: point of view in fiction, screenwriting, writing for the Web, and R.N. Morris' The Gentle Axe.

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

The answer is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and here is his poem:

Metrical Feet--A Lesson for a Boy

Trochee trips from long to short;
>From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;---
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests
throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;---
First and last being long, middle short,
Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud
high-bred Racer.
If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water,
and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres
to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make
Derwent a poet,---
May crown him with fame, and must win him the
love
Of his father on earth and his Father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not
from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S. T.
Coleridge.

This month's trivia question: In what film do oranges presage an impending death or close call?

Answer next month.