Mike Murphy's writing diary: Problems with Grandma

Monday, 28 July 2014

Problems with Grandma

I'm having problems with the character of Debby, the POV character I am using. Part of the reason is that she is one of a set of characters who are all of equal importance but using her as the POV gives her weight over the others and this is not helping the structure of the story which depends on the interaction between them and the different skills and personality traits each contributes.
Originally I wrote in omniscient but changed to one POV after someone told me this is the latest trend and that omniscient isn't acceptable any more. Maybe I misunderstood that but it doesn't matter. Looking over Grandma's shoulder isn't working.
My alternatives are to rewrite the whole thing in omniscient or, as one person has suggested, write each chapter from a different character's POV.
Either would be a massive task given the current partly completed draft is around 80,000 words. Still, may be better to rewrite now than to wait until I have a draft of 100,000 plus.
Another part of the problem is that I am finding being this close to a character is uncomfortable. I need her to take various actions but find it distracting if I have to justify why she is doing it. As soon as I write this I begin wondering if this is not a serious flaw in my writing, Perhaps I do not get inside my characters enough but use them as pawns or cyphers to tell my story or get my own views across. If so, I need to do some hard thinking about what I am writing and why I am doing it. It could explain why I have been successful with short stories, where there is less time for character development, and not with novels where the reader wants character development often at the expense of plot development.
A lot to think about.

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Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.