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Mastering Point of View - Live Online Workshop

[0:00:00] David Loy: Hi and thanks for joining us for this live workshop on The Jerry

Jenkins Writers Guild. I’m your host, David Loy, and today we are excited to cover a topic that so many Guild members have been asking about: Point of View. Your guide for today’s session is, as always, Jerry Jenkins. Having written over 185 books, no one is more experienced on this topic than he is.

Now, this is a detailed topic. We always encourage Guild members

to take full advantage of both the recording sessions—the recording of these sessions and the transcripts that we provide. But Jerry, this subject, “Mastering Point of View,” is one we’ve been anticipating for quite some time—and for a good reason.

Jerry Jenkins: Well, that’s right. We’ve already had Live Online Workshops on

“How to Become a Ferocious Self-Editor,” and then “Dialogue That Grabs Your Reader,” which were both foundational writing topics, but we promised from the beginning that we wanted our Founding Members to tell us in the Forum what writing elements they most struggle with. For weeks, this subject of Point of View has dominated those pages.

David Loy: It really has, and from all the discussion both you and the team

have seen on it in the Forum, it seems to be a topic that confuses writers at all levels, from beginner to experienced. Why is that, is it really that complicated?

Jerry Jenkins: For some reason it seems to be, and because of all the

terminologies surrounding it it can sound that way, but I don’t think it has to be. So my goal today is to simplify Point of View so we can master it once and for all. It is, after all, a crucial tool in our writer’s utility belt, so it behooves us to get a handle on it.

David Loy: All right, so what’s your plan for today? How will you simplify it? Jerry Jenkins: Well, I’m going to do two things: first, just to explain the

terminology. I don’t know how else to put it, but there are simply a lot of words associated with the topic of Point of View. I think it helps just to define them so we’re all on the same page and know

 

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what we’re talking about. It doesn’t have to sound like some high-

level grade school course. So I want to put the cookies on the lower shelf where we can all reach them, as they say.

Secondly, I plan to leave a lot more time for Q&A today than we

usually do, just so I can be sure that I’ve done my job and that people are getting it. We do have a lot to cover and I don’t want to assume that I’ve clarified everything without everybody getting a chance to get their questions answered.

David Loy: Great. Then let’s jump right into “Mastering Point of View.” Guild

members, as you are thinking of your questions during Jerry’s content today, go ahead and type them into the chat box that’s on your screen. As Jerry just mentioned, we are going to devote a lot more time than normal to live questions today, so make sure you type those questions as soon as you think of them. We will try to get to as many as possible during our time together. Okay Jerry, we are ready if you are.

Jerry Jenkins: All right. And keeping with my goal to keep it simple, I want to

define Point of View. What do we mean by the term? Point of View is the perspective from which you tell your story, fiction or nonfiction. If you’re a beginner or want to be a writer you’ve likely been a reader all your life and are just now starting to try your hand at this writing thing. It may have never occurred to you that you would do anything but take a pen in hand or sit at the keyboard and simply start. You literally may not have noticed in anything you’ve ever read that the author told the story from any perspective other than his or her own, simply describing events in fiction or nonfiction form.

Now, in old-fashioned, classic fiction, the author knew everything

and told you everything from the thoughts and intents of every character, to even what was happening off-stage. Often it would go like this: “Meanwhile, little did she know that on the other side of town, the villain was plotting her demise.” That, as you will come to see, is an example of the omniscient viewpoint.

Now, in nonfiction, this is still used. Even if you use fictional

techniques in your nonfiction piece and tell the occasional fictional anecdote to make your point, in nonfiction your job is to, as I said, make a point, and you are the omniscient narrator. To put it in another way, Point of View is your perspective character.

 

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Nowadays, the fashion…the trend in fiction is away from an

omniscient narrator to one Point of View character at a time. The writer is limited to that person as the perspective character.

Now, this is where the first point of confusion arises. Many writers

believe that this means the character himself or herself is then naturally narrating in the first person, but that’s not necessarily so. Notice the opening of Left Behind where my perspective character is the airline pilot. I’m writing in the third person limited, past tense about him. But he is clearly my Point of View character.

[0:05:33] The first line reads, “Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he

had never touched.” I‘m the author and the narrator, but I have limited myself to one perspective character, and as we proceed today, you’ll see what that limitation means. The Point of View, or perspective character, simply acts as your camera. So view that character that you’ve chosen as that—a movie camera. And here is a cardinal rule of Point of View, so get this if you get nothing else today.

You’re limited to one Point of View character per scene,

preferably one per chapter, ideally one per book. In Left Behind, I alternated between two perspective characters, but

I always made it crystal clear when I switched between those two. For instance, as I say, I started with my airline pilot Rayford Steele. But when I switched to journalist Buck Williams, I made it crystal clear with the reader that I was doing that. I left extra space between paragraphs. I inserted what we call a typographical dingbat, which were, in the case of Left Behind, three asterisks in the center of the line. Then I used terminology like, “Meanwhile,” and then I set the new location, “in Los Angeles,” and then I introduced the new character with his full name, “Buck Williams was hunched over his laptop...” So now we know we’re in a different place, different time, different character—and that’s our new perspective character.

Now in later Left Behind titles, when the scope of the novels

became global, I used as many as five different perspective characters. But again, I made clear to the readers who my Point of View character was at all times.

Now, I’ve got a novel releasing at the end of May, and I used only

one perspective character for that entire novel. So that makes it

 

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really clear with the reader. There’s no switching, no worrying

about who’s your perspective character at that point. Imagining our perspective character as a movie camera reminds us that we’re limited to only what our Point of View characters sees, hears, knows, understands, and thinks. So how do you know when you’ve violated the cardinal rule of Point of View: one perspective character per scene.

Here’s an example of what it might look like if I had forgotten that

I had a single movie camera as a perspective character. Now—again back to the first page of Left Behind—I start by saying, “Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched.” What if I then said, “Meanwhile, his co-pilot was wondering what Rayford was thinking as he gazed out the cockpit window?”

David Loy: So Jerry, is that what’s meant by the term head-hopping? Jerry Jenkins: Exactly, and we’re going to get into that even more as we discuss

the different types of Points of View. David Loy: Well, great. Well, let’s do that right after I remind everyone how to

be sure to get their questions into the queue. Simply type your question into that chat box on your screen, and we’ll tackle as many as possible during the Q&A session at the end. Jerry is eager to know where you are and where you may be struggling on this topic, and I’m already seeing several great questions come in, so make sure that you participate in the question and answer time that we have together.

Secondly, I want to take just a minute to remind everyone of the

terrific content that’s already available inside The Jerry Jenkins Writers Guild. First of all, the Live Workshop, just like we’re doing today. The first workshop from Jerry was, “How to Become a Ferocious Self-Editor.” The second one, as he mentioned previously, was, “Dialogue that Grabs Your Reader.” Now, the material in each of these workshops was terrific, and other Guild members have raved about what they learned. But remember at the end of those sessions, just like we’re going to do today, Jerry answered Guild members’ questions and the Q&A session was directly related to each of those topics, so make sure you check those out if you haven’t already.

Also, the Master Classes. These are interviews where Jerry is

speaking with several notable authors and other industry experts.

 

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They are available in the Guild right now and included already

inside the Guild are interviews with Chris Fabry, Jane Friedman, Donald Miller. In fact, our next Master Class session is releasing next week—April 5th to be precise. That session is with one of the best writing teachers in the country, Dr. Dennis Hensley. Now, Jerry you’ve known him for quite a while, right?

[0:10:31] Jerry Jenkins: I have, Doc Hensley is one of my best friends. He really is, I think,

the best writing coach in the country. He heads up the Professional Writing program at Taylor University. I first heard him speak probably 35 years ago. He only spoke for about 20 minutes at a writer’s conference. I still remember everything he said and I vowed at that time that I would never hold a writer’s conference without at least inviting Doc to speak and I’ve maintained that vow ever since.

If he’s available, he always accepts and his stuff is new and fresh

every time, he never disappoints, he’s almost always a favorite, and we have recorded this session that we’re going to release Tuesday. It is just chockfull of stuff. I mean, you have to fasten your seatbelt and make sure you’ve got your pen and paper handy because he’s just full of great information. So I really look forward to that Tuesday Master Class session.

David Loy: Absolutely. So we’ll release that Tuesday April 5th and that will be

the newest in our series of Master Class interviews. Also, the Manuscript Repair and Rewrite sessions are an excellent source for you, and this is where Jerry walks through a detailed editing of the first page of a Guild member’s manuscript and so much can be learned by watching Jerry in his editing process. You can get so much knowledge from watching him work on other people’s material. You can also submit the first page of your manuscript to be reviewed and edited by Jerry on our future sessions, so make sure that you’ve taken full advantage of that.

Finally, the Office Hours sessions, where it’s nothing but Guild

member Q&A live with Jerry where you get to ask him whatever is going on. So many of these live workshops are specific in topic and we try to keep the Q&A sessions like today focused on [the specific topic of the day], but the Office Hours session is wide open. That’s where you get to ask Jerry whatever questions you have about wherever you are in the process.

 

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All right Jerry, I’m done talking. I think we are ready for more on

Point of View. Jerry Jenkins: Good, let’s get into the primary Points of View. There are many,

but I’m going to cover just three and that should be all we need to concern ourselves with. In fact, these have a few variations each, but I’ll try to make them simple and narrow them to just a few that you’ll most likely use.

First, there is first person. This is telling a story using the “I, we”

construction. Here’s an example from Moby-Dick. That classic novel starts this way: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” That’s first person.

Then there is second person, which uses the “you, your”

construction, which is rare. You may not even remember ever reading a novel that uses that construction. It’s been said that second person can bring a sense of immediacy to a novel, but as I say, it’s not often used. Jay McInerney used it in Bright Lights, Big City this way: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the trend is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You were at a night club talking to a girl with a shaved head.”

That’s second person, and you can see how it forces the reader, in

essence, to become a character, and how difficult that might be to maintain for 300 or 400 pages. I don’t recommend it, especially for beginners. In fact, it’s not something I would foresee myself ever using.

Now, the most commonly used Point of View is third person,

wherein you use the “he, she, it, they” construction. I already gave an example of that from the start of Left Behind. So let me bring that and read you the first four paragraphs to illustrate a third person Point of View narrative: “Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot above the Atlantic en route to a 6 a.m. landing at Heathrow, Rayford had pushed from his mind thoughts of his family.” That’s third person.

[0:15:00]

 

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David Loy: So Jerry, those are the primary Points of View: first, second, and

third person. That seems straightforward enough, so what makes it so complicated?

Jerry Jenkins: Good question, David. While there are really only three Points of

View worth worrying about, there are many variations and options. For instance, each of these Points of View can be used in the present tense or the past tense, and as I mentioned, each [must] be limited to one perspective character at a time, which is what I recommend, or they can be used by the author omnisciently, which carries with it a Pandora’s Box of dangers I’ll point out as we go.

With that said, many of the great classics were written in both first

person and third person omniscient Points of View. One of the most widely acclaimed and bestselling current young adult series of all time is written in the third person omniscient Point of View. So there are exceptions to the rule.

Let’s start with first person present tense. I actually recommend

writing in the first person for many beginning novels because it’s a good way to learn limiting your viewpoint to one perspective character. In fact, my first 13 novels were written in that first person, from the perspective of not my lead character but her love interest. However, I do not recommend first person present tense. I find that a conceit, distracting, and almost impossible to maintain—and rarely successful.

The example I’m about to read to you, on the other hand, you may

recognize as the opening paragraph to one of the most successful literary franchises in written history. It goes like this, “When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My finger’s stretched out in Prim’s warmth, but finding only the rough canvas covers the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with her mother. Of course she did. This is the day of the reaping.”

That is the first paragraph from The Hunger Games by Suzanne

Collins, and it is an example of the first person present tense. Now, if you have a colossal talent like hers and an idea as cosmic as that, feel free to ignore my counsel and render your narrative from any perspective you wish.

Now, moving on to first person past tense, this is the most common

way to employ the first person Point of View. It’s the way I wrote my first 13 novels, and as I said, the Moby-Dick example above

 

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was first person and while it started in the present tense—“Call me

Ishmael”—it immediately switched to the past with the lines “Some years ago, I thought I would...” et cetera. Now, the McInerney Bright Lights, Big City sample I read was actually in the second person present tense, where he says, “But here you are and you cannot say…” etcetera, but I’m not going to take the time to cite the second person past tense examples because, as I say, the likelihood of your resorting to second person in either tense for an entire novel is simply too remote.

So let’s move right on to third person present tense. Many find this

just too weird to read. You won’t find many novels written in this way. It would sound like this, “Fritz skips out to the garage, fishing in his pocket for his keys. He slips behind the wheel and starts the car.” You can imagine how tough this would be to maintain as a writer, and how distracting it would be to the reader.

By far the most common choice for modern fiction is third person

past tense. Almost any novel you pick up is going to be written in that perspective. You’d think, then, that by choosing that option you can hardly go wrong. However, danger still lurks—and here’s why:

Because so many of us were raised on the classics with their

omniscient author/narrator, it seems ingrained in us to want to know all and tell all about every character on stage and off. We even want to tell unseen things and things from the future. Such miraculous foretellings were often worded something like this: “Little did our hero know that 20 miles away, what would happen to him the next day was already being planned.”

Now, by and large, traditional publishers are not buying fiction

from an omniscient viewpoint, and self-published fiction written from an omniscient viewpoint doesn’t succeed. The omniscient viewpoint simply does this: it does not limit itself to one character. It knows the thoughts and intents of the hearts and minds of every character. It knows and tells why things happen and what is about to happen. In essence, the author/narrator plays God.

Now, in nonfiction, the omniscient narrator’s common and makes

sense, because you’re trying to make a point. You’re trying to persuade and so you know everything and tell everything. But if you use a fictional anecdote here in nonfiction, pick one perspective character for that scene just as you would in a novel.

 

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[0:20:23] Now, I mentioned earlier that the best-selling young adult series in

history gloriously breaks this rule. So if your name is J.K. Rowling and you can write stories as inventive as Harry Potter that sell enough books in 10 years to make you a billion dollars in royalties, again, you have my whole-hearted permission to ignore this advice.

The classic books we grew up on were nearly all written from this

omniscient perspective, and so when I critique and criticize manuscripts written this way and urge beginning writers to lean instead towards the third person past tense, I often hear this argument that Hawthorne or Dickens or Austen or some other great literary giant set the standard for omniscient. However, if you want to save yourself a lot of wasted time and grief, trust me and follow the current trend, which caters to the taste of the modern reader with a nanosecond attention span of a gnat. That will save you from the pitfalls of the following bugaboo.

Head-hopping is the problem that results from employing the

omniscient Point of View. Once you establish your perspective character, or your camera that we talked about, you’re limited to that one character’s brain in the sense that you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel only what they do.

Writers say to me, Then how can I develop any other characters?

Here’s an example. Let’s say Jeannie Gill is your perspective character. She’s late for a college class. She’s running, arms full of books. She arrives while Professor Billings is in full lecture. She slinks into her chair, hoping he won’t embarrass her or give her a look.

Now, we already know a lot about her. She cares what he thinks.

She’s stressed about being late again. Now, an amateur writer will make the mistake now of head-hopping. They’ll say—sometimes it’s in the same sentence or paragraph—“Professor Billings was distracted by her as she came in, frustrated that she was late again, wondering what he was going to do about her. Should he ask to see Jeannie after class to find out what was going on with her?” That’s a violation of Point of View because we’ve suddenly jumped from her head into his. But we’re not in his Point of View. We’re in hers.

 

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So the writer asks, How can we know anything about him when

Jeannie is our camera? Here’s how. He can give her a scowl, stop lecturing, press his lips together. Now, can we say he was mad at her, frustrated with her? Not unequivocally, no…not unless we’re mind readers or—wait for it—omniscient, which we are not. But let’s say he does all that above. He gives her a scowl, stops lecturing, presses his lips together and even says, “I’m glad you could join us, Ms. Gill.” Because we’re seeing that from her perspective, we don’t have to say unequivocally what he is thinking or feeling.

We get it from her perspective what she thinks he is doing. It

seems like he’s mad. It’s obvious. He’s sarcastic. Now she feels the heat rise from her neck to her face and she says, “Sorry sir, it won’t happen again,” and he says—because we can hear it from her, she is the camera—“I’ll believe that when I see it.” We learn more about him, don’t we? He has a right to be frustrated, but isn’t he being a little insensitive?

Now, what if he tells Jeannie after class that he was in his office all

evening last night grading papers, she could have come in and talked to him about whatever her problem is? But she saw him leaving at 4 p.m. and happened by his office an hour later and it was dark. Now we’ve learned that he is a liar, too. So even though we’re never inside his head—in his Point of View, we’re limited to her—we learn a lot about this character even without being in his Point of View. That’s how we stay with our perspective character, our camera, our Point of View, and develop other characters without head-hopping.

Now, using multiple perspective characters. Use multiple

perspective characters with caution and always employ the Golden Rule: think reader first and, as I said before, make it crystal clear every time you switch between your Point of View characters. I mentioned how I used extra space and that dingbat, full name, location.

I used two perspective characters in Left Behind and then some of

the later volumes I expanded to three and eventually in the end when the story was really getting universal I used five different perspective characters. As I mentioned, too, I have a new novel coming out soon where I used only one perspective character for the entire novel. That sort of idea makes it really easy on the reader.

 

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[0:25:34] Now, choose your perspective character with care. It should be the

one who has the most to gain or lose in the scene. Most often that’s going to be your lead, your hero or your heroine.

Now what is deep POV? That’s a fairly new term and it’s being

bandied about…you’re seeing lots of articles and books about Point of View. To my mind it’s an empty term. It’s supposed to mean a new kind of super Point of View that takes the reader closer to the story and gets deeper into the character. So instead of saying, “The character looked and saw a train go by,” you establish your perspective character and then just say, “The train blew past,” and the reader knows the character saw and felt it because he’s been established.

I say you should always write like that. Establish your perspective

character in such a way that you never have to say he turned and looked and saw or listened and heard, just describe what’s going on. We’ll know it’s from his vantage point because we’re in his Point of View. That’s deep POV because it’s the very definition of Point of View.

The key is to make readers forget they’re reading. That’s our job.

That’s our goal. Pull them into the story and get out of their way. That’s my major quarrel with the gimmicky forms of Point of View. The reader becomes too aware of the writer and this interrupts the fictional construct. Our goal as artists is to get out of the way of our own art. I don’t want my readers to even be aware that I am there. I want them to be drawn into the story, unaware they’re even turning pages.

I hope that’s been of some help and I’m sure it sparked a lot of

questions. David Loy: I’m sure it has. Jerry, I’ve seen several comments from people

saying they’ve already learned so much, and even how today’s session has been worth the price of their membership. That’s always nice to hear, but I agree there’s a lot of value here even though it’s been presented in somewhat of a shorter timeframe than what we typically do.

So we are going to go ahead and move into the question and

answer session in just a second. But because Point of View is such a detailed topic, I want to take this opportunity to again remind and

 

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encourage Guild members to take full advantage of the recording

of these sessions. We always want you to be able to go back and listen and re-listen and take notes as needed, but this session specifically might be one that you want to carve out some additional time to do so. We should have this recording posted inside the Guild within the next 48 hours or so, and as with all of our content, you’re always able to go back and listen to it as many times as you like. And again these are resources that we truly believe will help you in your writing process.

All right, so let’s move into the question and answer session. Jerry,

as I said, we’ve got dozens of questions already pouring in and for those who are just joining us, remember we have intentionally left a lot more time for this portion today. As you know, during Live Workshops we typically allot 30 minutes for question and answer sessions.

Today Jerry and our team thought it would be a little bit more

beneficial to you to carve out about an hour. We believe that you can learn more by listening to Jerry talk specifically to people’s situations and also giving people more of an opportunity to ask their questions and have Jerry directly address as many Guild members as possible.

All right, well let’s get started. Let’s jump into some questions.

Jerry, the first one comes from Rebecca. She says, “Jerry, I’m working on a fantasy-allegory novel and I have a character that represents God-like. As such, he is omniscient so I introduced him in the first chapter using omniscient Point of View in that chapter. It seems to work for most writers that have read it, but is that too great a risk when presenting to a publisher?”

Jerry Jenkins: Well, that’s sort of a unique situation because the difference is

your character is omniscient rather than you as the author. So it would make sense if it fits the character for the character to know all if His personality is that He is God. So I do think that’s a unique situation. In fact, it sounds kind of intriguing, and not knowing the story or whether the other characters know that that’s true of this character, it could be interesting. And make sure, obviously, that your other characters don’t have that gift. So when He tells them things about themselves that no one else could know, you can get some pretty interesting reactions from them as they slowly come to realize there’s something supernatural and special about this character. So that could work. I could see that working.

 

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[0:30:53] David Loy: All right, question from Sarah: “Point of View can change the

entire tone of a novel. What is a practical way to determine what Point of View a novel should be written in?”

Jerry Jenkins: I wish there was a practical way. Sometimes it just takes a lot of

blood, sweat, and tears. I remember I was asked to write a novelization of a movie. The movie was called Hometown Legend. It was a high school football picture, and movies have different sorts of perspectives because the camera is limited by its lens. So wherever that lens goes you get to see what’s happening and you don’t feel like you’re necessarily limited to one character.

So I watched the movie and I read the script, but how do you do

that with a novel? Because you do have to pick a perspective, and I was thinking, Well, it’s a story about a head football coach and how he was misunderstood and people thought he was gruff and mean and nasty. And yet it turns out he is a softie, and he had his demons and he’d lost his own son on a football field, etcetera, etcetera. There was a little love story in there among a couple of high school kids and there was a team. It was almost Disney-esque, where this team that wasn’t expected to do much almost wins a championship.

So there’s all kinds of ways to tell the story, and I remember

battling for a couple of weeks, whose perspective do I tell the story? I tried from the coach perspective. I tried from the cheerleader. I tried from the newcomer who becomes a star, and it wasn’t working.

All of a sudden, one of the characters sort of spoke to me and I’m

not mystical-type writer, but it just worked and I even…he even spoke to me in his own sort of dialect. So I wrote it just the way I heard it in my head, and as I recall, I’m doing this from memory, but, the story opens with him saying—he doesn’t even speak in complete sentences—he just said, “Name’s Cal Sawyer, and I got a story starts about 10 years ago when I was assistant coach in this little high school in South Alabama.” So he was speaking to me in this Southern dialect, not full sentences, and he was the assistant coach. So he had that perspective of being able to tell about this head coach he worked for, and these kids who came in, and this cheerleader he knew, and he knew people in town. He’d been there for…he was the guy who’d been there forever. So that worked for that novel.

 

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So you just have to kind of play with all the elements and figure

out what character is going to tell that story. I mentioned earlier in my training here that my first novels were written in the first person. It helped me learn to limit myself to one person. It wasn’t my lead character. The lead character in this novel is…they are called the “Margo Mysteries,” so she should have been probably…a lot of people would have written them in her perspective, but the person who knew her better than she herself was her love interest, her boyfriend who became her fiancé and eventually he married her in that story. He is the narrator, and it just worked better for that novel.

So only you can answer that, but you know your cast of characters

and they should go through whatever exercises you use to know the backstory and the background of your characters. Even stuff that won’t appear in the book, in the novel, but that you need to know to tell the story—that will help you determine who your perspective character is going to be, too.

David Loy: All right, Lorraine asks, “In my Letters Out of Africa book, my

family are the main characters. There will be a chapter focusing on answered prayers and miracles, which will include other characters. I’m afraid I’m going to be breaking all sorts of POV rules. How do I handle this dilemma?”

[0:35:00] Jerry Jenkins: It’s going to be tricky. Sometimes when people do stories like that,

they’ll use a different perspective character for each chapter. It can be fun and interesting because it sounds like it’s a nonfiction book. So you’re talking about the history of a season or some years in Africa with various things happening. I could see…you may be starting with your story or your husband’s story of some years or some dramatic events, and then maybe the next chapter is the oldest child doing his or her favorite events or highlights.

But when you come to events that overlap, maybe something is

more important to you than it would be to one of your kids, but they certainly were aware of it. So maybe you had a dramatic thing that happened. It affected you, but they weren’t there when it happened—but they saw the aftermath. They heard about that time you are with another person and that dramatic thing happened and maybe you were injured or you were sick or you survive it or it aggrieved you and they could tell.

 

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So, they’re telling about their events and their miraculous

experiences and their drama. Somewhere in their story they’ll talk about that time when their mother suffered from this event, so that you’ll see the different perspectives. But I would say work hard on limiting your Point of View. Once you’ve established who the Point of View character is for that chapter, stick with that.

I talked a little bit earlier about how you can learn about other

characters even though you’re limiting yourself to that one. Whereas like the Jeannie Gill character I mentioned, we learned about her professor by what she heard and saw and observed. We learned that he is deceptive. We learned that he is insensitive. We learned he’s not afraid to embarrass her in front of her classmates, lies to her about his office time…but we’re not in his head. We don’t know why he does this, but we learn a lot about him from her perspective. You can do the same with your perspective characters in each chapter.

David Loy: All right. That’s a great question, Lorraine. Thank you so much for

asking that. Jerry, there’s a couple of great comments that are coming in as well. Gwen says, “I just wanted to thank you, Jerry, for making this lesson and all the others. I have been noticing big changes in my work since joining the Guild.” Congratulations Gwen, that’s terrific to hear. Thanks for letting us know.

We also had someone write in…let’s see, Carol says that she loves

Doc. He is a great teacher. Jerry, I know you agree with that. I know you’re excited about Doc’s interview releasing.

Jerry Jenkins: That is great to hear—both of those comments are great to hear

because I know this stuff is tricky. Even when I am just doing the training, I’m hearing the terminology and thinking, Oh boy, this stuff all sounds so similar, and you think, What is the difference between the first person present and the first person past tense and third person this and that. And you’re thinking, Boy, unless you’ve done it and sat there and used these different ones and seen what works and what doesn’t, it can sound like Greek. I realize that. I’m trying to make it sound simple, but you just have to do it. But it is gratifying to hear that people are learning and growing, and that’s really the goal.

We’re not telling people that are brand new beginners that in three

weeks you’re going to be a New York Times bestseller. We’re just saying wherever you are on the journey, within a few weeks and a

 

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few months we want you to be able to look back and say, Wow, I

really have grown. If all you want to do is write a journal or a little history of your

family, we want you to be able to say it’s better than it would have been if I hadn’t taken this training. If you’re serious about making a career of writing, we want you to be able to say that the training is here—if you give yourself to it you’re going to see yourself growing by leaps and bounds. I do appreciate hearing that, and yeah, you’re preaching to the choir about Doc Hensley, you can bet on that. And you’re going to really enjoy Tuesday’s session with him.

David Loy: Absolutely. Great question from Brock: “Jerry, when you are

writing as-told-to, how much license do you take to fill in gaps and thoughts and emotions from your subject’s Point of View if you didn’t precisely capture it during your interviews. Do you just go with your gut and later validate with your subject during the rewrite phase if that was how they felt or what they might have been thinking?”

Jerry Jenkins: That’s a really good question, and I have a motto that I use, or an

adage, whatever you want to call it, and I established this upfront. I’ve done an awful lot of as-told-to first person autobiographies, probably done 20 or 25 of those in my career. It’s one of the first things I tell subjects.

We’ll get together and talk about…the publisher wants to do this

and they have to decide what writer they are going to use and we’re in that courting phase. I say, Let me tell you how this works. If we get together, I would interview you on tape. We’d get all the stuff I can imagine and try to ask every question I want to. Then I would put it all in chronological order, and then I would write the book. I’ll try to record…catch your voice, write it from your standpoint—and I want to sound like you. I won’t always. I’ll use words that you won’t recognize and you’ll say “That doesn’t sound like me” and “I wouldn’t say it that way.” But my adage or my motto is, “You have full veto power over every word.”

[0:40:55] That gives people a sense of comfort, because their biggest fear is,

they say, “Well, I’m not writer. It’s my life story but I’m not a writer so I need you to write it for me.” But their biggest fear is I’m going to run off with it. It’s going to the publisher. The publisher is going to say “This is great. We like it. We’re going to

 

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print it,” and now you just sit back and hope it sounds like you.

Then it comes out and people go, “Wow, did you believe…did you really say this? Did you really think that? Did you really…” They go “No, not quite, but I’m giving him literary license.” I don’t believe in that.

So I try to get to know them and I hear the story, and a lot of times

people…while I’m listening to them, I think I understand and hear, [but] as I’m writing I don’t have them right there in the next room—maybe they are a thousand miles away by now and I can’t reach them by phone or email or whatever right then. So as I’m writing I am just saying, “Well here’s what I would have felt like at that time. Here’s what I would have thought,” and I didn’t get what the person…how the person reacted.

This happened, I’ll give you an example. I was…one of my bios

was Walter Payton. He was talking about…he got a scholarship to a university and he went there to see his brother because his brother is already at this university to play. I’m sorry, he got a scholarship somewhere else but on the way there he went to see his brother at a local university. While he was there, the coach said, “Walter you would be better off coming here to be with your brother—be closer to home, and here’s what I will guarantee you. You’ll play, you’ll learn, you’ll grow, and I’ll take care of you.”

It was enough of a conversation to convince him to give up his

scholarship at a bigger university and play there. He knew what he was sacrificing—maybe national notoriety, etcetera. But he didn’t give me much of the conversation. He just said, “What he said convinced me to do that.” That’s a monumental conversation to change a kid’s mind like that. Now, he was afraid of being homesick, and to disappoint the big university, and maybe he was being weak, or whatever.

But with all my background in sports and in sports writing, I had to

imagine. What would that coach have said to him to convince him? So I made it up, and I just tried to think what he would have said. And so then when I sent that chapter to Walter, and I said, “Remember what I told you. You have full veto power over every word, so correct me if I’m wrong on this.” And I’ll never forget him saying, “This looked like you were there. That is what he said. How did you know that?” I said, “Well, I was guessing, but I’ve been around long enough…” And so it worked. So that’s what you do.

 

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But it’s a great question, because you do have to give your subject

full veto power, and make sure they adhere to it. That’s checking back, and sometimes you’ll write something that’s brilliant, and I’ve had this happen where they go, “Uh, yeah, it’s really great but it’s not what happened and it doesn’t sound like me and you need to put it this way.” You just grieve over the loss of your great prose, but it has to be—especially when it’s nonfiction and it’s somebody else’s story and life—it needs to be their words. You need to get out of the way and let them tell you their story, and in that case you’re simply recording the facts.

David Loy: Great question, Brock. Thank you so much for sending that. Jerry,

I’m getting a couple of questions about flashbacks. Richard writes, “How would you handle flashbacks?” Then Patty writes, “Jerry, what are your thoughts about flashback technique, and what is the best way to handle this without pulling the reader out of the story or the character’s Point of View?”

Jerry Jenkins: Flashbacks are becoming passé. [0:45:00] It’s hard to sell flashbacks to editors anymore because they do tend

to jar the reader out of the fictional construct. The new answer—and one of our future Master Class subjects is going to be DiAnn Mills, she is a novelist who really knows how to do this well—her solution to this flashback dilemma is an expert use of backstory. And backstory is…it doesn’t sound like it’s much different from a flashback, but it is. It’s where you layer this in during dialogue and during inner dialogue, and they’re hints.

So you’ve got action going. You’ve got a chronological story

happening. The characters are going from here to there and getting things done and there is a quest or a challenge or something that they’re dealing with. A character will say something like, “This is the worst thing that’s happened to us,” and “…the biggest challenge we’ve had since Detroit,” and the main character says “I don’t even want to think about Detroit. Don’t bring that up again. It’s the reason I don’t sleep well,” and they leave it at that, and the reader is like, Wow, what happened in Detroit? What are they talking about?

Maybe another chapter later, there’s an incident. Maybe there’s

action. Maybe there’s a shootout or a fighter, an argument or something, and there will be a mention that the main character failed in some respect. Or DiAnn Mills writes about CIA agents

 

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and this agent did something out of protocol or didn’t do

something as they were trained to do, and another character again says, “That’s what got you in trouble in Detroit.” Now we know a little more. They’ve gotten in trouble. They got written up. They got reprimanded for whatever happened in Detroit.

So as you keep going, more and more comes up about whatever

that was in Detroit. Instead of flashing back and telling this whole incident, we’re getting backstory. What happened before these books started, what happened before this chapter started that isn’t a background that has shaped this character and made them who they are. Why are they afraid now of heights, or why are they afraid now of automatic weapons, or why are they afraid of commitment or relationships or whatever, and you’re going, This is what real life is like.

Like my wife and I, we don’t sit in the car and have some

flashback to when our oldest son was born or whatever trauma we might have had and when one of our kids had an illness or stuff like that. We don’t just all of a sudden have a conversation that takes us 20 years ago and we rehash the whole thing. It’s part of our backstory. It’s part of our life, so we can do that in shorthand.

We had one of our sons that had a routine operation a few years

ago and they over-medicated him in a recovery room. He stopped breathing and they have crash carts coming and revived him. You can imagine how traumatic that was. When they usher you out and bring in 10 people with a crash cart, that’s life and death. It shook us to our core because if they hadn’t succeeded or somebody hadn’t noticed, he would have died. It turned out it was…they took care of it and he was fine, but when we mention that, we don’t rehash the whole thing. We just say…we hear somebody else having a trauma with their kids and we say, “We know about that because of what happened to Mike.” And that’s all we say, “Because of what happened to Mike.” That’s all we need to say.

So that’s how it needs to be in your book. But then for the sake of

the reader—because they want to know—each time you mention it, you give them a little more backstory until finally, somebody comes on the scene that—maybe it’s the person…whatever happened in Detroit, that person shows up. Maybe it’s the criminal who got away with something there because of the failure of this person. So study backstory, learn how to layer that and bring it out

 

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so that you’re not flashing back and pulling people out of what’s

on stage right now. For one thing, it has become such a sort of artificial way to tell a

story that it does jar your reader out of the present, and makes them aware they’re reading. This is much more natural the way people talk, the way things happen in real life. And it’s another way to keep people turning the pages, because it makes you curious. It’s like where someplace down the road we’re going to find out what that thing was that happened back then, either in his childhood or in a previous relationship or, as they say in the case we’re talking about, in Detroit, and when it comes out it needs to really be satisfying and might even feel like a flashback then because somebody needs to know.

Maybe it’s the superior that says, Are we going to have to let you

go? Are you going to need a leave of absence? Are you going to get through this issue where you are a trained longtime agent and you drop your weapon, or you forget a basic step that you didn’t load your weapon, or whatever it was? All of a sudden it comes out what this big trauma was without resorting to flashback—it’s backstory. So study that, and watch for that session we do with DiAnn Mills because she’s an expert in it and can talk about that.

[0:50:33] David Loy: Absolutely. That is a great topic, great question brought to us by a

couple of different people, so hopefully that addressed both Richard’s and Patty’s question. Thank you both for sending those in.

Sheila writes, “Jerry, in your first workshop you said you can’t say

your Point of View characters saw or looked, etc. Can you revisit and explain that a bit a more?”

Jerry Jenkins: Yeah. I may have overstated that. It isn’t that you can’t say, but

you shouldn’t need to say it. If I put my character on the scene—and just to simplify it, let’s just go back to Rayford still on Left Behind. I say that I mentioned that about Rayford Steele’s mind on a woman he’d never touched and this fully loaded 747 is on autopilot above the Atlantic…is a lot of inter dialogue. He used to look forward to getting home to his wife and he is talking about in a couple of hours he’d be the first to see the hands of the sun. Until then, the blackness through the window seemed miles thick.

 

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Now, I didn’t have to say, “Until then, as Rayford looked out

through the cockpit window, the blackness seemed miles thick.” We’re in his Point of View.

So all I have to say is “The blackness through the window seemed

miles thick.” Nobody’s going to ask to whom. It’s to Rayford; that’s who we’re talking about. That’s all I mean by saying you don’t have to say “he looked” and “he saw.” We’re in his Point of View. His groggy or sleeping passengers had window shades pulled down. I didn’t have to say he walked back and noticed that his groggy and sleeping passengers had window shades pulled down. I didn’t have to say as he took a break and walked down through the fuselage, he noticed that the plane was dark and the sleep chamber was humming for all, but a few wanderers and…you just say it. You just describe it. “For now, the plane was a dark humming sleep chamber for all but a few wanderers. The attendants and one or two responders to nature’s call.” I didn’t have to say he looked and saw this. We know that. We’re getting it from him because he is our perspective character.

So that’s the mistake too many beginners make is that they feel

like, to say anything about what is on the scene, they have to turn their character’s head and have them look at somebody even in conversation. They will say, “She turned and looked at her mother and said…” Or “She noticed that her mother was wearing a blue housecoat.” If you’ve got your characters established, she is in the kitchen. You can say her mother came in wearing a blue bathrobe. Nobody is going to say how does she know. We know—she looked. We know she can see her. She’s standing there. That’s all I’m saying is that you don’t have to describe your character seeing, hearing, feeling. Just describe what’s there and we know your character saw that because they’re there and we’re in their perspective.

David Loy: Thanks, Sheila, for that question. Priscilla writes, “Jerry, this has

been excellent. It reminds me of when I would teach Point of View to middle school students. They almost naturally would move into second person. It was not easy to explain to them why this was probably not an effective way to work their writings. Thank you again.” It’s such an interesting comment.

Jerry Jenkins: It is, and you have my total sympathy of trying to teach this to

middle school students. I feel frustrated trying to teach it to adults, and it’s just a tricky thing with lots of verbiage attached to it. And

 

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as I say, it’s the doing of it and then asking questions and you talk

it through. I think that makes it become clear. David Loy: Absolutely. I’m getting a couple of people asking for clarification

about the Master Class with Doc Hensley. The release date is Tuesday, April 5th. That is not a live event. It’s actually a recorded interview that Jerry did with “Doc” Dennis Hensley previously and we will put it inside the Guild and send all Guild members an email notification once it is available.

My best guess right now is that that will be available no later than

3 p.m. Central on Tuesday, April 5th. It could be earlier, but it should be in there by Tuesday afternoon. And again, this is another resource which will be in there indefinitely. You can go back and listen to it as many times as needed, so be watching for an email notification about when that interview, the Master Class will be released on Tuesday. And hopefully that clears up a couple of questions people are writing in.

[0:55:57] Jerry Jenkins: We should clarify that there are a couple of features that we do that

we do record in advance. One is the Manuscript Repair & Rewrite, because it takes me time to go through and edit that and then explain why I do each one I do. If I did that live, it would take a lot longer, and this way I can record it and explain it.

The Master Class, I’m interviewing people at their convenience.

It’s hard to get—we get really busy people and important experts in the field, and I get them when I can and we do it on Skype or GoToMedia or one of these programs where we’re both onscreen and we’re interacting. We want to make sure that the technology is right, that the connection is right and that it sounds right and we talk for a good long time, and there are sometimes asides and we’ll go on and on about a subject and it may not be relevant totally. And so those are edited by the team.

We try to give you the best 45 to 60 minutes of content possible.

So all that’s being prepared, and when you finally see it when it’s produced and put up, it’s going to be really rich with content. You’ll get the best production we can give you.

David Loy: Absolutely. A few people are writing in asking a question and

clarification about deep POV, including—let’s see, Nancy wrote one, and I guess I’m going to paraphrase because we’ve got several different questions around the same topic.

 

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I guess, Jerry, people are saying thanks so much for talking about

deep POV and giving your opinion on it. Why do you believe this is becoming a popular term, and are there any other terms that you’re aware of that ring hollow?

Jerry Jenkins: There probably are, but I didn’t hear them today. I had started to

hear this thing about deep POV, and it seemed new to me. And I thought, Boy, have I missed something? Am I already becoming passé, spending too much time writing novels instead of studying?

I try to read everything there is to read about writing, and I read all

the Writer’s Digest books and all the books especially from my friends about writing, and I even read my own books about writing. So I thought that was something everything and so I’m still hearing about this deep POV and I thought, Point of View is so important, so what’s deep POV?

So I, of course, Googled it and I’m reading about all the stuff, and

everything I read was, they would show examples of a Point of View and they would say rather than talk about your character seeing something happening, you just say that it happened and because we’re in your character’s Point of View, we know that it’s happening. I’m thinking, Well, that’s what Point of View is. So we should all be writing in deep POV all the time. That’s what Point of View is. So I’ll watch for other phrases like that where it almost seems to me like people are finally getting what we should have been doing all along.

Now, it’s very possible, too, that there is some deeper meaning to

deep POV that I missed in my study, and I’d be happy to be corrected. If my POV isn’t deep enough and there is something out there, I’d like to know what it is. But to me, as you see in Manuscript Repair & Rewrite, I see a lot of people making the mistakes that we were just talking about where they tend to use their perspective character almost like a puppet. They understand that he or she is the camera, and they want to kind of steer it around.

What I’m saying is, you establish, you bring them on the scene like

I do: “As Rayford Steele’s mind…”—he’s the guy. He’s there. He’s the one in the cockpit and that’s the guy we’re limiting ourselves to. And then everything I describe better be something that we assume he can see, touch, hear, think about—he’s our guy. That’s deep POV.

 

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So as I mentioned, those things I read about—that the plane being

dark and humming like a sleep chamber, and the people that are either sleeping or going off to the bathroom or whatever—were in his deep Point of View, so we’re describing stuff that he is aware of. That’s deep POV.

[1:00:53] David Loy: We continue to have topics that multiple people are asking

questions about. So Bob and Karen both wrote in similar questions. So let me read both of those real quick.

Bob says, “Jerry, are there grammatical exercises you can share

that help us to know if our stories are consistent with Point of View?” Karen says, “Jerry do you have any suggestions for reading back through my manuscript to watch for and catch myself getting out of the Point of View of the character’s head?”

Jerry Jenkins: A lot of times, it seems like other people can catch this when we

can’t. I even had a little brief chill when I was looking at Left Behind again. This is a 20-year-old novel. It happens to be my best seller. This first volume alone is getting close to 9 million copies, and so when I see mistakes in it, I’m thinking, Don’t be too hard on yourself because it’s sold pretty well. But even when I said on the very first page, “But for now, with his first officer fighting sleep, Rayford imagined Hattie Durham’s smile and looked forward to their next meeting.”

If I wrote that today, to be careful that I’m not jumping into his

first officer’s head, I probably would have said, “But for now, with his first officer seeming to fight sleep…” Because I’m not in his first officer’s Point of View. I can’t say unequivocally he’s fighting sleep. He might appear to Rayford to be fighting sleep, because maybe his eyes are—he’s slowly blinking or he’s nodding or whatever. For all I know, he’s faking it. I don’t know because I’m in Rayford’s Point of View. So technically, I might be flirting with head-hopping there because I say unequivocally, “With his first officer fighting sleep.” Now, I don’t think there are readers who are going to go, Wait a minute, how does he know that he’s fighting sleep? But that’s something to watch for.

Now, usually, it’s much more obvious and egregious than that. I’ve

seen people head-hop within the same sentence. They will say, “Jim embraced Mary and had such a deep love for her and such gratitude that they were married that he could barely contain

 

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himself, while Mary was thinking, Is that my perfume I smell on

his collar or is it possible he has been unfaithful to me?” Now, you’ve got two Points of View in the same sentence there.

That’s head-hopping, and that’s breaking the rule and it’s pretty obvious. Those are the things you need to watch for. The rule is, you get one perspective character per scene. You certainly get only one perspective character per sentence. So you don’t want to be head-hopping within the same scene or paragraph or sentence—that type of thing.

I’m not sure if there’s a trick to watch for that, but just maybe that

metaphor of imagining your perspective character as your camera and saying, I can’t know what that other character is thinking. Now, people always say, Well, I want to develop this other character, so how will I ever know? You don’t have to switch to their perspective in the next scene or in the next chapter to develop their character because, as I say, like with the professor example, your character can learn a lot just by saying…maybe we say Jim embraced her and had those feelings, but it seemed like she didn’t return his embrace or his kiss with the same intensity. When he says something to her, maybe expresses his love, she says the same words, but he senses hesitation. So then they have a conversation, and let the reader decide what she’s saying: “Is there something missing?” We’re not in her head, but we know his hesitation. And so he looks in her eyes, and do her eyes start to waver a little bit? Can she hold his gaze?

[1:05:40] And then based on what she says, he’s trying to decide. And then

maybe he catches her in a little white lie, maybe he asked about her day and she tells him something about that she was at the school for a couple of hours. He was just about to say that he ran into a friend of hers who said that she saw her at the market at 1 o’clock and she said she was at the school, so he said not to pursue it. So the reader now gets this idea that something is going on here. She’s not responding to him the way he is responding to her. He’s wondering if she’s telling him the whole truth. He’s worried about her commitment. So we’re learning about that character without being in her perspective.

Now, if you need to be in her perspective in some other chapter,

then go ahead and switch to her, but you can learn an awful lot about other characters by what they say and whether they’re caught in lies and one is telling one person one thing and telling another

 

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person the other. So there are ways to do it, but that’s the kind of

grid to…when you’re reading back through, make sure you’re not saying something unequivocal.

If you find yourself saying about the other character, “But she

didn’t believe him,” if you’re not in her perspective you can’t say that. You can say from his perspective, “She seemed not to believe me” or “She had a look on her face that made me wonder if she believed me.” Remember whose perspective you’re in.

David Loy: Alright. Let’s see, the next question comes from Tracy. She says,

“Jerry, what’s your view on blog posts that are written in second person?”

Jerry Jenkins: They can work. Blogs are nonfiction, and so you’re trying to make

a point. Second person is always tricky, but blogs being short, most blogs should be 600 words or fewer. You can get away with longer ones if you get really great content, and sometimes, we call these cornerstone pieces where you’re saying, Here’s how to do this and here’s how to build a ship. It’s going to be longer than 600 words, but I’ve written a few where I say, “Let’s say you want to do this.” “Your goal today is to do this.” “So you go to your writing den and you sit down and you get your things together and you make this call.” So that’s the second person. You’re using the “you” construction. It can be done. I wouldn’t try to build a whole schedule of blogs around that unless you’ve got a strong voice and can pull it off, but it can work.

David Loy: Alright. Tracy, thanks for that question. This one is from Laura:

“Jerry, I’ve been told the second person is the most distant Point of View because the reader’s reaction is, I’m not doing that. So if that’s true, which is the least distant Point of View, first or third?”

Jerry Jenkins: I would say first is probably the least distant because—and it

depends on what side of the writing fence you’re on. If you happen to be writing on the inspirational side, first person is used a lot because it keeps you from preaching.

One of the biggest weaknesses on the inspirational side of the

writing fence is that we tend to get sermonic. We learn something from the Bible or really learn some spiritualism. We want to tell people, “This is going to change your life. This is going to fix you. We are going to teach you how not to commit this sin or yield to this temptation and here’s what you need to do. You need to read

 

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your Bible more or pray more or do this or avoid that,” when the

best way to do that is to say, “Let me tell you about how I learned the hard lesson. I used to do this too much. I used to be this way and I failed and I felt bad about it. But one day I learned, and I learned this lesson from my granddaughter,” or “I was taught this by a friend who gently told me this and I was embarrassed, but I had to face the fact that I learned this lesson,” and the reader is like, I feel for you. I am embarrassed for you, but it’s good that you learned that lesson. And then you don’t say, now, “How about you, reader? So did you get the point?” You want to avoid that.

[1:10:13] It’s great to give the reader credit and assume that at some point

they’re going to go, That was really good that the writer told me that story from the first person and admitted their weakness and what they learned, and that’s the lesson. And maybe an hour or two later or the next day are going to go, That’s true of me, too. They told me to just come alongside and hear their story and I didn’t feel preached at. I didn’t feel lectured. I didn’t feel chastised. I didn’t feel like I got a finger pointed at me, but I think I’ve got a lesson too. That’s the way to do it on that side of the fence.

Of course, that’s true in the general market, too. You can teach

lessons and let people read between the lines simply by taking a come-alongside angle. So I think first person is the way to do that.

David Loy: And Jerry, I’m seeing several people write in saying that they are

going to take advantage of the recording that we’re going to be posting of this session in the next 48 hours. Megan says, “I love this session. I will definitely need to listen to this one again.” Let’s see, Richard says, “There’s so much info here. I will have to watch the recording.” There’s just people that are excited about it. “I can’t wait for the replay…and I need to take more notes.” That’s from Nancy.

So I’m glad to hear that people are taking advantage of realizing

that this is an in-depth topic. It’s not something you can master in 30, 60, 90 minutes, maybe not even 30, 60, 90 days. So being able to go back and listen to it is something, Jerry, you’ve always wanted to be able to offer people.

Jerry Jenkins: Yeah, and I should say, too, based on what I’ve just said, the

anecdote about “come alongside.” Let me put this in the first person and say, I’m an old man with a lot of books written and I’m still learning this. So come alongside and learn it with me.

 

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And let me say this, too. It’s time for our Live Online Workshops

to do some fun training that’s a little easier. So we’ve got people asking about creating characters, building tension, keeping your reader turning pages, and we’re going to get in some of those that are going to be not quite so academic. So if anybody feels like, Boy, this is really getting in, now, to grad school level, trust me, there’s some fun stuff coming up, too. So we’ve kind of eaten some steak and mashed potatoes today, but dessert is coming.

David Loy: Absolutely, and it’s a balancing act because we want to cover the

key points and the elements that we know people are asking questions about, but we also want this to be—we don’t want people to walk away feeling frustrated either. So there are some exciting topics coming up.

Gail actually wrote in saying that she loved the movie camera

analogy. She said, “This is an amazing tool. It’s so helpful. This makes me want to get into my manuscript right now.” So that’s an encouraging response so far from today.

Jerry Jenkins: That’s great. David Loy: Alright. Let’s keep going. We have, gosh, time is flying. We’ve

got about 15 minutes left so we’re going to keep going to as many questions as possible.

Lisa asks…well actually, this is a comment. She says, “Thank you

so much for having this class on a weekday. I’m unable to do Saturday classes. So this is perfect.” And Lisa, that’s a great point. Jerry is very intentional about trying to balance around the times and the days where these live sessions take place. Obviously, Jerry, we can’t always accommodate everyone, but I know you’re very intentional about trying to move things around so that people who work during the day have an option at night or vice versa or on the weekends. I know that that was something you always wanted to do from the beginning of the Guild.

Jerry Jenkins: Yeah. We do that, and then for people that have a problem with

either time, we do archive this and put the recordings up. So hopefully, you’ve got access 24/7.

David Loy: Absolutely. Okay. Let’s go to the next question. “Why do you

think fiction has changed from the omniscient Point of View to a single Point of View?” That’s from Roberta.

 

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Jerry Jenkins: That’s a good question. I have thought a lot about that, and I think

a lot of it has to do with the advent of the screen generation where we live by the screen now. We watch things on a movie screen. We watch things on a television screen. We watch things on our phones and on tablets and on computers, and so we’re narrowing our focus all the time. It used to be that our main avenue for entertainment was the book, and so you wanted something that would sort of give you this panorama of information. Books were 600, 800, a thousand pages, and brought you the world, and I’m not sure authors knew any different. They just sat down and said, Let me tell you a story. And they told you everything about every character.

[1:15:51] And then as they got more sophisticated, they said, Let’s withhold

some information to keep the reader turning the page. And it got better and better. As you see now, filmmakers are doing this, too. A lot of TV series are doing this. They will do things and it gets frustrating sometimes, but some are more masterful than others. They will say, Here’s a scene. Now, let’s look 6 months ago…what led to this? And they will show you that, and then they show you another scene. They say, Let’s look 4 months before this, and you go, Why are we hopping around like this? Well, it’s just fun to see, you see something and you’re thinking, What’s going on? But look what led to this. They’re withholding more and more and more, and you think you know who the villain is, but then you find out, well, they’re not really the villain. They’re kind of the hero and the person who looks like the hero has actually other ulterior motives.

So we’re looking at new ways of doing things, but I kind of like

the way it is now. I mean, to me, it’s more like real life is. I feel limited to my own experience. I don’t know what people are thinking. I only know what I think they’re thinking. I judge everything by people’s expressions, what they say, what they do. I hear inflection in their voice, see their actions, hear what other people say about them, and I think, That person likes me. I think they’re telling me the truth. I think if I invited them to my home for dinner, I think they’d accept and want to come and be happy and be my friend. And then sometimes, they surprise me and they don’t, and then I found out they don’t like me and I think, Well, there’s a story. And so that’s how fiction works.

We don’t know what we think we know. We’re not inside other

people’s heads. So the old-fashioned fiction is really fiction, and

 

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the only omniscient person there is God. He’s the only one who

knows people’s hearts and minds and intentions. So I think the current way of writing is really more realistic.

David Loy: Thanks, Roberta, for that question. Next question is from

Elizabeth. “Jerry, for children’s chapter books, can animals give Point of View? Can they talk? I’ve heard mixed answers on this.”

Jerry Jenkins: Well, I think they can and they do. I mean, kids seem to love that,

and I think the reason for that is that it tends to make children more comfortable. They identify. I’ve got a daughter-in-law who writes children’s picture books for a little bit younger kids, and when an animal takes on human characteristics and deals with fear or deals with learning or not knowing certain things, it makes it fun for the child and then they sort of develop some of these characteristics themselves. Publishers seem to like it and kids seem to like it. So I think that, yeah, I’d have to say, they do not—I’m not sure what you’re hearing about people saying it doesn’t work. Maybe some writers are trying to use it for too old a reader. What I find is that readers like to read up [from] their age category.

I often see writers say, This is for teenagers. And they show me a

book or a manuscript and I think, I don’t know a teenager who would want to read this. This is for 8 to 12 years old. It might even be about teenagers, but 8- to 12-year-olds want to be teenagers, so they will read up. You give that to a teenager and they go, I don’t want to be labeled a teenager. I’m reading adult books and what they’re really reading is books about people 18 to 22 or 24. So people are always reading up. They want to be the next age group. So be careful of that. If you’re writing chapter books about animals, it’s not going to work for a kid 8 to 12, probably. They’re reading young adult novels probably by now.

[1:20:34] David Loy: It’s a great question, Elizabeth. Next comes from Jen. “Jerry, how

do we get out of the way when writing nonfiction first person?” Jerry Jenkins: We don’t. That really applies more to fiction. I would say if you’re

writing a nonfiction book or article, in essence, you are the point. You’re trying to say, I have something I want to tell you, convince you, persuade you. Here’s my experience, and here’s a lesson that you can learn from me.

I do think the most attractive quality of a nonfiction writer is

humility and not finger-pointing and finger-wagging. Sometimes,

 

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the right post is the stage. For instance, I’ve got my Writing for the

Soul book. I’m writing about writing, and I can’t hide from the fact that I don’t just want to do a book that’s about all the mistakes I have made, so don’t make these mistakes.

Now, that’s in there because I was at one point a beginning writer,

but my posture at this point is I’ve been in the game now for over 40 years. I’ve been a professional writer for 50 years. I’ve been writing books for over 40 years. So I’m saying—and not to trying to be boastful, but I’m trying to say in humility, I’ve really been around the game a long time and I have learned a lot and have succeeded a lot. So if you’d like to learn from somebody who’s been around the block, I’ve got a lot to say.

And if I was just in there bragging about all the stuff I’ve done and

all the successes I’ve had, people would go, Thank you so much, brag somewhere else. But I try to bring lessons and things you can do to advance your career. That’s one posture, and so I’m not trying to get out of the way. I’m trying to say I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ve made a lot of mistakes and here are the things you can avoid. Here are the things you can do.

Now, in my fiction, I do want to get out of the way. I don’t want

people to read and go, Boy, that Jerry Jenkins is really trying to phrase or pick the right word or the way he does this or that is fantastic.

Some writers are so good as stylists. I wouldn’t advise them to get

out of the way. For instance, Pat Conroy, he had such a style that I was always aware it was Pat Conroy writing, but he’s so good he can do it.

This is going to sound strange, but one of my least favorite types of

entertainers is a lounge singer. When it comes on… “Hey, great to see you here, great to have everybody here,” and dropping names of all the stars he knows, this and that. But there was one guy who did that so well that I had to like him anyway, and that was Wayne Newton. He’s pretty much retired now, but he had a Vegas act and he was a good-looking dark-haired guy and sang. He wasn’t the best singer, but he’s singing everything and he was the ultimate lounge singer. But he was so good at it and so entertaining and seemed to enjoy himself and you had to enjoy yourself at his show. That’s how I feel about Pat Conroy.

 

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On the nonfiction side, Rick Bragg…and I always say Rick Bragg

is the best living nonfiction writer. He’s so good. I’m always aware that it’s Rick because his writing is so beautiful, but for most of us, the story has to be king. I’m not a stylist like that. I’d like to tell a story, and I want the story and the characters to be king. I don’t want people to say, Boy, that Jerry Jenkins, there’s a line from him. If every line was that great, then I’d be happy to show it off, but I think for most of us—for 95 or more percent of novelists—the key is to get out of the way and make the reader unaware they’re even reading and just let the story grab them.

But the question was, Should nonfiction writers get out of the way?

No. You’re trying to persuade somebody of something or teach them something, so let your voice be heard. Don’t brag, but say, Look, here’s what I think you need to know, here’s what I wanted to teach you. And by the end of this, here’s the skill that I want to impart to you.

[1:25:20] David Loy: Alright. We’ll keep moving, here. This one is from Bryan. “I’m

writing a short story that will be an epistolary narrative. The story will be interweaved with letters and diary entries that will be written in the first person. I want to include narrative bits that will be present tense. Will this be okay to do, or will it somehow mess with the rules of Point of View?”

Jerry Jenkins: I think that can be done. I’ve seen it done where you would

intersperse and say, I found this letter on this date, or it was dated here and it came from this person to set the context…and then let the letter do the work. Because the key here is going to be that the letters themselves have to be poignant enough and content-rich enough to keep the reader reading, but they have to be set on context.

So I think it can work, but within each element you want to make

sure you’re following the Point of View rules. So if, in a letter, the writer is telling an anecdote or something, make sure you’re following the POV rules carefully.

David Loy: Alright, let’s see, a couple of additional comments have come in.

Jeannie says, “I’m a new fiction writer. I have so much to learn and I’m so excited with all that I’ve learned already since January in the Guild. Lead on, Jerry, this is so helpful on all levels.” Thank you for that comment Jeannie.

 

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Our founding members are just as thrilled with what’s been going

on so far. Louise writes in saying, “I love the grad school-level term that you used. I’d wanted something like this for so long.” But Jerry, you made mention of it and I think it’s worth touching on again that although this might be that grad school level-type setting in today’s session, and the topic is intense and very detailed, there are some fun sessions coming up that you’ve got mapped out.

Jerry Jenkins: Yeah I do, and the reason that they will be fun is I always love

examples from popular-level novelists and writers that will get into some stylists that really know how to put together a character and can write in ways that keep us turning pages and build tension and conflict. People say I often tease about how writing is so grueling you can’t enjoy it while you’re doing it—the fun of it is when it’s done. But it’s fun to learn about it, too, and it’s fun to see how other people do it. The best comments I can hear are…people will say, I can’t wait to get back to my story and back to the keyboard. That’s what’s rewarding.

David Loy: Absolutely. Even in the midst of a very detailed topic, this is

inspiring people to go continue on in their process. Alright, well, we are just about to wrap up here, today. I want to remind everyone that this session has been recorded. It will be posted inside the Guild in the next 48 hours for your accessibility. We will always be working on getting a transcript added to that page as well. I ran through the content that’s already available on the Guild earlier, so if you missed that, make sure you go back and listen to it. Go through all of those Master Class sessions, the other workshops that we’ve done previously with Jerry, also the Manuscript Repair & Rewrite sessions, and of course the Office Hours sessions.

Remember, the Doc Hensley Master Class is going to be released

next Tuesday, April 5th. You will receive an email notification about that once it is available in the Guild. We also have some other exciting pieces of content that we’ll be releasing in the month of April. Jerry, thank you so much for taking the time to teach Point of View today. Do you have any comments as we close out?

Jerry Jenkins: Well, it’s been a great time. I always enjoy the questions and just

want to remind everybody, too, to tune in Tuesday for Doc Hensley’s class. It’s going to be a great one.

 

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David Loy: Absolutely. Well Jerry, thanks for your time. Thank you all Guild

members for joining us. Stay tuned. Watch your email for future notifications and we will look forward to being with you on our next event. Have a great day.

[1:29:59] End of Audio