by Ann Gimpel

In fictional writing, point of view refers to which character is observing/driving the action in a particular part of a story. The reader can’t know anything the POV character doesn’t know which makes writing an entire novel from a single POV somewhat daunting, but far from impossible. I’ve done it a few times, but I prefer alternating POVs. In urban fantasy, I’ll often have as many as five or six POVs in a long series.

I’ve picked up a lot of novels where the writer switches POV many times in the course of a single page. It gives the story a jerky aspect that feels rather like a tennis match. I don’t think readers need to know what each character’s internal process is at all times. The writer can use dialogue and observation of body language to good effect. This avoids “head hopping.” For example:

Amanda glanced across the room through eyes glistening with tears. Ty’s jaw was set in a hard line she recognized all too well. The muscle under his eye twitched, too, always a dead giveaway he was furious.

Even though it’s Amanda’s POV, we get a bird’s eye view of Ty’s mental state from her observation of his body language. Dialogue can serve the same purpose.

From a writer’s perspective, I see the story through my characters’ eyes. It makes my life easier if I’m telling the story from, for example, the heroine’s POV until either a section or chapter break when I may switch to the hero or an important subsidiary character. Each character has their own personality and way of viewing the world. While two or three POV characters can enrich a hundred thousand word novel, introducing half a dozen can be confusing.

George RR Martin simply labels his chapters with whomever the POV character is. That works great because I could click to the table of contents in my Kindle and skip over the chapters about the characters I hadn’t warmed to. For a multi-book series of hundreds of thousands of words, it’s actually a solid approach.

Most writers do a decent job maintaining the POV rules. Others thumb their noses at them. I’m currently reading an old Nora Roberts romance, Courting Catherine, which would have been ever so much better if it didn’t head hop every paragraph or two. Don’t get me wrong. I’m enjoying it. Ms. Roberts is a wonderful writer, but I’d like it better if we could stick with CC or Trent and skip CC’s three sisters and aunt.

While we’re at it, how about some of the other writing conventions like third person past tense? I’ve written my share of first person past, but I have to admit I prefer third because it gives me much more latitude. First person present drives me nuts. I find it hard to read, although I admit to slogging through all three Hunger Games books because the story was intriguing. I’d love to know what you think. What person/tense do you prefer to write in and what do you like to read?

Ann Gimpel is a USA Today bestselling author. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she began writing speculative fiction a few years ago. Since then her short fiction has appeared in several webzines and anthologies. Her longer books run the gamut from urban fantasy to paranormal romance. Once upon a time, she nurtured clients. Now she nurtures dark, gritty fantasy stories that push hard against reality. When she’s not writing, she’s in the backcountry getting down and dirty with her camera. She’s published more than 50 books to date, with several more planned for 2018 and beyond. A husband, grown children, grandchildren, and wolf hybrids round out her family.

Keep up with her at www.anngimpel.com or http://anngimpel.blogspot.com

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by Chris Turner

In 2014, I started sequencing original SFF to audio using the Booktrack free studio tool, and it offered up a unique, creative experience. I was amazed at how the placement of some well-crafted audio, synced by word, sentence or paragraph could make a story come alive—in the same way a soundtrack makes a movie come alive.

Adding sound effects to a story builds up the suspense, the mystery, just as adding theme tracks underlines moods of humour, tragedy, horror, romance.

These enhancements add a whole new dimension to a reader’s experience. Readers can adjust the playback speed to taste and have a running cursor word by word. Pausing the booktrack and pulling down the gear box settings allows several options. The booktrack audio library includes thousands of clips, allowing designers to create richly layered soundtracks to their stories, as one would expect in professionally-mastered movies.

Some authors have sequenced whole books to audio, others have sequenced selected chapters, serving as teasers to their ebooks. Some well known authors such as Hugh Howey and JF Penn have worked with booktrack to put their novels to audio. Give them a read.

The Timelost, my most recent production, is a gritty, dystopian foray into the macabre, featuring visceral alien battles and edge-of-the-seat SF audio in a Star Wars meets Alien thriller. The Timelost marks my 25th text-and-audio creation, drawing on the wide variety of sound clips from the Booktrack audio library.

At an early age Chris’s parents encouraged him to play several musical instruments, mainly to keep him out of trouble. He began composing his own music, writing short stories, painting, thus developing a deep appreciation for the masters of music, literature and art. An avid traveller, he backpacked and mountain-biked through exotic countries in Asia and Europe, often undertaking some risky journeys solo, many of which fuelled his imagination and became a source for his adventure stories.

by Phil Williams

A story’s timing in relation to an apocalypse, for me, says a lot about the nature of that story, and why we want to read it. Broadly speaking, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction tends to fit three rough areas – stories surrounding the apocalypse, those in the near post-apocalyptic future and those in the far post-apocalyptic future. So what does each periods offer?

The Apocalypse Itself

The stories depicting an apocalypse could cover almost any large-scale disaster or war story. What lumps a book in with the apocalyptic genre, though, is the scale of destruction caused. When enough damage is done that the world will never be the same. The best apocalyptic fiction is about something capable of destroying everything. More crucially, it’s about what can survive something capable of destroying everything. These stories are the domain of unrelenting action and adventure. They’re also the stomping ground of romances surviving against the odds – or tragically being cut short. They’re even an area of existential musing – looking at the inevitability of death. Zombie fiction like World War Z provide adventurous or horror examples, while more literary approaches like The Age of Miracles use the apocalypse in parallel to coming of age. Many stories in this field also take us right through to the aftermath – Stephen King’s The Stand is classic in this respect, and one that perhaps belongs in both the first and second category.

The Near Post-Apocalypse

In the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse, we’re still obsessing over what survives – though we shift towards how life goes on. The near post-apocalypse is concerned with how we start again, which can either be with hope and original ideas or, more commonly, with barbaric fighting for survival. The near post-apocalypse, more than anything, tends to be the time when the world is least populated, so it’s the ideal place for stories of loneliness and the importance of individuals or small groups. It’s a great area for stories that celebrate ordinary people being forced into becoming special by their circumstances. It’s also a great change to ask what we would do if our world lost its rules. Books like Day of the Triffids, The Road or I Am Legend are tremendous examples that touch on all these ideas.

The Far Post-Apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic fiction set in the far future, long after a disaster, may be more generally associated with dystopian stories than ones about the apocalypse. This is a realm of creative and unusual ideas – essentially sci-fi or fantasy with the barest roots in the world we know. It’s also where you find sweeping societal ideas – if stories about the apocalypse judge the current world, the far apocalyptic future is often used to ask questions of what could emerge if things were completely different. A Canticle for Lebowitz, for example, spans centuries – while Riddley Walker, the book I most frequently recommend in this area, completely reimagines language. Many examples only loosely use the old world disaster to explain the rise of a dystopia (my own Estalia series included). It’s an area where we can explore our fantasies of regression, in contrast to the science fiction that assumes we’ll continue to advance.

Whatever the timeframe, of course, good apocalyptic fiction depends on its characters. That’s what we really want from all apocalyptic fiction – a look at how extraordinary circumstances impact interesting characters. Whether we’re looking at the end of all things, the start of something new or surviving in a dystopian civilisation, it’s being able to relate to these stories that makes them successful. For each of their purposes, they help us question how we behave and survive right now.

Phil Williams is an author of dystopian and contemporary fantasy fiction, whose work includes the post-apocalyptic Estalia series and the urban fantasy Ordshaw series. Find out more about him at: www.phil-williams.co.uk