Rookie Mistakes (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, our topic is point of view.

It's funny: point of view, or POV, is always a hot topic among writers. But I don't think I've ever heard a single reader mention it.

It's the concept of showing whose head we're in during a story. As in, what they're thinking. Typically, you stay in one character's POV for an entire scene or chapter. And sometimes, like in most of my young adult (YA) books, for the entire book. While in that person's POV, you don't technically know what any other characters are thinking, but you can often guess (correctly or not) through their words and actions.

My favorite POV story is that when I started writing my very first novel, I hadn't attended a single writers' workshop or read any books about how to write a novel. I'd read a lot of novels, of course, and my years of English and other languages, as well as law school, had taught me a lot. But when I started writing that first novel, Cooper's Folly, I figured that the reader should know what was in the mind of EVERYONE who spoke. As a result, I changed the POV of the story in nearly every paragraph.

Ha ha! The rookiest of rookie mistakes.

Two months and several chapters into writing that book, I attended my first writers' workshop, an all-day nuts-and-bolts workshop taught by the great Jennifer Crusie. OMG! I had so many lightbulb (and horrified) moments that day, I could've lit up the entire city of Minneapolis. But I also had to laugh.

This was toward the end of September 2000. And I already had a deadline for my first manuscript: the Golden Heart contest, by Romance Writers of America. That November.

Yikes! Especially since I was also working beyond full time as a lawyer.

I decided to write to the end of the book before fixing what I'd massively screwed up so far. Even then, I knew that writing is a right-brained (creative) thing, and revising is a left-brained (logical) thing, and I could do only one at a time. So, starting where I was at that point in the novel, I wrote the rest of the novel correctly in terms of POV and all the other things I'd blown, then went back to the beginning and started revising.

In the meantime, my new-to-me Minnesota writing group connected people who were entering the Golden Heart so we could critique each other. I exchanged the first 50 pages of my manuscript (utterly unedited) with two other writers, and we critiqued each other's pages while continuing to finish our respective novels. Both writers were remarkably kind in their comments. They probably figured I was beyond help and didn't want to break my spirit.

I entered the Golden Heart contest that November. A few months later, I got the call: I was a finalist. (And, in fact, I won the contest a few months after that. Thank you, Jenny Crusie!) I quickly emailed the two writers with whom I'd shared critiques, letting them know I finaled and thanking them for their help.

Years later, I found out that the two of them immediately called each other and agreed that there was absolutely NO WAY I'd finaled in the contest, especially because of my mind-boggling POV changes, and that I must either be drinking or on drugs. As in, seriously.

I can't blame them.

That's the extent of my thoughts (and stories) on point of view. I'm an extremely picky reader, and I do notice POV issues in other authors' books, but I still think most readers don't notice or care.

And I'm not even drinking or on drugs.

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.