Lots of good free advice for fictionistas in the RSS feeds today; the greatest chunk of which comes from Jim van Pelt’s Livejournal, a resource which I only discovered recently, but am already very found of.

Mr. van Pelt first looks at character creation, and the methods of showing rather than telling the reader what a character is like:

“For me, actions trump both appearance and speech.  The soldier who talks about how he will run when faced with the enemy, but throws himself on the grenade at a key moment reveals more about himself through his actions than his words.”

He then shares an exercise that he gives to his students, which sounds like the sort of thing I’d have really enjoyed, had my teachers in English ever set such tasks – go into another classroom and take observational notes about the teacher!

Next, he looks at situations where the canonical rules of writing can be broken, on the proviso that the writer knows what they are doing. For example:

“Don’t shift point of view.   In general, this is good advice.  A writer who slips around willy nilly with point of view just confuses the heck out of the reader.  I responded to a story the other day that dipped into the cat’s point of view for a sentence, and then, catastrophically, into a house plant on the fireplace mantle for another sentence.  The better advice, at least to stronger writers, is Control point of view.  If you know what you are doing, a story that shifts point of view can be the only way to tell the story, if it works.”

Following on neatly from that is Carol Berg’s response to a reader enquiry about shifting POVs at the DeepGenre blog:

“There is certainly nothing technically wrong with multiple first-person narrators. It is no more

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