Newbie writing advice

[subseasniper]

Hey guys,

first post on this forum and I am delighted that there are lots of others out there who are into undead fiction and storytelling.

I have been working on a novel for a couple of months now and have committed about one hundred pages to paper.

I am writing in a mixture of first and third person and the three main characters are a coastguard rescue jumper who boards a cargo ship which is unwittingly holding a container full of African stowaways who have been found by the ships crew and are suffering from an unknown virus that cause them to. . . . well you can figure the next bit.

The second character is a middle aged alcoholic who happens to be in a jail cell when the infection breaks out.

The third character is a loner in his early thirties who bugs out when things start getting weird. He lives on a fairly isolated island and comes back a few days later to find things have gone pear shaped.

I am planning on having these character cross paths at some point but am wondering how to write these chapters as I will have to go first or third person which is going to change some of the characters.

Or is there anyway to mix both writing styles in the same chapters?

Any advice on these matters and undead writing in general would be appreciated.

Cheers, sub sea sniper

[Deadman_Deluxe]

I don't really consider myself qualified to give out advice regarding "how to write" ... i just wanted to say hello in responce to your first ever post here!


Velcome to ze forums yah?


1. Do not take ANYTHING i say in the literal sense . . . ever!

2. A sense of humour will be essential to your survival here, develop one now or suffer later.

3. Please be aware that 77.4% of the people you will bump heads with on these forums are ONLY here inbetween eating cereal from their own shoes and smearing their own excrement all over their apartment walls.

4. The remaining 82.6% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[deadpunk]

Stephen King used both the first and third person P.O.V.s in Christine, if I recall correctly. The main character Dennis tells the majority of the story, then suffers a broken leg and is out of the action, so that section of the novel is told in third person before it reverts back to Dennis in first.

Sooooooo...yeah, I guess it can be done. I think that switching it up from chapter to chapter might be a bit much, but hey...if you can pull it off; more power to ya.

[subseasniper]

Undead dudes,

thanks for the replies. This site is the ****, I have been a huge undead fan for a while and was delighted to stumble across this site.

Sense of humour is not a problem Deadman, in my line of work I have seen some crazy **** that blackens your humour to a twisted char.

More power to you all,

Sub Sea Sniper

[Neil]

Like DD I don't consider myself a qualified writer...

Just thought I'd mention my biggest issue when writing is dialog, so going even further than "speaking" for a character, and also going first person thinking for them as well would scare the b-jesus out of me :)

[deadpunk]

I rarely write stories in first person. To me, this is like cheating, because it's easy. It's the equivalent of putting a daydream down on paper, for lack of a better comparison.

[Neil]

I rarely write stories in first person. To me, this is like cheating, because it's easy. It's the equivalent of putting a daydream down on paper, for lack of a better comparison.

I've always found it harder :)

[deadpunk]

Hmmmm...now that we've opened this particular Pandora's Box... I realize that this is a style of writing I have steered clear of for literally years! Everything I have posted in the Fiction Section on this site is told from 3rd Person (save Final Transmission, which is told through a series of disjointed radio broadcasts.)

Actually, the closest I can come is my newest submission, which contains a written confession by one of the two characters. :shifty:

Of course...now I'm intriqued. I think I'll put my hand at making my next submission told from the first person p.o.v. WTF do I have to lose?

[Neil]

:) :)

[subseasniper]

Hey Guys,

Just thought I would drop a quick update. I have scribbled over 150 pages now and the story is tightening up, going where I want it to go.

I have had two of the main characters meet and am considering telling each chapter from two points of view. The first character (the one previously told in 3rd person) is an alcoholic middle-aged guy who first becomes aware of the crisis whilst he is locked up in his local police station. He eventually escapes and wanders home but has to cope with some insane **** on the way there. He is eventually left alone in his town.

The other character (the one told in 1st person) lives on an island and battles his way to the mainland. After several setbacks he meets with the drunk who is sitting on a bench singing his heart out. The two characters team up to try to make it to a safe zone.

The third major character (told in 1st person) is a rescue jumper who boards a ship ostensibly to aid somebody who has fallen ill. He discovers that the ships captain freed a bunch of trafficked east africans who were hidden in a container. The group have an infection and the captain comes down with it. The infected begin attacking the ships crew and the jumpers helicopter is taken down. After that he has to fight his way to the downed choppers liferaft which is floating nearby.

I have interspersed the action with chapters I call Fragments which basically details in a couple of pages different characters around the worlds and their reaction to the crisis. I have tried to be sneaky because some of these 'fragments' forward the plot and offer a perspective on events that are denied to the main characters. Maybe a little sneaky but it gets boring for the reader to be mired in confusion like the characters.

Sorry, I am rambling on but any feedback from you guys is vastly appreciated. Also, in response to the commenta bout first person I am actually pretty comfortable writing in that form as in my day job I do a lot of first person writing, all of which has to be written in a very precise style, a legal style, a style of presenting evidence if you get my meaning.

What do you all think?

Sub Sea Sniper

[Todd Tjersland]

I'd say it is difficult to judge your effectiveness mixing first and third-person in the same novel without seeing some consecutive sample chapters. It seems odd to me, but as someone else pointed out, Stephen King did it in Christine.

I enjoy stories told in the first person a lot, because the author can really get inside the narrator's head in ways that cannot otherwise be replicated. Jim Thompson did this very effectively in many of his crime/noir books, like The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, and Pop. 1280. My new book, Deathbreed: A Zombie Novel, is told entirely in the first-person.

For an excellent example of switching between character viewpoints every chapter (all within the third-person), I highly recommend reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.

Anyway, good luck! It's quite a challenge to write a novel (as I just found out for myself, LOL). I wish you all the best!