As I approach the end of the first draft of my new novel I am once again struck with thoughts on my own writing process.

Many sf/fantasy novels today are well north of 100,000 words and yet my own works tend to land around that mark or under. Vulcan’s Forge (available from all booksellers) was a slim 80,000 and generally well-reviewed and the feedback I got was that the exposition was deft and sufficient so it would not appear that I am shortchanging on conveying my world-building to readers.

It is simply that I write lean. This is not to say I write better or worse than authors who have much larger works. It is a function of both plot and style not of quality. I find that in my editing and even in my critiquing I tend to be an advocate of cutting out words, phrases, or sentences for more direct writing.

I think this stylistic approach is in part a development that sprung from my lifelong love of film. Cinema is by its nature a very lean form of storytelling. While producing longer books os more expensive that cost increase is nothing compared to the fantastic cost of making a feature length film. This constraint presses on production to tell their stories in the simplest, leanest, method possible that can still achieve the artistic vision of the film. It is perhaps the single most identifiable element of my voice. (Someone else would have to speak to that matter I seem constitutionally incapable of seeing hearing my own voice in my fiction.)

I am quite comfortable with my lean prose and writing and hopefully others will be as well.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new copy of Dune on eBook and began a re-read of the science-fiction classic. It had been decades since I last read Dune and while the major contours of the plot were well-known to me one of the things that took me by surprise is the out of style point of view.

Writing prose comes in three major points of view.

1) First Person, where the narrative is told directly by the character. The story is literally narrated by the protagonist. It’s a very intimate with every word being the character’s own. It’s also very limited as you can only see and hear what the character sees and hears.

2) Second Person, this takes the form of ‘You see this’ and so on. It is very rare as a fictional point of view but has been used here and there though it never works for me and always kicks me out of the story.

3) Third Person where the prose drops the artifice of a narrator and the prose is told from the viewpoint of observation outside of the characters,

Third person subdivides into three more types.

Third Person Objective, this is best thought of as a ‘like a movie.’ The point of view is outside all of the characters’ inner thoughts or lives and while we can see and hear things around the character we can never see into the characters’ heads.

Third Person Close, here we have a point of view that takes its tone from the character and even present narrative bits with the same biases and observations as the character. Looking at a factory with a close third person view where the character is an environmentalist may present the scene as despoiled and ugly while the same factory with an industrialist character may be presented as vibrant and thriving. This is the point of view most in style today.

Third Person Omniscient, this is the ‘god’s view.’ The point of view can be whatever the author wants. Close to the characters or even inside their minds hearing their thoughts and it is applied to whatever character the author needs. This is the point of view of Dune and it used to be used a lot more often than it is used today. A danger of the third person objective is something called ‘head hopping’ where the point of view switches often and frequently between various characters and this is very true in Dune. Two characters in the novel will be having a conversation and the Herbert will fly between the unspoken thoughts of both back and forth. To me this is jarring and makes the scenes difficult to emotionally engaged with as I have to keep shifting mental gears to follow the oscillating points of view. Mind you this point of view is a fairly common one decades ago and its disuse is more of a matter of style than narrative rule. However, because it is a now nearly an archaic prose approach it has put some distance between me and the book.