In our last episode:

I did my own first cover. It isn’t horrible, but it’s not good or representative of what’s in the book. I take comfort in what Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn said: “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.” [Footnote 6: I wasn’t too embarrassed until a friend said, “I am amused by your creative use of verbs.” I dun fucked up.] I re-edited it and put out a second edition with a new cover (that someone else did).

★★★

That hurt. That hurt in ways I cannot explain. Why? Because I knew I was doing it when I was doing it. I knew it was wrong. I knew it hurt the book, the pacing, the rhythm, and in some ways, the story itself. But I did it anyway because demz wuz da rulez.

Or so I thought.

Rules of writing. These are the rules that get passed from one aspiring writer to another like a game of telephone, treated like gospel in critique groups, ignoring historical writing models or actively trashing them as dated and sloppy, all gleaned from that one conference that one time when that one junior editor at that one publisher gave a workshop about what editors are looking for, said something in passing, and the veteran aspiring authors engraved these rulez on golden plates.

One of many of these nitpicky little shits was “don’t use ‘be’ verbs.” So like a dutiful little writer type, even though I knew it was wrong and bad and ugly, I did everything I could to use no “be” verbs in Teh Bewbies. I twisted myself into linguistic pretzels to keep it from happening. There were so many unnecessary words added to get out of using a “be” verb.

What the rule intended was to eradicate passive voice. The heroine was plowed by the hero. No. The hero plowed the heroine.

It started in the early 90s and was the Big Deal for a long time. If my brief time in online writer circles (in 2007, when I got back into it) was anything to go by, it was still a Big Deal. “Don’t use ‘be’ verbs.”

Apparently no one, including I, got to the deeper issue of passive voice.

You know what? It’s totally possible to construct a passive-voice sentence using active verbs. I’ve seen it.

Now, I have only seen this nincompoopery passed around in genre fiction, not nonfiction or litrachoor. My friend who said this to me writes litrachoor and they not only fling “be” verbs around like parade candy, they construct passive sentences on purpose!

I knew it was wrong and bad and ugly when I did it and I did it anyway.

I dun fucked up.

BUT!

Because I self-published, I have all the control.

And when you self-publish and you have all the control, you’re never finished tweaking.

So I went about pulling that out of print, re-editing it, and releasing it again.

Were I with a publisher, I would never have been able to do that. Nora Roberts’s first book is, I’m told, something she would like to bury to the core of the planet. It fetches a mighty sum.

Teh Bewbies is still out there floating around. People love it. They see the flaws but they don’t care. It’s still people’s favorite book of all time.

Doesn’t matter.

I’m still embarrassed.

★★★

People want different things from writing a book. The first step you must take is to ask yourself: “What do I want?” and actually get to the rock bottom of the truth.

For many people, that is difficult. Too difficult. Some people (me) only get halfway there, but I freely admit I don’t know what I want most of the time.¹

So there I was with my cursor perpetually on the SEND button sending my manuscript out to real agents and publishers (not those poseur ebook publishers) and getting nowhere. Meh, I don’t blame the early rejections. My blurb sucked and so did my beginning (which I rewrote) and my tag line was apparently only appropriate for my blog.

I retooled and sent out another round. Meanwhile, I saw that an in-real-life critique group friend I’d had back in the day and had gotten published by her chosen publisher was talking up ebooks. Well. If she had no problem with it, maybe I should just peek. One night, after another long shift of medical transcriptioning, I decided to browse the poseur ebook publishers.

I found one whose blurb was satisfactory, so I bought it and read it. It was good. It was really good. I bought another one from a different ebook publishing house. Also good. A third, from a third ebook publishing house. Excellent, in fact.

Allrightythen.

After another spate of flat rejections, I started sending it to ebook publishers. Lo and behold, I got one rather complimentary rejection with several suggestions I implemented immediately. I got a couple of other complimentary rejections, and a few more. People liked it, but they didn’t know what it was, precisely, or what to call it.

That was encouraging, but it was still a wall. At least I knew I could still write.

Yet I despaired and my husband finally said (quite innocently) (it was cute), “Why don’t you publish it yourself?”

That sparked the REEEEist REEEE that ever was REEEEd.

YOU CAN’T DO THAT! IT’S NOT ALLOWED!

^{And that would make me no better than Judy the MT.}

He was completely confused. “You publish your cross-stitch patterns. You already have the skills to do it.”

THAT’S DIFFERENT!

I REEEEd for days.

The problem was … in between those very complimentary rejections and the odd editorial suggestion here and there, I was fiddling with covers and doing the typesetting to create a pretty galley. I kept that part to myself. It was my dirty little secret because yes, I did have the chops to do it myself, I didn’t trust what a publisher would do with it, so I’d already begun in the hopes I could say, “Yeah, hey, uh … could you use this cover? And this typesetting?”² I was halfway out the door of my church, but I was afraid of the heat I’d take.

“Look, do you want people to read it?” Dude asked me.

“Yes.”

“Then put it out there. Who’s it going to hurt?”

MY FEELINGS! MY PRIDE! WHAT IF THEY DON’T LIKE IT? WHAT IF THEY SAY MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME ON THE INTERNET?! WHAT IF SIMON & SCHUSTER WANTS TO DESTROY MY CAREER?! REEEEEEEEEEEEE

Then. Then. THEN.

He used The Words on me.

“Remind me who said, ‘The question is not ‘Who’s going to let me?’ The question is ‘Who’s going to stop me?’”

I should never have given him Rand.

★★★

NOTE
2025-08-25:
The second half of this post is a how-to and I decided to make it its own post. I’ll post the link here once I’ve cleaned it up a bit.

★★★

★★★

“I’ve always wanted to write a book!” I hear quite a bit.

“Do it!” I say.

Writing a book has the lowest barrier to entry of any craft, hobby, art, free-time waster I can think of.

Language is accessible to everyone. Everyone can find something to write upon and write with. If you’ve ever heard about back-of-the-napkin ideas/art, just know it’s A Thing. Creators will take any damned thing that can hold ink or graphite.¹

Therefore, writing a story or book is felt to be easy. That’s okay. Most people won’t do it. They’re just not interested. Some people will and they will feel a sense of accomplishment and it’s a once-and-done and they scratch it off their bucket list. They may or may not share it. A few people will be infected with The Dream and learn how to submit queries and proposals to publishers. Some will publish themselves.² The marketers will make it to living (or better) income.

You just gotta have faith.

I bought into this delusion. It was easy to believe before the internet, because you had no idea how many other writers were querying and you just knew yours would hit the slush pile just right. There were probably a lot, yeah, but it wasn’t unmanageable.³ I had an extra reason to believe because editors demonstrated they liked my writing but freak things happened.

I was special.

But the math don’t lie and here is the formula:

Quality is the real lie. It is the most pernicious lie because no one knows exactly what that is. Everyone assumes it’s hitting the formula right and knowing one’s way around the language. That is objectively true. It is also only ostensibly true.

JK Rowling got lucky when “the chairman of [Bloomsbury] gave the first chapter to his then eight-year-old daughter, Alice, to read. Upon finishing, she immediately demanded the rest of the book. However, Bloomsbury was not convinced that it had a bestseller on its hands. Rowling’s editor, Barry Cunningham, warned her that she needed to get a day job because it was impossible to make a living writing children’s books.” This is a children’s editor and he didn’t recognize a gold mine.

It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking one writes quality when your critique groups keep telling you this and you really don’t understand the massive number of people who believe the same thing of themselves.

You become like the beautiful small-town homecoming queen/leading lady in local theater who thinks you can make it big in Hollywood, where no one’s as pretty and talented as you are. You are the prettiest of all. You are the most talented.

And then you find out LA is filled with beautiful, talented women and you look like everyone else and if you catch someone’s eye, you’ll eventually have to fuck Harvey Weinstein to get a breakout role and if you don’t, bye bye hopes and dreams because you’ll never work in this town.⁴ And you may or may not go back home with your tail between your legs.⁵

★★★

I’m doing medical transcription and part of a Usenet group with other MTs. Most are women, most are bleeding-heart liberals, and every MT in the world has one thing in common: We are all voracious readers.⁶

An ancient woman, single, never married, with cats, a robot that mows her lawn, lives in San Francisco, and is about to retire. Now, this woman already irritated me because she felt very entitled to other people’s money. She writes a book and she announces that she’s been published. I’m immediately green. I wear that color well. A lot. So I go looking and lo and behold! She self-published with this new-fangled thing called print-on-demand.     ^{Wait, what?}     Print-on-demand?! Therein begins the toxic stew that churns in my gut.

She’s not supposed to do that! Nobody said she could do that! Doesn’t she know how this is done? That’s not an accomplishment! You can’t be a good writer if nobody published you! I had that idea before you did and I couldn’t afford it! I have been writing for years! I have a degree! My professor said I could write!

So I go to my secret horde of MT friends and rant. One of my friends, the only other female conservatarian MT I know (who has her own business) (whom I subcontract for) (who knows good fiction) bought the book and could barely read it. “Don’t worry about it; it’s crap.”

I felt better, but later, the Usenet group had a conversation about fiction in general and this woman says, as authoritatively as she says everything, that she hates reading books that are grammatically incorrect. To clarify, I politely asked if she meant dialogue, too. She said yes. I said, “That is not the way people talk.”

“They should. And I make them talk that way because it is correct.”

She is a medical transcriptionist. She listens to people talk all day. Doctors mumble, stutter, chew, shit, pee, and drive while they’re dictating. Furthermore, I had cut my transcription teeth on transcribing my PI dad’s telephone interviews when I was 16,⁷ and had developed various punctuation protocols to replicate on paper how people really talk.

So I copied and pasted a small snippet of dialogue from one of those old books I had written but han’t looked at in years. She ripped me to pieces up one side and down the other and pasted a good piece of hers (which was, indeed, crap), but shocker—the others agreed with me.

People don’t talk like that.⁸

Satisfied that she was a dilettante and as much of an annoying idiot as I had already thought she was, I went about my medical transcriptioning business, comfortably smug that she had to self-publish because she really was crap. My church and prophets were right, and my theology was pure:

But there remained the tiniest pebble in my soul I was worrying like an oyster worries a grain of sand: I write better than that. I am better than she is.

^{Aren’t I?}

★★★

The Proviso, book 1 of my restarted writing career, was as finished as it was going to be without editorial help. I started looking for online critique groups. They were not helpful. I found a couple of critique partners, but they didn’t grok what I was doing,⁹ deliberately hearkening back to ye olde dayes of soap opera books

Didn’t matter. An agent and/or editor would see how special it was and whip it into shape.

Then I realized there were these things called ebooks and ebook publishers and that was where most of these people were concentrating their efforts. Pffft. That was little better than self-publishing, but I continued to look for a decent critique group and partner.

Well, it took a while but I figured out I wasn’t going to get any valuable critiques.¹⁰ I started preparing my submissions according to the Old Ways and when I went looking for agents and publishers, I was ecstatic to find out they took subs by email and the restriction on simultaneous submissions was gone.

I cracked my knuckles and gleefully copied and pasted my carefully personalized cover letters and “first chapter into the body of the email—no attachments accepted” into one email after another after another and confidently hit the SEND button.

______________________________

1.   #ProTip: Don’t use pencil; it fades and you may need that idea someday.

2.   This was always true, even when self-publishing was of the devil.

3.   You weren’t allowed to submit to different publishers and agents simultaneously back then, so it was a long process and you might never hear back. If you did so anyway and both publishers offered, you’d have some ’splainin’ to do, Lucy. The brainwashing was so complete that you obeyed this edict because you thought there was a very good chance more than one publisher or agent would want it.

4.   Mira [sad trombone] Sorvino

5.

• Yeah, you were gonna change the world
• Walking back, a child in the rain …
• Just keep your eye upon that endless broken line
• Throw bag beneath the bus
• Sit among the curious
• It happens to the best of us, you know

6.  Flyover Country rubes who don’t read? Please. We just don’t read various flavors of mid-40s men detailing their midlife crises and sexual fantasies masquerading as “literature.”

7.  Picture this: A tiny bedroom in a small house in the ghetto, painted pink, frilly pink gingham curtains handmade by my mother, a pink gingham quilt hand-made by my grandmother, a French provincial desk from Sears, a kitchen chair, an old Royal typewriter with a manual return, and a boom box. I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning typing and made excellent money for my age, for a work-at-home job, and managed to please my dad.

8.  The rhythm of the way people talk is a kind of music. You have to alter the time signatures, put in rests and fragments and somehow convey allegro and adagio. You have to drop letters, syllables, and somehow spell non-word noises that actually mean something like “uh huh” and “nuh uh” and “ope!” You have to have alternate spellings for regional accents: “a’ight”, “innit”, “doan”.

9.  They always “just don’t get what I’m doing.” Idiots, clearly, every last one.

10.  “Real heroines don’t mutiny their captains by beheading them with battle axes while half-naked—and they certainly don’t do it on the first page. She’s totally unlikeable. I’m not going to read this and nobody else will, either.”

      Well, I’d read it. That’s why I fucking wrote it.

★★★

★★★

I didn’t actually do the math.

I didn’t have the numbers for one side of the colon. But based on the proliferation of newsgroups, online critique groups, publishing forums in 2008, and the number of such denizens all trying to get published, I could guess. And it was huge.

Then there was me. 1 : x⁶²¹⁴

Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will.

I was 15 when I first found out how to go about querying and creating proposals. I even did that a couple of times for Reader’s Digest. I was rejected. It hurt, not because I was rejected, but because I was running out of time. A favorite author’s bio said she was 18 when she first published a book, which she wrote “on a whim”. If I hadn’t done it by 18, well … (Narrator: That was a lie. She was 25.)

I was eating Harlequin Presents romances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I knew the formula. I knew the most popular tropes. I had plenty of ideas. I didn’t have such words in my vocabulary as “formula” and “trope.” It was a gut feeling, the natural rhythm of the way a good story is paced.

I never did get a Harlequin Presents romance written. By the time I could actually write a book, I liked Harlequin Superromances better and I trained myself to write within that word count (90,000 to 120,000). It felt more complete than the 55,000 words of Presents. Well, of course it would. It was double.

So here’s what happened:

In 1989, I wrote my under-the-bed novel. The apprentice novel. The horrible one. The one you never want to see the light of day. It’s still out there floating around, I think.

In 1990, I wrote my next novel. It was marginally better.

In 1991, I wrote my third. It was good. I sent it to a publisher that had launched the careers of a bunch of NYT bestsellers. I got The Call. You know, the one where the editor calls you and congratulates you. Then … nothing. The publisher went out of business. Why? The parent company had bought it for a tax write-off and it made money. So bye bye Kismet. Yes, that was the publisher’s name. Kismet.

In 1993, I wrote my fourth. It was really good. I sent it to Harlequin and got The Call. Sorta. The editor said, “I love this book. However, I bought one fairly similar last month that is not as good as yours, but I can’t break that contract and I can’t sell this to my editorial board. Send me something else. NAO.” I gave a brief rundown of book #3 and she passed.

So I got an agent with book 4. That relationship ended in disaster after she read book 2 and told me to get a therapist. (Narrator: That book was revamped a few times, published, and remains the fan favorite.)

In 1993, I started writing my pirate novel. I knew what I wanted to do. I also knew I didn’t have the chops to do it, so I fiddled with it for years.

In 1993, I wrote book 5. It also got me The Call. An editor at Harlequin called me up on a Saturday morning and said, “I want to read the rest of this book. Overnight it.” She called me Tuesday evening and said, “I love this book—except the ending.” Me, having been trained to be a good, dutiful, well-behaved author, said, “I’ll rewrite it!” She sighed and said, “No, that would ruin the book. It has the ending it needs. I just can’t sell it.”

In 1995, I was a senior in college in the creative writing program. My professor was the faculty supervisor of the uni’s lit rag. After my first assignment, he told me I had an A in the class and I could just skip the rest of the semester because he couldn’t teach me anything. But he would count it a personal favor if I stayed and did the assignments because he loved my work. That class was 8:00 a.m. after I’d spent the night working a graveyard shift at a gas station. You better believe I went to class.

I wrote a story. He was disappointed in me for giving it a “romance novel ending,” but otherwise he loved it. My senior advisor for my capstone project happened to be a Latin teacher (no idea why) who was absolutely fascinated by my creative process. She said, “I don’t care what you do, just tell me why and how you do it.” Okay, so I expanded on my story that had caught my attention.

It so happened that I was in Shakespeare 480 class or whatever really high number and we were studying Hamlet. I decided that somehow my religious allegory for the atonement (with a romance-novel ending) and Hamlet should go together like bread and butter. It didn’t. I couldn’t make that plot work.

So I was bored at my graveyard job and in class and wrote book 6. That one got me a literary agent who loved it, but could not sell it, either.

Let us stop a moment and draw the obvious conclusion.

It was about now I started messing with making my own galleys of book 6. I was never going to self-publish, oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Only bad writers self-published. It was the kiss of death. Even if you really were good, a publisher would never publish someone who had published himself. Still … that galley looked awfully pretty. I hesitantly called up a printer as if I were calling up a gigolo to take my virginity for me, knowing I was going to go to hell for it when I died, and said,

“Yeah, um … how … much … would this cost?”

“Twenty grand.”

“Bye.”

So even my attempt at committing the ultimate sin was unavailable to me.

I gave up. I had enough near-misses to let me know I wasn’t a bad writer, but clearly not good enough and I obviously didn’t know how to hit the Harlequin bullseye after all.

No, I didn’t give up trying to get published. I gave up writing altogether.

Fast forward to 2004. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had a baby. I’ve gotten a work-at-home profession as a medical transcriptionist and was doing okay. I’ve got no creative outlet. I refuse to write and only occasionally fiddled with my pirate novel, and once in a while, I tried to make that Hamlet-atonement plot that wouldn’t work, work.

My husband had read one of my books and liked it. He had urged me to query it again. I had. I had gotten swiftly and roundly rejected. Apparently, it hadn’t stood the test of time. In anger, I had burned all my manuscripts in the barbecue grill.

I’ve still got no creative outlet except … counted cross stitch. I love it. (Narrator: Loved. She killed that by making it into a business.) There were lots of things I wanted to stitch, so I learned how to convert them into patterns. I then went online and found out people who were “superstars” in the cross stitch pattern world had started out doing their own and just pitched them to shops and then got picked up by distributors. Self-publishing your patterns was the mark of a professional. So I did that. Turns out, what I like and what a lot of other people like aren’t the same, and the few who did like my patterns weren’t enough to pay the bills.

That fizzled after a few years of tinkering with it. I was okay with that. I’d had another baby. I was working my ass off at medical transcription because I had moved into a house that we should never have bought and had started having expensive problems. (Narrator: Two weeks after moving in, the back patio sliding door fell out. Just … fell out. That was a very cold winter.)

Fast forward to 2007.

One night, after having invoiced my contractor for my medical transcription work (it was a lot of money), I was very depressed. Not even my newly-doubled-dose of antidepressants was helping. (Narrator: Sometimes you don’t have depression. Sometimes your life just sucks.) As one gets older, one should be making more money for less effort. Otherwise, you’re not life-ing right. I sent my bill and sat there in the dark and looked at my computer. I opened up book 6 and I read my own work for the first time in years.

It was like somebody else had written it, and it was good. Like, really good. I went to bed even more depressed and discouraged and asking, “Why did I give up on myself?”

I woke up the next morning with the solution to my now-decade-old plot problem and I got to writing.

The rollercoaster car had left the station.

★★★

“Any halfway decent artist can outline,” she sneered.

You can’t sneer a statement.

She raised her eyes to his.

What’d she do, pick them up off the floor?

Long ago and far away, when I first had this thing called a critique group, a thing that was foreign to me, I was taught these “rules.” I had never heard of these “rules.” I didn’t know what was wrong with raising one’s eyes or sneering one’s reply. I found such phrasings helpful and I read lots of books that had such things in it, lots of books by famed (and good) authors.

They were “rules,” I was told, lectured upon at workshops and conferences at RWA by editors and agents and teachers of writing classes. Ah, well, if it came from editors, it must be true.

(Never mind it was third- or fourth- or twelfth-hand. And never mind I was in my senior year of a creative writing degree and none of my professors had ever said any such thing. But that was LITERARY, and this was ROMANCE. Clearly, they had different rules.)

Then there was the head-hopping. I can’t find the last manuscript I did that in, so I’ll skip the example. I didn’t know what was wrong with that, either, because it was the way many popular books I read when I was a child and teenager were written. Hell, Hemingway did it. I never noticed it much less knew there was a name for it. Furthermore, I’d gotten two literary agents with books whose characters hop-scotched all the way through 300 pages, and I was the only person in my critique group to have gotten that close to getting The Call.

But the more it was pointed out to me, the more it irritated me. I don’t know if it irritated me because it was a “rule” that was being broken, because it was a “rule” I was not allowed to break, because I acquired a taste against the technique, or because it was just pointed out so often I avoided it like a puppy getting its nose smacked with a rolled-up newspaper.

I still don’t do it and now I will notice it but if I see it I chalk it up to artistic choice and go with it.

Lastly.

Oh, lastly.

Lastly, there are the “be” verbs, and the blanket admonition to use them as sparingly as possible because using a “be” verb is weak and is passive voice.

It was this that gave her the upper hand with Fen.

Her outfit was utterly ridiculous.

(Do we see the difference in “be” usage between these two sentences? No? Then this post is for you.)

One of the reasons I decided to revise The Proviso was because I had adhered to all of these admonitions (and at least a dozen more). It’d been a long time since I’d written anything at all, much less tried to find an agent or publisher, and I was a little weak in the knees about doing anything “wrong.” So while I was writing, I was adhering to these rules because they were the only solid thing I had to depend on at that time.

And I would find creative ways to delete any “be” verbs, because by that point I didn’t remember WHY I was supposed to do that. A sign of a bad or unimaginative writer or something. And none of my characters raised their eyes; their attention went to that spot. Many attentions went to many spots. None of my characters sneered any words, but they did say things with a sneer, which added very many words. All those rules-followings, and I told myself I was making good art.

Piffle.

I knew I was wrong while I was writing it. It didn’t flow. It was making me crazy, trying to come up with sentence structure that was simple and effective and rhythmic while avoiding “be” verbs. It wasn’t my voice. The language was overwrought, and I knew it. I didn’t like it. But dammit, I was following the rules!

I didn’t trust myself, you see. I didn’t trust my voice, but my voice was rusty and the rules were a long time ago and the internet was crawling with contradictory advice …

So a while after I released The Proviso and gotten a bit of good feedback, a literary type person whose work I highly respect (koff**DannyNelson**koff) said to me:

“I am enjoying your creative use of verbs.”

I died.

Withered up.

Blew away.

He’d noticed. Since he wasn’t a genre writer, I wasn’t sure if he’d know why I did that, but did it matter? I had followed the rules and I had done the exact wrong thing.

It became a thing with me, The Proviso being not quite right because I had done something deliberately I knew was bad for the story but I was following the rules. It was like putting up sheetrock and getting it all mudded and sanded and painted and trimmed—only to realize that even though you followed the instructions given to you by someone you trusted, you didn’t get the outlets wired correctly. But oh well. Since you weren’t going to use them that much anyway, you could work around it.

But every time you look at those outlets or have to run an extension cord, you know. And your brain picks at it. When are you going to open up that wall and do it right? You need to get that done right. I have so many other things to do though! But you know that’s not wired right and it’s getting more annoying every time you have to move an extension cord. You can still live with it until—

Wait, are you telling me we’re avoiding “be” verbs because you think AAAAALLLLLL “be” verbs make a sentence passive? What the hell?!

Everywhere around the web I was seeing this. I was seeing this from n00b authors telling other n00b authors, the way it was told to me by n00b authors I assumed knew more than I did (they didn’t), who said they got it from some workshop or writing article and who knows where all else they got it, and it’s been spreading like syphilis through a crackwhorehouse for the last 20 years.

THAT IS NOT WHAT PASSIVE VOICE MEANS!!!! DON’T YOU PEOPLE GROK NUANCE?!?!?

I’m still seeing that advice everywhere. I had to tell a n00b a couple of weeks ago that “be” DOES NOT EQUAL passive voice. It just means the sentence is arranged passively.

And so I took the sledgehammer to the wall because I couldn’t stand Nelson’s voice in my head anymore.

I am enjoying your creative use of verbs.

Stop it. It was clever the first three times I heard it in, oh, 1993. Now, after 3,409,320 times used and an interwebz in which I can document every instance, it’s way past cliché.

You’re writers (or editors or agents). Find a different way to say it, because at this point, every time you say it, you sound like a parrot without an original thought in your head.

Third person limited, with a little modification.

According to Wikipedia (that most unassailable source), third-person limited is:

Third person limited is when the narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one character … In third person limited the narrator is outside of the story and tells the story from only one character’s view.

However, some authors use an even narrower and more subjective perspective, as though the viewpoint character were narrating the story; this is dramatically very similar to the first person, allowing in-depth revelation of the protagonist’s personality, but uses third-person grammar.

In my time writing novels, being in critique groups, chomped on by the creative writing professors at UMKC, this has been pounded into me as being The Correct Way To Do Things. Well, either that or first person, which has a literary cachet that is only beginning to gain ground in genre fiction.

Then there’s third person objective, which I will admit I have been confusing with third person omniscient as recently two minutes ago:

… which tells a story without detailing any characters’ thoughts and instead gives an objective point of view. This point of view can be described as “a fly on the wall” and is preferred in newspaper articles.

Then there’s third person omniscient.

Historically, the “third person omniscient” perspective was more common. This is the tale told from the point of view of the storyteller who knows all the facts. An example of this would be “little did he know” when told by that third person, such as a narrator. The primary advantage is that it injected the narrator’s own perspective and reputation into the story, creating a greater sense of objectivity for the story. The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story.

And the salient point to the above paragraph is this: “Currently this style is out of favor.”

Oh, ya think?

We who have been pummeled call it “head hopping.” I hate it. I really do. But my problem is that I don’t know if I hate this style of storytelling natively or if I’ve been conditioned to spot it and, thus, hate it. Why am I agonizing over this now?

Because of Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.

The short backstory is this: The book was self-published and picked up by a NY house when it started catching buzz around Blogland. I did not buy the self-published version; I bought the Harper version. I don’t know how heavily edited the second one was, but it appears it underwent some serious whipping-into-shape. Obviously I can’t make comparisons between the two (sorry, not getting the other one), but this is significant to today’s agonization.

This book is told in so many points of view I can’t count them all. The servants have a POV, for cryin’ out loud! And while I don’t mind that in some authors, it makes me mad in others (no, I’m not naming names). So beware, head-hopper haters, this book might drive you up a wucking fall.

I didn’t mind it at all in this book, which is what surprised me, but that was also because there was no “meanwhile back at the ranch” transitioning (and if there was, I didn’t notice it), which is what annoys my inner storyteller. Why and when did this style of storytelling fall out of favor? If I weren’t a writer who’d had the propensity beat out of her with the sharp end of a red pen, I would A) not notice and B) not care.

Obviously, whoever read this book (then blogged it and started the buzz) enjoyed it enough for a bunch of other people to pick it up. That snowballed into Harper picking it up. They edited it, but they apparently didn’t follow the current trend of limiting the number of one’s POV characters and, furthermore, not head hopping.

My question is this: Does it even matter to the reader, all this technical flim-flammery, if the story’s engaging? Apparently not.

On the other hand, are you going to be able to send your deliciously wonderful head-hopping novel to an agent and expect something other than a rejection letter? Erm, no. Remember the story I just told you about this novel’s path to publication.

Are we writers just so conditioned by now to spot and eliminate (or the gods of writing will come take our pen nibs away from us) all head hopping and unauthorized POV switches that we automatically think “bad writing” when we come across it? I mean, yes, it can get in the way of the story (and I ran across that even when I was a child glomming every book in the small library by my house), but is it necessarily to be eliminated at all costs?

I’m now intrigued by this and will probably end up reading everything through this filter for a while. I know myself well enough to know I won’t ever be comfortable writing this way and even if I were, a lot of someones would come along and say, “You can’t do that.”