Caitlin Weaver on navigating the potential pitfalls of multi-POV stories
Plus, Sidney Karger shares the importance of being "wrong as fast as you can" and how to deal with writer's block in this week's Author Q&A
Greetings writing pals!
All writers are ambitious—there’s no way around it. Unambitious people simply don’t wake up one day and think “Today is a good day to make something up out of thin air!” Or, if they do, they quickly abandon the project once they realize writing is a lot harder than they’d first thought. If you’re reading this, that obviously doesn’t apply to you—congratulations! But are you one of those extra-ambitious sorts? You know, the kind of person who thinks “This is torturous, sure, but how can I make it even MORE challenging? I know, I’ll try my hand at tackling multi-POV!” (Add bonus toughness points if you’ve taken this on as a debut!👏👏👏)
We know from the number of Books with Hooks submissions we get for multi-POV manuscripts that there are a lot of you masochists out there, so this week’s subscribers-only issue is going to be extra-helpful for many of you—we’ve got debut author Caitlin Weaver’s essay on the pitfalls of ensemble casts and the secrets to avoiding them. It really is jam-packed with practical advice (most of which is applicable to books with lone protagonists, too), including seven questions every author needs to be able to answer about their characters.
We’ve also got our weekly Author Q&A, this time with screenwriter, novelist, and director Sidney Karger whose recently released The Bump was called “Smart, deeply funny and heartwarming” by Anderson Cooper. Among other things, Sid shares an interesting perspective on writer’s block, framing it in a way we hadn’t considered before, and that we can see being really helpful the next time we come up against a writing wall. We think you’ll find it helpful, too.
Thanks for reading!
❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
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