"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

hit man.тАЭ) Second person, the voice so popular in those choose-your-own-
story adventure juveniles (You stir your chili with your spoon, then turn to
the waitress and say, тАЬLet me tell you about the time I found...тАЭ) turns off
readers so quickly that, unless you're a screaming genius, your editor will
bounce it back to you unread. It's ugly and awkward.
So figure out which one it's going to be. First or third. When you're a bit
more experienced, it can be both in the same book.

First person is great fun to write, because the narrator will develop a
distinctive voice with shocking ease. Its limitations are that you can't know
anything except what your main character knows, and, because the main
character is narrating, you're almost certain she survives the novel. Agatha
Christie did some funky things with this, but I thought the one where the
first-person narrator turned out to be the killer (surprise!) was kind of
gimmicky.
Third person is broader in the scope of what it allows you to do (multiple
points of view, varying emotional distances, shifts to omniscient viewpoint).
It is easier to write a literary novel in third than in first. There are
exceptions. Its drawbacks are the ease with which you can be drawn off into
tangents, the ease with which you can fall into passive voice (boring) and
the way that characters can proliferate, to the point that you start losing track
of them.
I've written books in both, they each have their uses, and you will discover
that one fits what you're writing better than the other. Give it some thought.



тАв Know your genre.
In a perfect world, every book would be equally marketable to every
publisher, and we'd all sell everything we wrote and make millions doing so.
But we haven't yet reached that perfect world, so in the meantime, you're
going to need to know what you're writing so that you'll have an idea of who
might buy it. It really, really helps to know this BEFORE you type тАЬThe
EndтАЭ and print out your final copy. Or, worse, get fifty rejection letters from
publishers who tell you they тАЬdon't publish books of this type.тАЭ
Genre is: romance, mystery, horror, western, men's adventure, science
fiction, fantasy, gay/lesbian, religious, historical, mainstream, etc..
HOLLY LISLE
 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 34

Mainstream can have elements from any or all of the other genres, but will
have some facet that publishers believe will make it appeal to a wider
audience. Walk through a bookstore, and try to imagine where your book
would likely be shelved. That's your genre.
And be honest with yourself here. If Fabio's presence on the cover of your
book would, A) be appropriate, and B) increase sales, you have not written a
mainstream novel. Ditto rocket-ships, women in chain-mail bikinis, or guys
in cowboy boots and chaps.