Debi Alper
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Hi Paula. I’m honestly in awe of how good this group is. When I did Gill’s feedback, I saw she had set the bar high and thought others would struggle to come up to it but you too have exceeded expectations and have shown a far better understanding of PD than most people do at the point when they do the exercise. And this in spite of the inherent deception in the way we worded the task. (Please see my confession over on Gill’s thread if you haven’t already seen it.)
A few things to pick up on in the discussions.
I didn’t go to number 5 in it at all. That’s probably because you were subliminally aware that the scene doesn’t justify going to PD5, so it will always feel artificially imposed. In other words, it’s a good sign that you think you didn’t go there. That doesn’t mean you’ve posted the ‘wrong’ passage for the exercise. Part of what we learn this week is when an area of the spectum *isn’t* called for. Having said that, you might be surprised by my deconstruction. You got closer than you give yourself credit for.
I think Debi wanted us to just do an exercise – even if we don’t use it precisely in the book at the end. Yes, that’s right. This week is all about developing a sense of the spectrum. It can be useful for your own purposes to analyse the PD in your current draft, though we didn’t ask you to post it. (Though it’s fine if people do.)
I added in all that cheeto, boner and viagra stuff when I was working on the exercise. What a brilliant outcome! The exercise made you delve deeper into his psyche, getting to know him from the inside in a way that you hadn’t before. That insight will help to inform his character-in-action, whatever part of the spectrum you’re in.
Gill said: A bit as I did you’ve used the closest PD for thoughts and feelings which is what seems to come more naturally….Just wondering if we can also use them for settings? Keen to see if anyone does it that way, or how to work from inner to outer…Maybe when the setting is the most important thing for the character eg earthquake? That’s an interesting point. A reverse zoom can also work well for something like a battlefield. Let’s see if anyone does use a reverse zoom in their exercise.
Before we move on, I have to say again how impressed I am by the feedback. I know Lucia, for example, has said how hard she’s had to push herself to pin down the levels but her instincts are guiding her well, and that applies to a lot of you. Once you’ve done all this hard work, you might be surprised at how intuitive it all is to spot the PD in any given sentence.
Coming to your story now, Paula, PD1 is incredibly useful for world-building in a story in a setting that’s unfamiliar to us, ie hist fic, sci-fi, fantasy etc. Remember, this is the part of the spectrum where you can do any of the *telling* that’s crucial for us to understand the world of your story. For your PD1, you’ve stripped out any POV voice for a character but there’s not a strong sense of an external narrator’s voice. There’s been a bit of discussion about switching from third to first person at PD5, so I’ll talk about that a bit. We’ve already said that PD5 should be reserved for an emotional gut-punch, or a fast-paced scene with maximum jeopardy. Putting that aside, it’s true that the gap in time and space between reader and narrative disappears at PD5. That can often manifest as past tense becoming present, and/or third person becoming first or second person. When it’s done smoothly, via a PD slide, the average reader won’t even notice it’s happened. (You will now, because you’re learning to read as a writer.)
You’re writing in present tense, so everything happens in the *now*. Is that a boner in his pants? is third person, so, by definition, someone else is still in the picture. Is that a boner in my pants? (gawd, I love this course) could be an abrupt switch in the voice. PD5 is often neutral. In this scenario, it would probably manifest as Phwoar. Yeah, baby.
Let’s drill down into the detail.
PD1
Texan billionaire Lionel White stands on a high podium. PD1-2 His backdrop is a one-hundred-metre stainless steel rocket attached to a scaffold frame, pointing at the sky. PD1 A crowd of supporters pulsates on a viewing platform, waving miniature White Light flags. PD1-ish They cheer as he steps up to the microphone. PD1-ish
PD is not an exact science, which is why I’ll sometimes say something is PD1-2, or PD1-ish. It’s a slide, and the 1>5 are artificial markers on it. But it is useful to think about how far we can push out at PD1, especially in a WIP that’s set in an unfamiliar world. There was talk in the comments about how you don’t want Lionel to come over as too narcissistic and Trumpian. You want him to be flawed, vain (that sort of adulation would be hard to resist) but not incapable of compassion or wanting to good for good’s sake and not just for his own glory. That makes him a much more interesting character, to be honest. So, how do you convey that to the reader when he’s being shown basking in the adoration of the masses and getting turned on by it?
Here’s where your PD1 narrator could step in. They could *tell* us things from Lionel’s past, even back as far as childhood. Though that will focus on him as a character, it wouldn’t be part of the scene which is about to unfold. If you inserted something like that mid-scene, it would be probably be an info dump, which disrupts the pace of the action. For this reason, you’re more likely to encounter that sort of PD at the beginning of a scene or chapter. So, you could have something like:
As a child, Lionel White had never been adored. In fact, he’d barely been tolerated. His father … etc. Something like this would give us context for what we see in the scene when we get there.
There’s a lot in the WIP that the reader will need help to understand. How do the satellites work? What’s the science? Your PD1 narrator could give us this info. Obviously, you won’t want to get too techy but without some sort of understanding, it will be hard for us to assess the stakes. Is the scene in the middle of a desert? You could show the sun baking down on the landscape, an eagle swooping overhead, a lizard scuttling across sand …
You’re writing in present tense. This is a radical suggestion but I’ll throw it out there for you to consider. Your PD1 narrator might be a survivor, telling the story after it’s taken place. This doesn’t have to be explicit – though it could be. Their voice could be either first or third person, past or present tense. The latter might sound counter intuitive but it could work. The advantage is that this could be the uplift you want to introduce, so the story doesn’t feel too pessimistic about the impacts of the climate crisis. Also, as you have various locations and POV characters, this narrator could be a device which holds everything together, like a dish of component parts that are made whole by the addition of a sauce. (You can tell Masterchef is back on TV!)
There are so many possibilities for this end of the spectrum and I hope this has sparked off some ideas about what it could add to your WIP.
PD3
Lionel White feels (filtering) a rush as the crowd cheers. PD3 because of the filtering. This is what he lives for. PD4 – that’s his voice now. The dry heat has swelled the capillaries on his face, antagonizing his eczema. PD2 – that feels like something visible from the outside. He would be scarlet, but for the pressed powder his PR officer brushed over his cheeks. PD2 It had an orange tinge. PD2 He hopes (filtering) he doesn’t look too much like a walking Cheeto snack. PD3 because of the filtering. Seeing (filtering) the sea of smiles, he forgets (filtering) about that. PD3 They love him. PD4 – the narrator has faded away. This certainty is Lionel’s.
The good news there is that you have some movement around the middle of the spectrum, between PD2<>3<>4. That’s certainly what you want to be aiming for in the WIP. A reminder that PD3 is slap-bang in the middle of the spectrum. Filtering is a common feature of it. We get some insights into the character’s interiority but only as much as the narrator allows. Voice-wise, it’s neither one nor the other. Because it’s focusing on a character, rather than more narrator-ish things at PD1, we don’t get a strong sense of this narrator’s voice. At the same time, we don’t get the full impact of the character’s voice in the prose because the narrator is still holding the reins.
PD5
What a rush! PD5 Too bad that PR stuck orange powder all over his face. PD4 No matter. PD5 They love him. PD4 Is that a boner in his pants? PD4 Jeez, this is better than Viagra! PD5
Look at how good that is! You’ve also demonstrated how, at PD5, we’re so locked inside the character’s head, we lose sight of the scene they’re responding to.
PD1-5
Texan billionaire Lionel White stands on a high podium. PD1-2 His backdrop is a one-hundred-metre stainless steel rocket attached to a scaffold frame, pointing at the sky. PD1 The crowd cheers, waving their flags. PD1-ish What a rush! PD5 Shame that PR stuck orange powder all over his face. PD4 He hopes he doesn’t look too much like a walking Cheeto snack. PD3 No matter. PD5 They love him. PD4 Is that a boner in his pants? PD4 Jeez, this is better than Viagra! PD5
Well done for getting most of the spectrum in there, which is more than most people manage when they do this exercise for the first time. Can you see the ebb and flow though? Good news for the WIP but not the strict one-way slide we were looking for in the exercise. I’ll have a go.
The year is 2050 and Earth is on the brink of man-made destruction. One man, a Texan billionaire called Lionel White, has found the technology that will save the planet. Deep in the Chihuahuan Desert, Lionel stands on a high podium in front of a one-hundred-metre stainless steel rocket attached to a scaffold frame, pointing at the sky. He feels a rush as the crowd cheers. They love him. Jeez, this is better than Viagra!
Apologies for not including those wonderful gems – the powder, the Cheeto … You would never have such a steep and abrupt slide, across the whole spectrum in a short paragraph. But has this helped you to see the full spectrum and work out which parts to use and when? Hope so!
I’m jiggling in PD5-ish excitement, Gill. Your whole thread this week – your exercise and all the thinking you and the others are doing in response – is something I would never usually encounter until the end of the week. As an aside, I love the premise of the scene, but I’m going to keep a tight focus on PD. Perhaps counter intuitively, this week is not about your plot – and it’s not about producing ‘good’ writing either, so it’s a bonus that I’m excited by the former in your exercise and impressed by the latter.
I’m going to start by picking up on some of the things that have cropped up in the replies.
Katie said: I’m getting the impression it can be quite tricky to fit the entire PD spectrum into one passage … Absolutely. The exercise is artificial. The aim is simply to show the full spectrum, rather than producing something that might appear in the draft.
She also said: … the scene unfolding like I was watching through a camera on a gurney, sliding into the library, past the occupants and to the table where Laura is sat. That’s a brilliant analogy of a PD slide.
Gill’s reply: is it maybe unusual to go all the way in or out in one paragraph when you have a whole novel to play with? Useful as an exercise but not that common, maybe. … Exactly. You answered that question for yourself.
I’m definitely thinking to be more conscious of slides, to use 4 much more with touches of 5. Consciousness is what we’re aiming for. PD4 is the richest part of the spectrum in that it shows what’s going on but keeps us close to the character and their voice, so we’re sharing their experience.
Most single word sentences are going to be 5s in fact, aren’t they? Because we tend to use those single word sentences to embody an emotion. Yes! I’m air-punching! Most people don’t grasp this until much later in the week. I was also excited to see that you’re now reading as a writer, analysing the PD in Emma Flint’s Little Deaths (which I’ve read) and Katie doing the same in her analysis of Mrs March by Virginia Feito (which I haven’t).
Gill: I’m still tangling with when PD5 should be used. Since it shows quite a visceral, extreme reaction I’ve tended to use it so far for more high point emotional moments. You’ve got it. Some novels never go to PD5 at all. For those that do, it’s best to reserve it for those moments of emotional intensity or high drama. Like any tool, it can become blunt through over-use and won’t have the impact you want for those times when you want it to pack a punch.
Now to get down to the business of checking the PD in your exercise. The fact that you’ve done such an excellent job of it is all the more impressive given that we set you an impossible task. (I can see in some of the discussions that some of you are already working this out.) We asked you to show the whole scene at each level but, as soon as you start to show characters in action, you’ve moved in from PD1. And as soon as you show anything that’s not deep inside a character’s head in a frozen moment, you’ve pulled back from PD5. The point being that we need to use the whole spectrum to show complete scenes, or at least most of it. I’ve added that qualifier because some novels have no PD1 and/or PD5 but will still need movement between PD2, 3 and 4. If there isn’t, it’s the equivalent of watching a whole film shot with a static camera. I’ve come across no end of strong stories that don’t fly from the page, simply because the whole thing sits at PD3, making the voice same-y and never varying the perspective.
I do hope you will all forgive the deception in the exercise. Our take is that the ends justify the means and, if you all end up with an understanding of the spectrum and what it can offer to you and your story, that’s all that matters. As so many of you are already working that out, before I even got here, I do feel vindicated. I’m going to analyse your levels now.
PD1
The library at Colindale was busy on a Thursday afternoon. PD1 The tall windows sent slabs of light into the oak-panelled room and its occupants yawned and stretched at their desks, on which sat vast ledgers of old newspapers, or stacks of plastic spools. PD1 Laura sat huddled over a microfiche machine, her hand on the handle. PD2 – we’ve zoomed into seeing Laura as the character-in-action. We’re seeing her from outside only, which is why it’s PD2.
Your first two sentences are exemplary PD1. In theory, you could zoom back even further, outside the building, eg something like:
The newspaper archives in Colindale held approximately 700,000 bound volumes of papers and magazines, going back to the 17th century and occupying almost 30 miles of shelving. The red brick building had been used for this purpose since … etc.
Or you could show the area in north London, perhaps mentioning its proximity to the police college in Hendon, or you could talk about how microfiches worked in those pre-computer times. Maybe you could talk about the oldest volume in the archive and then zoom from there to ten years ago, the next step being Laura turning the handle at PD2. Think laterally. Might it be useful to talk about the politics of the era? In the 80s, that would be Thatcher. In the 90s, we’d see her legacy. It’s fine for your narrator to have a political agenda. They’ll feel more like a real person if they have opinions, though obviously, we can’t have too much of this. You’re writing a novel, not polemic. But your PD1 narrator could still tell us about the political climate in which the characters operate. Honestly, there’s so much you can do at PD1. As long as it’s detached from a character-in-action in an unfolding scene, it would qualify as PD1. It broadens the world of your novel.
PD3
Laura re-read the final paragraph, trying to impose a meaning on the words. PD3 Her fingers tightened on the handle, her eyes skimming the words, searching for the flaw, the error she had made. PD3 Something would show her the article was a lie. PD4
The good writer in you couldn’t resist drawing closer in the third sentence. It’s a natural progression from the PD3 in the previous sentences but it’s closer to the thought she had at the time. At PD3, the narrator hasn’t relinquished control of the voice. *They’re* telling us what Laura is doing physically (re-reading, tightening fingers, skimming eyes) and what she wants (trying to understand, searching for the flaw). In the third sentence, this narrator is fading away, showing us Laura’s steely determination from within.
PD5
The library was a house of lies. PD4 That last paragraph, nonsense. PD4-5 – note that it’s tense neutral, unlike the previous sentence. She was Kafka’s cockroach. PD4 An insect, with a great black belly, lying on its back and waving her legs in the air. PD4-ish
I’ve put that at PD4 because you haven’t completely committed to being inside her head in a single moment. She was shows that there’s another entity referring to her in third person. I love the analogy of Kafka’s cockroach but the last sentence feels overly dramatic. I’m not sure it’s what Laura would be thinking at the time.
But here’s the real point. She’s confused, struggling to believe the evidence in front of her. It’s an intellectual response, and that doesn’t lend itself to PD5. I’ll tell you what does though! The point when we see what she sees and learn that Mike’s whole persona was a deception and a betrayal. That would rock her whole world and a smattering of PD5 would force us to share her visceral response (what wonderful conflict!).
PD1-5
The library at Colindale was busy on a Thursday afternoon. PD1 The tall windows sent slabs of light into the oak-paneled room, making its occupants yawn and stretch at desks piled with ledgers of old newspapers. PD1 Laura sat at a side desk with a microfiche reader and a stack of plastic spools labelled ‘1983’. PD2 Her eyes were fixed on the screen and her grip on the handle tightened as she re-read the last paragraph from ‘The Post’, trying to impose a meaning on the words. PD3 But they were nonsense, a lie. PD4 Or a joke? PD4-5 An April fool’s joke played in May? PD4-5 She was Kafka’s cockroach. PD4 An insect. Lying on her back with her legs in the air. PD4-ish, though I can’t help feeling this is more authorial than her voice. It could be the narrator’s take on her at PD2.
You’ve done such a good job of this, and I do hope you know how rare it is for anyone to nail the spectrum to this extent, let alone the first person to post. I would usually draft a sliding version of my own but you’ve rendered me redundant. You’ve got this, Gill.
A quick reply to this, Gill. Yes – your analysis of Wolf’s PD is bang-on. Well done!
Yeah, all good 👍
Lucia – you need to edit out the code.
Happy to confirm you’ve interpreted the exercise in the way we intended, Gill. As before, I’ll be doing my feedback later in the week.
Aw, I’m a little puddle of happiness now, Steven. Look at what you’ve gone and done. Thanks for bringing the laughter to us all. It’s a precious gift.
Great stuff, Rich. One point about this: At first I felt a little daunted at the task of rechecking the entire MS. You’ve paid a lot of money to come onto a self-editing course. If your draft only needed a bit of tinkering, that would not be value for money. You need to be open to making radical changes, should you realise they will result in a better book – which is what we all want, right?
I read something recently about there being a need for more hopeful cli-fi stories, Paula. There’s even a sub-genre, if I remember rightly. Wish I could remember where I saw it. (Not very helpful for you – sorry.) Anyway, I’m loving your renewed energy and enthusiasm.
Such an important thing to learn, Lucia!
If my narrator can get up close to Mary’s POV, does that imply the story is being told by Mary? Or just that the narrator has access to her thoughts? I believe it’s the latter but just wanted to confirm. Love it when people come up with their own answers, Katie, as you have in your later reply. In fact, fortuitously (nothing at all to do with our cunning plan to train your brain and mould your thinking, no, m’am) this is precisely the question we will be answering in week 4. And how amazing that your book has already gone through such a radical transformation in three short weeks!
This coming week should equip you for the decision about first or third person, Kate. Bring it on.
I’m really pleased I got your characters wrong, Gillian. It means you have no choice but to replace my words with your own. It also demonstrates the importance of letting readers see for themselves what makes a character tick internally. Huge progress.
It’s a real joy to see you drinking up all this stuff and feeding it into your WIP, Chithrupa. We’re witnessing your whole process, from glorious messy first draft to stepping back and taming it with your self-editing hat on. I can’t comment in detail but this is a massive stride in the right direction. Just make sure you guide us through. For example, before There was me, thinking it was rather nice, when he invited me and Renee for dinner … I would add something like: Anyway, back to my second death.
