Each time I sit down to begin a
new novel, I find myself facing at least one new challenge that scares me; that
forces me out of my comfort zone.
I don’t always know what it’s
going to be till I get to that place in the manuscript where I think: “[Insert
your favourite swear word here], I have to write a whole battle scene/write as
a woman with Asperger’s/have someone speaking the Doric.”
In this latest book I’ve started
writing, BELLEWETHER, I’ve already hit three such places – but the latest one,
because it happened just last week, is freshest in my mind, and seems the kind
of thing to get a good discussion going.
I’ve
discovered that I’ll have to write at least half of the past scenes from the
hero’s point of view.
My first thought was: “[insert
your favourite swear word here], I can NOT write the hero’s point of view. I
don’t know how to do it!”
Which, once I had calmed myself
with coffee, proved to be not wholly true. In fact, my first book, UNDERTOW
(long out of print, and rightly so), had alternating points of view between the
two main characters, and in my thriller EVERY SECRET THING some of the people
who narrate what they remember to my heroine (a journalist) are men.
But I was 25 years old when I
wrote UNDERTOW. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and the book was short.
And in my thriller those male voices were still filtered somewhat through my
heroine’s first-person voice.
So, yeah. This definitely puts me
past the boundary of my comfort zone.
So reassure me. Tell me why you think the hero's voice deserves a place in a romantic novel. What do you enjoy (or not) about reading his point of view?
