‘Woo! Yeah! Rock and Roll! … Does anyone know why we’re here?’

Hey Strangers! Welcome back to my site. My long, horrendous training is over so I’m once again free to write my books and bombard the internet with my only mostly out of date information. So, get ready to be moderately interested, because I’m back!

Okay, so, when writing a story, one of the first important aspects to consider is which perspective you want to write from.

‘Oh, wow. Fanks!’

*Sigh,* okay fine; this is yet another post intended for novice writers like me. I’m literally staying three lessons ahead of my pupils here, so if you consider yourself at a moderate or above level, you can probably skip this. Otherwise, strap in kids, Professor Strange was on Google 15 minutes before you got here and she’s got a PowerPoint presentation all loaded up!

Where was I, ah yes, perspective. You may be thinking, ‘Well sure, I’ll just write from my lead character’s perspective. Using multiple viewpoints is considered amateurish, everyone knows that, Strange!’

And if that’s the case…well done, you’re a prophet and there’s nothing more I can teach you. Please exit the class.

Lovely, I should now have approximately three or four readers left, so let’s continue…

The thing is, perspective isn’t always so obvious and clear cut as that. One of my favourite erotic books, Night Mischief, by Nina Bruhnus, (No! Don’t go to Amazon to read it! Read my stuff!) was the first book I remember reading that had two perspectives, switching between the male and female protagonist at the start of each new chapter. I couldn’t get over how effective this technique was for an erotic novel.

Having one perspective in most genres generally does the trick just fine and it could cause a lot of confusion for the reader if more than one were used.

But in erotica, you get off on tension, right? ‘I’m so into them, I can’t resist their smouldering eyes…NO! I mustn’t! Our coupling is forbidden for many vague, non-sensical reasons!’ All that jazz. So, to have that insight from multiple angles only intensified the heat as far as I was concerned.

As such, when I wrote ‘Devoted’ I was determined to recreate that sizzle by doing the same thing with my own characters. In a lot of ways, it worked really well and it had the effect I wanted. Bolstered by my unrefuted success, I proceeded to write all of the GoE series and several others in the same style, feeling like I had found a template that worked brilliantly.

However, when I’ve read my work back since, I can see that sometimes the effect was actually a little difficult to follow and occasionally it ran dangerously close to taking the reader out of the world I was creating while they tried to figure out who’s talking. Also, it’s actually an exhausting way to write at times because I had to really adapt the way I was speaking or thinking, and devising quirks or traits that I could put into a characters dialogue to make it clear that the perspective had changed.

There are some upsides though. Working this way meant I gained a very deep understanding of the characters and I became well versed in their mannerisms which I feel helped to make my characters more 3D, as mentioned in my previous post. I would also argue that I was right about creating extra tension by experiencing it from both sides, it just needed a little refining in places. Still, I’ve since started writing from just one perspective for my more recent stories and I’m finding that works well for now.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s great to try and inject as much of your writing tools as possible in your work, but sometimes less is more. So, you know, keep it simple, stupid. Or ‘KISS.’

‘Aw yeah, now we get it. Rock on, Strange!’

Aw, thanks Jean. I’ll have to try and get that slogan patented.

As always, I hope this was in some way helpful, if not, feel free to send your complaints to the KISS fansite.

Take care,

Strange

(Note from KISS publicity lawyers: Please be advised that K M Strange has absolutely no connections to KISS or any of it’s members. She has been asked multiple times to refrain from contacting, referencing, and sending unsolicited indecent images to them. Court hearing in progress.)