It all depends on your point of view…

I once got a contract to publish a romance novel.

It sounds much more glamourous and accomplished than it was. The company was one of the thousands of ebook publishers that sprang up in the era when Amazon finally made ebooks a thing, and because there were so few mainstream publishers trading in erotica or porn, companies that specialised in the genre sprouted like weeds.

It’s even less glamourous and accomplished because it never actually happened. I can’t remember how I got to know the woman who ran the place but her, I and another lady had a weekly chat about projects where we’d talk about and make suggestions about each others’ work. Mine was a romance novel I’ve had for decades and at some point she offered to publish it, sending me a contract and everything.

We never got there because she wanted so many things changed and finessed and rewritten I feel like I still would have been doing it now (and that was 15 years ago) to make her satisfied. I can’t even remember how it all petered out. She eventually sold the business to some other guy and it’s still one of countless barely known ebook publishers on the web.

I got in touch with her years after the fact to ask if she’d let me out of the contract I’d signed because I wanted to submit it somewhere else (by that time it was obvious to everyone she was never going to publish it). She kindly got back to me and agreed, also putting me in touch with the guy who now owned the business to check with him, and he agreed too.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound too sour grapes-ey about it by denigrating the business as a non entity. It was my first (and so far only) experience working with a professional book editor who contracted a novel so it was undoubtedly invaluable.

But one thing I remember her being obsessed about was what she called deep point of view. She wanted the story to be told from inside the characters’ minds at every step, describing what they thought and felt about everything going on around them, from the knee-trembling satisfaction during sex scenes to the sinking feeling of heartbreak or loss.

Any departure from that narrative framework to describe the scene from the omnipotent view of an author was a big no no. I was forbidden from doing it even for a single sentence, and 90 percent of the rewriting I did was so the storytelling would come from inside the characters’ minds and nowhere else.

And look, she can run her business and publish content the way she likes it. I thought the changes she wanted were overkill, which is one of the reasons the whole venture came to nothing.

But I won’t say it was wasted. For one thing, she was broadly right – describing how a character reacts and feels to what’s happening is effective for two reasons; it provides as shorthand for the reader to know how they’d feel about it and helps them relate to and empathise with the people on the page.

From the viewpoint of story mechanics, it makes you hyperaware of where in your prose the point of view changes between characters. We’ve all read books that handle that poorly, and without knowing how it works you often can’t quite put your finger on what’s off apart from a general awareness that you’ve lost track of who’s speaking to who. Avail yourself of that principle and you’ll never make the same mistake in your own writing.

But in instilling how important it is she also (unwittingly) taught me how it’s not always necessary.

Maybe it is in erotic romance, maybe it just is/was for her. But there’s a sequence I always remember from Stephen King’s Under the Dome where an omnipotent narrator literally picks you up and carries you all over the township to look in on what everybody’s doing.

The (very florid) text actually says stuff like ‘and let us now, dear reader, float up main straight and settle at the window of Fred Bloggs, where he…’. It’s the antithesis of deep point of view.

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Falling?

There’s an extended sequence in Part 7 when the most visible of the paranormal phenomena occurs and a train carriage filled with dead bodies floats to the surface of Sydney Harbour.

The race is on to figure out why it wasn’t accounted for 20 years before during the cleanup after the disaster and where it’s been in the years since. As one character points out, it’s a body of water only about 30 metres deep in the middle of a bustling metropolis, not the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean three kilometres down.

In the original novel, that sequence talked about the emergency government meetings, experts coming out the woodwork, media frenzy and general feeling of morbid horror from a bird’s eye point of view.

I didn’t write it quite as flamboyantly as King did in Under the Dome by saying ‘and now let us whirl upwards, as if holding the underside of a drone, to peer through the window where the state minister for emergency services postulates upon…’

But during the MLR I had that publisher’s deep point of view in mind, and I cast my eye over sequences that were written from an more omnipotent position, wondering if I could improve them. The other name for it I kept in mind was ‘stitching it to action’.

So I did that with the train carriage sequence in particular. I took all the concepts, ideas and revelations that emerged from the original sequence (a council crisis meeting here, a wildly speculative media article there, a police press conference here, a self appointed expert who’s really a crackpot there, etc), and I managed to recast them all in two conversations.

They both centred on Albert Dimitriou, the government fixer who had a much larger role to play in the original novel but was downgraded (and saved from a horrible fate) during the LMR so Barry, Dale’s doctor, could have an expanded role.

We meet him on his way to a hastily prepared meeting in the state government’s chambers, taking a call from a reporter looking for an official comment. He eventually cuts the woman off, satisfied she just wants stories of blood and guts and horror, and sits down in his meeting alongside representatives from official records, the state transport authority, the police, the premier’s department a marine biologist and more.

It gives you the same essential information that was in the original draft about what a shitstorm has blown up over the appearance of the carriage and the mad scramble to investigate and explain it to the public – particularly relatives who thought they’d finished grieving over lost loved ones.

But it does two other things (at least I hope). First, it situates in in action and dialogue, which is inherently about progression and movement, especially if it’s an emotionally charged topic of discussion.

Tonally, that suits the frantic urgency of what’s going on in the story at the time much better than giving you a snapshot view from overhead, like you’re describing ants in a panic because someone’s tipped water on their nest (although that’d be a very legitimate literary approach too, saying something about how consumed we are with our petty problems in a wide, uncaring universe).

Second, it deepens the understanding we have of a minor character, and no opportunity to increase a character’s relatability should be ignored. Without it Albert was kind of a cypher, intended only to move logistics to set up other scenes, particularly the disastrous Part 6 investigative expedition.

But seeing him in action we come to understand that’s he’s confident in his position and abilities, controlled under pressure and can get shit done, lending credence to his actions at other points in the story.

He doesn’t get to the save the day or get the girl, but showing us the fallout from the incident from inside his viewpoint puts us on the careening, out of control train with him instead of watching it from afar, and I like to think it elevates the sequence.

So I never got the romance novel published but I certainly came to understand how powerful deep point of view is, when you need it and just as importantly, when you don’t. So thanks, er… (it’s been so long I can’t even remember her name. Mary something?)