But what if you want to show how other people are feeling? If they’re important characters, like the villain, a romantic interest, or a close friend or family member, you give them their own POV scenes, where you get into their heads and we see their thoughts, emotions, goals, aspirations and fears.

If they’re in the same scene as your main character, you show their thoughts, feelings and attitude through their words, tone of voice, body language and facial expressions. Say you’re writing a romantic suspense or mystery, and you’re in the heroine’s point of view, showing her thoughts, perceptions and reactions. The hero, whom she’s just met under unfortunate circumstances, is angry. You’ll show his thoughts and reactions, not from inside him at that point (What the hell is going on here? he thought. What’s she trying to pull off, anyway?), but by what the heroine is seeing and perceiving—his tense posture, hunched shoulders, clenched fists, furrowed brows, set mouth, clipped tone of voice, angry words, etc.

 
The general rule of thumb is “one scene, one viewpoint.” Or even better, wait for a new chapter to change the point of view to someone else’s. If you change the viewpoint within a scene, it’s best to do it only once, and leave a blank space before you start the next person’s point of view. Ping-ponging back and forth can be jarring and confusing to the reader. This is what’s referred to as “head-hopping.” Some writers go so far as to leave three asterisks (* * *) and spaces above and below to indicate a switch in viewpoint within a scene, but I think that’s too jarring and disruptive to the flow of action, since we’re still in the same scene. Three asterisks, centered, are best reserved to indicate a shift in place and time.

So why is it so important to avoid switching viewpoints (head-hopping) within scenes?

According to Cynthia VanRooy, “When a reader becomes emotionally engaged in a book, he or she enters into the story. The reader understands the book world isn’t real, but in order to fully enjoy the story, he or she chooses to temporarily pretend otherwise, or to suspend their disbelief. […]

“Every time you shift the reader from one character to another, they are jarred out of their suspension of disbelief and reminded that they’re only reading a story. Do that often enough and they’ll stop reading your story. Scene changes or new chapters are the best and least disruptive places to change POV.”

Here’s an example of a viewpoint gaffe: Our heroine, Carole, is stirring the spaghetti sauce on the stove and talking to her husband on the phone. They’re discussing the fact that their son, Colton, is grounded. Suddenly, the author jumps into her son’s head and tells us about Colton sneaking by behind her back (his rap music is playing loudly in his room), and out the front door, then jumping on his bike and racing off. Back to Carole, who continues to stir the spaghetti and talk on the phone. What’s wrong here? We were in Carole’s POV, and she had her back turned so she wouldn’t know Colton was sneaking past, especially with all that noise coming from his room. And how would she know he’s riding away on his bike? Another jarring POV shift in the same scene would be if we suddenly started seeing her husband waving his secretary away because he’s in an important conversation. We’re in Carole’s POV in this scene, and she can’t see what her husband is doing at his office.

A quick way to check whose POV you’re in is to get out the highlighters or colored pens and choose a different color for each of your main characters. Pick your protagonist’s color, then start highlighting or underlining sentences that describe scenes, people, perceptions, and emotions strictly from his or her POV. Do the same for other characters, with their color. When you’re done, you should have paragraphs, and preferably scenes, of only one color. If you have another color creeping into that scene, see if you can rewrite those sentences from the dominating character’s POV. If you have a number of colors within one scene, you’ve got some revisions to do. And as Stephen King says, “Writing is rewriting.” Keep on writing!

© Jodie Renner, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, April 2012

Resource for POV 102: “POV or: Whose Head Am I in, Anyway?” by Cynthia VanRooy http://romance.fictionfactor.com/articles/pov.html 

In POV 103, we’ll discuss Deep Point of View, or Close Third-Person POV

 
Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor who specializes in suspense/thrillers, mysteries and other crime fiction, as well as YA, historical and mainstream. Jodie’s craft-of-fiction articles appear regularly here and on 5 other blogs. For more info on Jodie’s editing services and for links to more of her posts, please visit www.JodieRennerEditing.com.

I’ve been editing fiction for years, and the most difficult concept for many of my aspiring author clients who write in third-person point of view (the most common POV in novels) is to portray their story world through the viewpoint/eyes/head of one character at a time, rather than hovering above them or ping-ponging back and forth between different characters’ viewpoints (head-hopping).

Point of view (or POV) simply refers to the character through whose perspective the story events are told. Ideally, we should only see, hear, smell, feel, and experience events as that character would—with no additional information provided “from above” by the author. This closeness helps your readers get to know your viewpoint character intimately, which makes them start worrying about him – and that keeps them turning the pages!

A hundred years ago, novels were often told from a distant authorial point of view, hovering over everything. That omniscient POV is no longer popular today (except for historical sagas), and for good reason: Readers want to experience the events of the story vicariously through the viewpoint character, to immerse themselves in her world, and they can only do that if they’re “inside her skin,” so to speak. They know/feel her inner thoughts, insecurities, hopes, and fears, so they bond with her quickly and want to know what’s going to happen to her next, and how she’s going to handle it.

As Jack M. Bickham says, “You’ll never have problems with the technique of viewpoint again if you simply follow this advice: Figure out whose story it is. Get inside that character—and stay there.” It’s especially important to open your book in your protagonist’s point of view, and stay there for at least the first chapter. This gives the reader a chance to figure out quickly whose story this is, and get to know him fast and start identifying with him and rooting for him.

Years ago I edited a novel in which a 15-year-old girl is riding in a car with her mother, who’s driving, and her 11-year-old brother in the backseat. (I’ve changed the details a bit.) The book starts out in the point of view of the mom, who is worried about uprooting her two kids and moving across the country, away from their friends. So we start empathizing with the mother, thinking it’s her story. Then suddenly we’re in the head of the teenage girl beside her, who is deeply resentful at her mom for tearing her away from her friends and agonizing over what lies ahead. Then, all within the first page, we switch to the head of the 11-year-old boy, who’s excited about the new adventure and wishes his sister would lighten up and quit hassling the mom. We’re also in his visual POV – he looks at his sister’s ponytail and considers yanking it. Now we’re confused. Whose story is this, anyway? Who are we supposed to be most identifying with and bonding with? Readers want to know this right away, so they can sit back and relax and enjoy the ride.

It’s essential to start out the story in your protagonist’s POV, but it’s also smart to tell most of your story from your main character’s viewpoint – at least 70 percent of it. That gets the reader deeper and deeper into that person’s psyche, so they get more and more invested in what’s happening to her. As Bickham explains, “I’m sure you realize why fiction is told from a viewpoint, a character inside the story. It’s because each of us lives our real life from a single viewpoint – our own – and none other, ever.” Successful fiction writers want their story to be as convincing and lifelike as possible, so they write it like we experience real life: from one viewpoint (at a time) inside the action.

So if you want your lead character to come alive and matter to the reader, and your story to be compelling, it’s best to show most of the action from inside the head and heart of your protagonist. Of course, thrillers often jump to the POV of the villain, to add suspense, worry, intrigue and dimension. But give the bad guy his own scene, and make sure he’s not onstage more than the protagonist is! And many romances have two main protagonists, the hero and heroine, but one usually predominates – most often the heroine, so the largely female readership can identify with her. Just don’t be inside the head of both characters in one scene – too jarring and confusing! Also, if there’s a scene with your protagonist and a minor character, don’t show the scene from the POV of the minor character, unless there’s a very good reason for it – it’s just too unnatural and jarring.

In POV 102, we’ll discuss techniques for avoiding “head-hopping,” a sure sign of amateurish writing, and in POV 103, we’ll get into more detail on deep point of view, or close third.

Main resource for today’s post: The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them) by Jack M. Bickham.

© Jodie Renner, www.JodieRennerEditing, April 2012

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor who specializes in suspense/thrillers, mysteries and other crime fiction, as well as YA, historical and mainstream. Jodie’s craft-of-fiction articles appear regularly here and on 5 other blogs. For more info on Jodie’s editing services and for links to more of her posts, please visit www.JodieRennerEditing.com.

Lizzie Williams

Obviously this crime remains unsolved and the theories are many but the one thing that is known is that during a 10 week period in 1888, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly all suffered horrible deaths at the hands of a very deranged individual.

Huffington Post Article

Global Post Article

Yahoo News Article

The Mary Sue Article

Birmingham Mail Article

The method that most Forensic dentists use now is to chart the mouths of victims who were too ravaged to be recognizable or have enough skin on their hands to have fingerprints. The jaws should be worked open enough so that the dentist could chart the mouth, and that X-ray films could be placed next to the teeth and a full series of X-rays could be taken. All abnormalities should be noted, as well as what teeth are missing, what fillings are present, what teeth have been replaced by either fixed, or removable appliances,and  which teeth  have had root canal treatment, or implants.

Once this process has been completed, the dentist or their assistant takes a history to find out what people might have been present at the occurrence, and then contact the various dental practitioners who might have worked on them, and request a copy of their records. If a match is not close enough for a definite comparison it can be confirmed with further DNA Testing.

If none of this is possible NCIS has to be contacted which would list all the people who have been declared missing, and many times the dentist can find a match.

If none of the above works, after a certified time in cold storage, the remains are buried in Potters Field which is a small island off City Island  by convicts from Rikers Island, If necessary the bodies can be exhumed at a later date.

In my first novel, False Impressions, which is due out on August 1st, the main character, the irreverent Forensic Dentist,  Steve Landau, performs all these duties in a much more humorous, but dramatic fashion, and could be an enjoyable, as well as educational way to get your facts. Dr. Stanley Woods-Frankel can be contacted via his web site:

http://www.writingdocfrankelswoods.com

In the 19th Century and before, the autopsy procedure itself dealt only with what the physician could see before him. Some diseases and traumas were readily apparent but more subtle diseases and injuries and essentially all poisons would often go unnoticed. Not likely today with our expanding knowledge of forensic science and greatly improved and more sophisticated facilities.

An interesting article in Forensic Magazine on state-of-the-art autopsy facilities underscores these changes. A modern autopsy facility would have looked unearthly to the 19th century physician.

Marilu Henner can. So can others who share her unusual ability called hyperthymesia, or Highly Superior Auto-Biographical Memory (H-SAM).

The brain is a very odd organ and memory and recall are two of its most mystifying functions.

Nora Barker, Author of Murder in Primary Colors

 
A: This is an extremely rare occurrence but can happen in either children or adults. A blow to the chest can cause a cardiac death in several ways.

The trauma could be of sufficient force to directly damage the heart muscle, causing it to rupture, resulting in sudden death. Or, a heart valve could be damaged so severely that the heart could no longer function efficiently as a pump and the victim could die from the resulting shock. Here death could take many minutes or hours. The blow could bruise the heart muscle (called a cardiac contusion) and this could cause a deadly cardiac arrhythmia, again with sudden death.

Also, the trauma, even without an overt cardiac contusion, could cause electrical instability and a deadly arrhythmia–usually either ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular fibrillation (VF).

Another possibility is that the force of the chest trauma could cause the heart to be propelled backward where it could bounce against the spinal column. The atrioventricular node (AV node or AVN) is found on the back side of the heart. It is the relay station that carries the heart’s electrical pulses from the upper chambers to the lower chambers. If the AVN is bruised or damaged, complete heart block, where no electrical impulses travel through the AVN, could result. If so the heart rate might drop to 25-30 per minute and this could lead to sudden collapse and death.

So yes a blow to the chest can kill by any of these mechanisms but each is exceedingly rare and very unpredictable. This unpredictability makes it a poor choice for murder as killers like things to be more certain—like gunshots and stabs and poisons. Still, it’s possible.

A recent study by forensic anthropologist Professor Daniel Franklin and his team at the University of Western Australia suggests that the height and possibly the sex of the perpetrator can be estimated from the print.

This harkens to the days of anthropometry, or bertillonage as it was termed. By the end of the 19th century, fingerprinting had not yet been fully accepted and vied with Anthropometry and Bertillonage as the standard identification method in criminal investigations.
Anthropometry (anthrop means human; metry means to measure) is the study of human body measurements for anthropological classification and comparison. Simply put, it is the making of body measurements in order to compare individuals with each other.

French police officer Alphonse Bertillon believed that the human skeleton did not change in size from about age 20 and that each person’s measurements were unique. He also believed that people could be distinguished from one another by key measurements, such as height, seated height from head to seat, length and width of the head, right ear length, left little finger length, the width of the cheeks, and other measurements. He created a system of body measurements that became known as bertillonage. According to Bertillon, the odds of two people having the same bertillonage measurements were 286 million to one.

His greatest triumph came in February 1883, when he measured a thief named Dupont and compared his profile against his files of known criminals. He found that Dupont’s measurements matched a man named Martin. Dupont ultimately confessed that he was indeed Martin.

For years, this system was accepted by many jurisdictions, but early in the 20th century flaws became apparent. Measurements were inexact and subject to observer variation since measurements in two people who were of the same size, weight, and body type varied by only fractions of a centimeter. The measurement system wasn’t exact enough to make such distinctions. The final blow to the Bertillonage system occurred with the famous Will West case.

Though landmark in its importance, the Will West case was more a comical coincidence. On May 1, 1903, Will West entered Kansas’ Leavenworth Penitentiary, where the records clerk thought he looked familiar. West denied ever having been in the prison. As part of his intake examination, anthropometry was performed and officials were surprised to find that Will’s measurements matched those of another inmate at Leavenworth named William West. The two men did look eerily similar, but each stated that they did not know each other and that they were not brothers. Fingerprints were then used to distinguish between the two Wills after which Leavenworth immediately dumped anthropometry and switched to a fingerprint-based system for identifying prisoners. New York’s Sing Sing Prison followed a month later.

Was the similarity between Will and William West simply a bizarre coincidence? Not really. A report in The Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1980 revealed that the two were likely identical twins. They possessed many fingerprint similarities, nearly identical ear configurations (unusual in any circumstance except with identical twins), and each of the men wrote letters to the same brother, same five sisters, and same Uncle George. So, even though the brothers denied it, it seemed that they were related after all.

Frank James, Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, Canada

A: The two steps needed to distinguish animal blood from human blood are: Determining if the stain or sample is indeed blood and then is it human of animal.

Testing liquids and stains to determine if they are blood is not new. For centuries, the microscope has been used to visually identify blood cells, which would prove that the substance is blood. But this required liquid blood and not the typical crime scene clotted or dried blood, neither of which contain identifiable cells. Several other tests appeared in the 1800s, including the hematin test, developed by Polish scientist Ludwig Teichmann in 1853. This also required liquid blood since in this test the blood was mixed with acetic acid and salt crystals, heated, and then viewed under a microscope. The presence of the characteristic rhomboid crystals proved the sample was blood. This test is similar to the present day Teichmann and Takayama Tests.

The guaiacum test, developed in 1862 by Dutch scientist Izaak Van Deen, used the guaiac resin of a West Indian shrub and is the precursor of the present day phenolphthalein test (see below). In the guaiacum test, the blood sample was mixed with hydrogen peroxide and guaiacum and, if it was indeed blood, a blue color would appear. In 1887, a similar test was used by Sherlock Holmes to identify a bloodstain in the very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.

In 1900, Paul Uhlenhuth developed a serum that reacted only to human blood, and not animal blood. This is an antigen-antibody reaction and is similar to how this testing is done today. The sample would be dissolved in salt water and then the serum would be added. Human blood proteins would then react with the serum, producing complexes that would precipitate (fallout of solution) and darken the serum. Animal blood would cause no such reaction so if a reaction occurred the tester would know that the blood was indeed human and if not it must be animal blood or some other substance. Now we have serums that react with a just about any species of animal you can name and with these lab techs can determine the specific type of animal that shed the blood.

So your character could use guaiacum to determine that the sample was blood and then employ Uhlenhuth’s serum to determine if it was human or not.

This is exactly what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor. Her stroke affected both her motor and speech areas. Her description of and insights into what happened and how she as a scientist reacted, as revealed in this movie on TED.com, are astonishing and candid. There is much here a writer can use.

Her comments reminded me of Dr. Tinsley Harrison. Every medical student devours Dr. Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. Word by word. It is the Bible of all things medical. Dr. Harrison was a professor at the University of Alabama College of Medicine when I was a student and intern there. I learned a great deal from him, as did anyone who ever spent time with him. It must have similar to Socrates’ students learning at his side. The man was quite simply brilliant.

He was, like Jill Bolte Taylor, a true scientist. In his other classic book, Principles and Problems of Ischemic Heart disease, co-authored with my old Chief of Medicine, T. Joseph Reeves, he concludes with 21 case histories. The final case he titled: “Subjective Aspects of an Acute Myocardial Infarction (as related by the patient).”

Dr. Harrison teaching, always teaching

It was an account of his own myocardial Infarction (heart attack), which he suffered at the age of 65. He was at his Lake Martin house when the pain began and while waiting for the ambulance to drive out and pick him up, he performed several tests to see how they affected the pain in order to “test some of his own teachings about ischemia pain.” He smoked a cigarette, moved his arms around, stretched, changed position, and even observed, after departing for the hospital in the back of an ambulance, how the bumpy road altered the pain. He found that none of these made any difference, the pain neither increasing nor resolving. Of course, Dr, Harrison survived his ordeal and went on to teach for many more years.