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Substack – Steady State – Irrational Reactions to the Birthright Citizenship Issue

Irrational Reactions to the Birthright Citizenship Issue by The Steady State

The Steady State | by Charles A. Ray

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Solving the point-of-view puzzle

In fiction, point of view (POV) is the perspective from which a story is narrated. Point of view (POV) significantly influences how a reader perceives the story and relates to the characters. This is often the most challenging skill for writers to master, leading to confusion for readers when they move abruptly from one character to another, a technique known as head-hopping.

 

Head-hopping is a sure sign of a neophyte writer and a way to cause readers to avoid what that author writes. Understanding the various types of point of view (POV) and choosing one for your story—and sticking to it—will go a long way in keeping your readers interested and engaged with your work.

 

The following are the main types of POV:

 

  1. First Person. Told by a person in the story, using pronouns like ‘I; and ‘we.’ This allows for a deep emotional connection and insight into what the narrator is thinking and feeling; however, the thoughts and feelings of other characters can only be interpreted or understood from the perspective of the POV character.
  2. Second Person. This is a less common POV, and it addresses the reader directly using the pronoun ‘you.’ In effect, the reader is a character in the story, but it has the same limitations as first-person, in that the reader can only know what the POV character knows or feels.
  3. Third Person. In this POV, the narrator is outside the story and refers to the characters as ‘he’, ‘she,’ or ‘they/them.’ This point of view (POV) is further divided into third-person limited (where the narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character) and third-person omniscient (where the narrator knows everything about all characters and events). In the third-person omniscient point of view, however, it’s essential to let the reader know when the narrator is shifting from one character to another to avoid confusion.

 

The choice of point of view is important. This shapes the reader’s experience and helps in understanding the story. It determines how much is revealed, influences character development, and affects the story’s emotional tone. The first person is more intimate, while the third person/omniscient perspective allows for a more detached overview of the story elements. Once a particular point of view is chosen, it should be consistent throughout the story, and by all means, avoid head-hopping. If you want to control the amount of information the reader has, to build suspense, for example, the third-person limited is probably the best, but this is a decision you have to make as an author. There are few ironclad rules of writing—at least, few that can’t be broken for dramatic effect. From my point of view, however, the rule against head-hopping is the one rule that no writer should ever break.

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Teaching history through fiction – and proving that history can be fun

I’ve been writing since I was twelve or thirteen, but my fascination with and love of history date back to well before that, beginning in fourth or fifth grade when I devoured every history book in our meager school library. When I graduated from high school and joined the army, being posted in places with excellent libraries that gave me access to history books that I hadn’t know existed, only fueled my love and activated my desire to learn more—especially the role that women and minorities played in history, facts that were often omitted from the history books I had access to in pre-Civil Rights Texas.

It was only natural, I suppose, that my love of history would impact my writing. Whatever I write, I strive to make it as historically accurate as possible, and I also enjoy writing stories about characters, people, and events that have been either overlooked or omitted from the history books accessible to American students.

Even though I’ve written in multiple genres for the past ten years, I’ve primarily written westerns, which have given me many opportunities to tell the true story of the Wild West. But it’s not just the historical inaccuracy of popular media’s portrayal of the American West that bothers me. World history writ large has often been whitewashed, sanitized, and rewritten to eliminate entire people from the record. My current publisher, DSP, has been at the forefront of putting historically accurate, while still entertaining, western fiction on the market for readers around the world. But it has gone a step further. It has provided writers like me with a platform to explore a broad range of subjects, ranging from military novels to historical fiction.

I’ve written several titles that’ve given me the chance to delve deeply into U.S. and world history and come up with some interesting —and I hope entertaining —characters and events that I’ve been proud to share with a global audience.

One of my first forays into historical fiction that was off the beaten path was The Ethiopian, a story of a soldier in Hannibal of Carthage’s army during the Punic Wars, who is captured by the Romans and sold as a gladiator. Although entirely fictional, it was based on historical events, and in researching the topic, I discovered that the interactions between ancient Roman and Greek civilizations and those of Africa were far older than I’d previously been taught.

I’ve always been drawn to American history, and the more I study, the more I discover that the history taught in American classrooms is often a mix of fact and fiction. For instance, the way President Chester A. Arthur is frequently overlooked in studies about American presidents led me to write Chester A. Arthur: Changing Course, which describes some of the truly remarkable things he accomplished as head of state and how he broke away from the traditional political mold of his time.

 

   Few people over forty are not familiar with Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, but probably only a handful who know that Wallace was a Union general in the Civil War who fought a losing battle that prevented the Confederates from taking the nation’s capital at a crucial point in the war—my effort to correct that lack of knowledge was The Lost Battle That Saves Washington: Monocacy Junction.

 

My most recent adventure in the realm of writing and righting the historical record is The Nubian Queen, a story about a queen of the Kush Empire (in what is now northern Sudan, Africa) who, after the Romans had conquered Egypt and then set their sights on the gold mines of Nubia to the south, thwarted the Roman invasion.

 

I hope that readers of this article will take a look at these offerings, which demonstrate that history is not only necessary for a better understanding of who we are and where we come from, but it can also be enjoyable.

 

These books have been published as e-books, and can be found at the following links:

The Ethiopian:  https://www.amazon.com/Ethiopian-Charles-Ray-ebook/dp/B0DRPGTZY9

Chester A. Arthur: Changing Course:  https://www.amazon.com/Chester-Arthur-Changing-Course-ebook/dp/B0DR3488HM

The Battle That Saves Washington:  https://www.amazon.com/Battle-That-Saves-Washington-Monocacy-ebook/dp/B0DH8M9XC6

The Nubian Queen:  https://www.amazon.com/Nubian-Queen-Charles-Ray-ebook/dp/B0F956KR87

Happy reading.

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