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Lynne Reid Banks

L.R.B. made her name with her first adult novel, The L-Shaped Room, which was filmed in 1961. After leaving ITN, where she was the first British female news reporter, she emigrated to Israel, became a teacher of English in a kibbutz, and wrote two more novels. She returned to the UK in l971 with her family and has since been a full-time writer. Her books for young readers include the Indian in the Cupboard series, Tiger, Tiger, The Dungeon, and the Harry the Poisonous Centipede trilogy. Her website is at www.lynnereidbanks.com.

Tutors will tell you that the first person narrative is the place to start if you want to slip into the business of fiction writing at the shallow end. Needless to say "shallow" should not be misunderstood. I merely mean that a beginner might be wise not to plunge into the deep end straight away. Just as, to begin with, plots might be kept simple and characters should not proliferate, in the matter of voice, to write your book in the first person is to keep early explorations of your capabilities within your depth.

Why do I think writing a book in the first person is easier than doing so in the third? When you write in the third person, or the "god voice" -- as the all-knowing, all-seeing over-viewer -- it's true that you can manipulate your characters more freely, move to more locations and portray the bigger picture. But this task of "head-hopping" is a strenuous exercise for the imagination. You have to know intimately and describe more convincingly many more characters, understand their motivatons, gauge their reactions, explain instead of merely reflect from a single point of view what they are feeling and thinking.

In the first person you tell your story from one point of view . You get into a single head -- the narrator's -- and after that, everything that happens is seen through one person's eyes and reactions. It's easier for readers, too. They need to know only one person intimately to be involved in the story.

There is no head-hopping for them, any more than for you, and for a child reader particularly, this is a good way of getting them involved -- provided you make your "I" character interesting enough. This is because, to insert a word of warning, if you do it this way, there is no relief for either you or the reader. If the reader doesn't take to your "I" character, you can't expect him or her to stick around. Your narrator must be a person they can closely identify with. Which means that you have to as well.

I started my writing career in this way, with the story of a girl named Jane who became pregnant after a brief affair and went to live in a grotty attic room (The L-Shaped Room) after her father threw her out. Everything happens from Jane's perspective and is told in her voice. She happened to be the same age and social class as me and have other things in common. Although her story was invented, there was enough common ground to make my heroine easy to project. I'm naturally lazy, so without knowing, I chose the easy way.

Later I ventured into deeper waters and wrote novels based on made-up or real people in the third person. But I sometimes still revert to the first person, always with a barely conscious sense of relief -- like dropping back to doggy-paddle after pushing oneself to the limit with the butterfly stroke. When I had evolved the voice of my hamster-hero in I, Houdini -- cocky, prolix, affectionately superior towards humans -- the book all but wrote itself!

In my teenage novel Broken Bridge, I told the rather complex story from many points of view, ranging from an eight-year-old girl to a grandfather. When my American editor first read it, she gaily asked me to rewrite it in the first person. I was aghast, because what she asked was impossible. The teenage boy she wanted me to use as my narrator couldn't know all the things that had happened because he wasn't there, and other characters' actions were simply outside his ambit. This was a very clear case of me -- and my readers -- having to tackle the more difficult option, the god voice which entered into the feelings and motivation of a large, disparate cast.

In my second book about the Brontes, Patrick, their minister-father, realising that Charlotte intends to deny her lead characters in Villette a happy ending -- in fact, to kill her hero -- cries out: "Can God be so cruel - even in books?" and then, realising, he adds: "But for them you are God. You can be merciful." This heady power that authors have over their characters is almost indecently alluring. But using it to full effect is a skill that needs practice.

The god voice is not only essential sometimes, it is wonderfully liberating if you've been confined to a single point of view. A friend of mine who wrote autobiographical novels essayed a "real" (ie purely fictional) novel and was ecstatic when she realised the exciting possibilities of exploring, and manipulating, many characters -- not to mention making things happen in different locations.

Of course it's quite possible to keep one character's viewpoint but to tell the story in the third person, as I did in The Indian in the Cupboard. You can stick like superglue to your chief protagonist and yet have insights into his motives and reactions that he might not have about himself.

Still, my advice is, as an apprentice, start in the first person. Sometimes apprentices make something beautiful and saleable! Tell a story close to your heart and rooted in (but not slavishly echoing) your own life, from the point of view of an appealing narrator.

Learn to think like a child, or an animal, or even some humble object, and let them tell their story, before you tackle the thrilling task of hopping into the head, and the many voices, of an all-powerful puppet-master.

LYNNE REID BANKS recommends books by Michael Morpungo, Louise Rennison and Annie Daltor for further reading.