This is pretty objective. I should probably read some Cormac McCarthy.
POV control
- Thread starter Naomasa298
- Start date
This is pretty objective. I should probably read some Cormac McCarthy.
So in objective POV, this:
Karen gripped the steering wheel so hard that her nails dug into her palm. The welling blood and subsequent pain barely registered. Screw Chad. He was going to get what was coming to him. She glanced at the bag. Good. The gun wasn't showing.
Would read like this:
Karen gripped the steering wheel hard. Her nails dug into her palm. Blood welled. She glanced at the bag. The gun wasn't showing.
The POV can't get into Karen's head or detect emotion. So it can see blood welling from her palms, but it can't detect the "so hard" part or understand that the character is under duress. And it can see her looking at the bag and report that a gun isn't showing, but it can't call it "good." Or bad. It can only report the events objectively. The inner monologue part about Chad wouldn't be there obviously. No thoughts of any kind are allowed. It's a cool POV but gets cumbersome in a hurry.
Karen gripped the steering wheel so hard that her nails dug into her palm. The welling blood and subsequent pain barely registered. Screw Chad. He was going to get what was coming to him. She glanced at the bag. Good. The gun wasn't showing.
Would read like this:
Karen gripped the steering wheel hard. Her nails dug into her palm. Blood welled. She glanced at the bag. The gun wasn't showing.
The POV can't get into Karen's head or detect emotion. So it can see blood welling from her palms, but it can't detect the "so hard" part or understand that the character is under duress. And it can see her looking at the bag and report that a gun isn't showing, but it can't call it "good." Or bad. It can only report the events objectively. The inner monologue part about Chad wouldn't be there obviously. No thoughts of any kind are allowed. It's a cool POV but gets cumbersome in a hurry.
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This tends to be my goto. I pretty much live in first or close third, and a lot of my stories touch on memory or perception. I have done some work in omniscient, and occasionally head-hop, but generally I find it easier to maintain narrative consistency from a single close pov. (Likely due to less experience writing in omniscient.) And the unreliability that highly internal perspective lends itself to is fun to play with.
That said, I'm not certain about my novel yet. So far I've maintained the main characters pov, but I'm considering writing some chapters from her friends pov. Not sure if an external view would be detrimental to the unreliability of her own. Might have to write some to see how it would work.
I wrote as a challenge recently a ~1000 word piece in objective, just to see if I could execute distance and maintain the emotional core without being inside the protagonists head. It's harder than it sounds. Particularly as it goes against all of my instincts.
When I started, I wrote in a sort of more-or-less-but-not-quite-objective-maybe POV, mainly because I didn't know how to write interiority, emotion, show-don-tell and all that, so it kind of turned out that way, but not deliberately.
It was basically me narrating events, badly - A did this, then B did that, then they all sat around drinking tea.
