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.
defaux
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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.
For those that have been professionally published and gone through the agent, editor process, etc., how tight does the POV thing need to be? I write stone-cold third limited close, but at times (like once a chapter) I want to toss in a one-liner that I can't jam into place correctly. Is that like a deal-breaker or do they let you cheat now and then?
I don't possess the requisite qualifications, but I would think the editor would probably flag those things and ask you to fix them.
I mentioned in a prior post that it's common for authors to start a scene in an objective POV. Once you zoom into the character's head, though, I think readers (and by extension editors) will expect you to stay there.
Rzero
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I don't think anyone's mentioned retrospective first or retrospective third, which can come in any variety from limited to omniscient. I used to call this "little did I know narration," as in "Little did I know, that was the last time I'd see him alive." Retrospective involves the narrator divulging knowledge that the characters in the story don't have yet. It's good for foreshadowing and all sorts of things. I have an outline I'm working on that I'd like to experiment with in retrospective first. I've only ever written in the now of the story, so it might be a challenge, but probably a fun one.
My first attempt at a book was written in omniscient. It's unfinished at 20K and sophomoric as hell, but reading back through it recently, I was surprised to find very few instances of what I would call head-hopping. Still, I would consider my POV methods back then undisciplined compared to future works.
My second attempt, and first finished novel, was written in first-person. I originally started in third but realized three chapters in that it absolutely had to be written in first. I wanted every bit of the narration to be her thoughts and, especially, her personality. You can get pretty intimate in close third limited, but I didn't feel like it was enough in this case.
Then I wrote a novella that may or may not be the first act of an unfinished novel. I've already scrapped two versions of Act II, so it might just end up as-is with better closure added to the ending. Anyway, I wrote the whole thing in close third limited with one POV throughout. It just felt natural. It was also highly personal material, and writing in third-person, even as intimate as I got, I think allowed me a little disconnect from a painful story. It probably also prevented me from getting overly self-indulgent. It made him more of a character in a story, as opposed to my voice in a fictionalized memoir.
And finally, my second finished (but currently under revision) novel is written in close third limited. And this is going to sound like a crazy bad idea to some of you, but at 175K, it features no less than 25 POVs across 230 scenes. Together, the two MCs are responsible for about 90 of those scenes, whereas eleven characters have only one to two POV scenes. I took a lot of risks with this book, but I'm proud of the way it's turning out, and so far, my three readers all said they had no trouble keeping all the characters straight, which was a concern I had for obvious reasons. The story involves two main arcs that coalesce halfway through, but they're interwoven with several others. The focus jumps around town, constantly checking in on different characters, and the changing perspectives allowed me to put just the right person in the driver's seat in every scene. Plus, each character comes with their own flavor of narration, which I like, and I'm told it's not jarring as one might expect, thank God.
My first attempt at a book was written in omniscient. It's unfinished at 20K and sophomoric as hell, but reading back through it recently, I was surprised to find very few instances of what I would call head-hopping. Still, I would consider my POV methods back then undisciplined compared to future works.
My second attempt, and first finished novel, was written in first-person. I originally started in third but realized three chapters in that it absolutely had to be written in first. I wanted every bit of the narration to be her thoughts and, especially, her personality. You can get pretty intimate in close third limited, but I didn't feel like it was enough in this case.
Then I wrote a novella that may or may not be the first act of an unfinished novel. I've already scrapped two versions of Act II, so it might just end up as-is with better closure added to the ending. Anyway, I wrote the whole thing in close third limited with one POV throughout. It just felt natural. It was also highly personal material, and writing in third-person, even as intimate as I got, I think allowed me a little disconnect from a painful story. It probably also prevented me from getting overly self-indulgent. It made him more of a character in a story, as opposed to my voice in a fictionalized memoir.
And finally, my second finished (but currently under revision) novel is written in close third limited. And this is going to sound like a crazy bad idea to some of you, but at 175K, it features no less than 25 POVs across 230 scenes. Together, the two MCs are responsible for about 90 of those scenes, whereas eleven characters have only one to two POV scenes. I took a lot of risks with this book, but I'm proud of the way it's turning out, and so far, my three readers all said they had no trouble keeping all the characters straight, which was a concern I had for obvious reasons. The story involves two main arcs that coalesce halfway through, but they're interwoven with several others. The focus jumps around town, constantly checking in on different characters, and the changing perspectives allowed me to put just the right person in the driver's seat in every scene. Plus, each character comes with their own flavor of narration, which I like, and I'm told it's not jarring as one might expect, thank God.
Not to me, though 230 scenes and 175k words suggests a lot of short scenes. That's an average of about 761 words per scene. That's maybe 2-3 pages, depending on formatting.
Rzero
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That sounds about right. They vary greatly. I have brief scenes of 200-400 words and longer scenes peaking over 2K. And of course, these are scenes, not chapters. The chapters are much longer, most of them. Actually, it's divided into days instead of chapters, but whatever. It's supposed to have a real-time sort of feel, especially in Act I. There's a massive, deadly dust storm for two days, and everyone's trapped wherever they were when it hit. That's where a lot of the shorter scenes reside.
