McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Breaking POV

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Lanodantheon:
The best piece of advice I can give on this is that when you are using a narrative tool, use it in a consistent way. Keeping it consistent is the most important part of any artistic endeavor. Even if you do something weird and incorrect, as long as you do that thing the same way every single time you do it, the audience will forgive for it.


When shifting POV, maybe use italics or some other obvious formatting to ease the reader into what you are doing and allow them to easily identify when you are changing POV.


I would recommend that you start your story with the non-1st Person Perspective with the different formatting so that upfront the reader is open to another point-of-view. From there, ease the reader into the 1st Person Point of View with a direct signal, "This is your narrator. This is what he was thinking at that moment..."


If you did it the other way of starting in First person and then pulling out into 3rd...you'd have to be quite the wordsmith to be able to keep an audience's attention. When a reader is used to even a chapter of hearing a character's 1st person narration, the move to 3rd person will be really jarring.


The key is to clarify for the reader who is talking when.

gravesbane:
All of your insights are very helpful and giving me some clues on how to do this. Thanks again to all of you.

Delarith:
I have read books that had multiple POV's in them.  Normally it was one character for the first part of the book and then another after about 1/3 and then again another for the last 1/3.  I have also read series where each book was from a different character's POV.  It works as long as you don't get a character that the reader could care less what they are thinking.

cenwolfgirl:
yep it has to be relivent to the plot if not now then latter
its realy easy to do forshadowing if you do POV shifts
i do it more reguly the 1/3 but thats becaue i didnt have a plain as to how long the book will be / exactly what will happen i just sate wroght and watched the fur fly in some cases now i have to neaten it all up
(its one aproch only do it if you get writters block)

hank the ancient:
I've been experimenting with this myself by inserting archive/encyclopedia entries as stand alone chapters. Of course, the point of this is to blast through a lot of retroactive exposition (the work is future scifi, so setting up the universe is a bit of a chore).  If you really want to tell the action of the story from multiple points of view, I'd recommend cracking open a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula for inspiration. The whole narrative is told through newspaper clippings, correspondence, and journal entries.  Moreover, the character's repeatedly make statements in their own entries which only provide for "oh crap" moments because the reader just read an entry by someone else. You spend the first two thirds of the book screaming at them to compare frigging notes.

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