McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
POV Advice
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Aminar on August 10, 2012, 12:32:23 AM ---Fantasy tends to have characters with amazing abilities, abilities they are so used to that the sense of awe or terror just isn't there. So throw a section in from Joe Blow's perspective where he watches the main character doing something the character sees as routine. Suddenly that routine thing is probably EPIC. Or at least that's where I need to use them.
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That's the kind of thing that strikes me as an easy out. Characters who don't see how spectacular they are just means needing to get stuff in around the limits of their POV, and that's totally doable - it's done in pretty much every DF book, clues to the mystery in early that Harry does not get, but that a reader can.
Dom:
I'm sort of "eh" on it. I bet a good writer could do a story that's nothing but 100 different POV characters, never repeating. (In fact, sounds like fun!)
I think the onus would just be on your character-building skills, and your plotting skills. If those are both strong, so that the new POVs are both vibrant and bring something to the story's plot, you could probably pepper in as many of these as you need and be ok.
And if you're weak in these areas, it's probably not the extra POV scenes that are killing you...although people may misidentify the extra scenes as being the culprit.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Dom on September 28, 2012, 08:56:23 PM ---I'm sort of "eh" on it. I bet a good writer could do a story that's nothing but 100 different POV characters, never repeating. (In fact, sounds like fun!)
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I recommend Geoff Ryman's 253 to your attention. 253 characters, a 253-word chapter each, the action of the whole novel spans seven minutes, and yet it has plot tension and character development. (It's available online, but it is to my mind much less impressive as hypertext because you can hop about all over the place in all sorts of thematic links and you lose the focus of getting a story despite the format.)
Paynesgrey:
I can tell that one wouldn't be my cup of tea save to perhaps as a learning exercise to see how Event XYZ is interpreted from several points of view. I love character driven work, like the Vorkosigan series. A well written, engaging character can go to the grocery, read soup labels, and it's still a good read... but when you get a slew of characters, I find myself getting annoyed at having to read through the ones that don't interest me just to (hopefully) get back to the ones I find interesting. Same thing with too many plot threads.
This is by no means a value judgement where I claim ">X Characters is bad, mmmkay", just my personal preference. That and to point out that there's a potential danger in too many POV's... the writer must ensure that they're all engaging, or become one of those writers about whom people say "it's ok if you skip past Blofnorp's stuff and just pay attention to the Whompetting League's storyline..."
It's like the MMO Grind in a way... one risks alienating readers when one goes from intellectually challenging them to must making them "work" (i.e. slog through meh stuff) to get to the stuff they like.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on September 28, 2012, 09:49:24 PM ---This is by no means a value judgement where I claim ">X Characters is bad, mmmkay", just my personal preference. That and to point out that there's a potential danger in too many POV's... the writer must ensure that they're all engaging, or become one of those writers about whom people say "it's ok if you skip past Blofnorp's stuff and just pay attention to the Whompetting League's storyline..."
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Oh, agreed, and that's not the only downside; I think there's a pacing problem that often arises with writers who like adding POVs to cover things from different angles, or to solve problems of one sort or another, and then find themselves in Book 9 with 12 different POVs to visit, and even with a hefty brick of a book that leaves you not a great deal of room to develop each individual thread and the series as a whole slows right down. Or you can leave half of them out of any given book and have it disliked by the people who like those characters best, or you can kill the ones you do not need any more and upset people who don't like that. (I did this myself in an unpublished and likely unpublishable earlier story, which I was envisioning while writing as most likely split into three volumes if it ever saw print on practical grounds, so any lack of charity in what I just said is aimed at my own failed experiments.) I remind myself of this every time trying to write a single first-person POV drives me crazy with how to fit information in.
253 is basically stunt writing, like that Vikram Seth novel entirely in sonnets, and I'm not advising it as a model for following so much as an example of how far out the limits of the possible are.
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