McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
POV Advice
Paynesgrey:
Huh. I actually find first person POV easier because it allows me to focus on the world from her eyes, what she reasonably knows, how she goes about doing or finding things out... keeps me from getting lost in my own meanderings. Artificial discipline... I have to do a lot of intellectual judo on myself sometimes. She becomes the mechanism and filter by which I can regulate how miserly I dole out nuggets backstory. I can keep things focused by just using her to give the reader information as she weaves in and out of the other story threads. I think for me, it would actually be more different to do anything outside the first person, single PoV.
Maybe after I get a couple done I'll try my hand at multiple PoV's but for now I'm probably best off getting one PoV at a time good and solid. I've read too many books where the tone/voice of different PoV's got mushy and tangled, so I want to make sure I don't stumble into that sort of inconsistency myself .
When I get this one nailed down, I'll probably do the next one from her friend's POV as the two are frequently separated by circumstances while doing Awfully Important Things. Lets me avoid the Sidekick/Big Damn Hero Dymanic. And also I'm figuring it'll let me deal out backstory bits and portions of worldbuilding the first one wouldn't be privy to without an info-dump. Plus, it'll force me to tell the story in another character's voice and without the dialect. That dialect my first protagonist has spun up is really a lot of fun, but I don't want to let it become a gimmick.
Which brings to mind this question: Does anyone find their characters becoming the boss of them? I've found that as mine's personalities get started, they pretty much start to develop on their own, which is just fine... but the plot issues start to develop in a way that compliments the character's growth. While my overall story arc and it's tent-posts remain intact, but other than that things develop in a way that compliments the character. It turns into a collaborative effort with them reading over my shoulder and saying things like "Oh, I'd never die like that. I'd die more like this..."
I'm not at all complaining about this, since it seems to be working, just wondering if this happens to anyone else.
The Deposed King:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on September 29, 2012, 05:28:14 AM ---Huh. I actually find first person POV easier because it allows me to focus on the world from her eyes, what she reasonably knows, how she goes about doing or finding things out... keeps me from getting lost in my own meanderings. Artificial discipline... I have to do a lot of intellectual judo on myself sometimes. She becomes the mechanism and filter by which I can regulate how miserly I dole out nuggets backstory. I can keep things focused by just using her to give the reader information as she weaves in and out of the other story threads. I think for me, it would actually be more different to do anything outside the first person, single PoV.
Maybe after I get a couple done I'll try my hand at multiple PoV's but for now I'm probably best off getting one PoV at a time good and solid. I've read too many books where the tone/voice of different PoV's got mushy and tangled, so I want to make sure I don't stumble into that sort of inconsistency myself .
When I get this one nailed down, I'll probably do the next one from her friend's POV as the two are frequently separated by circumstances while doing Awfully Important Things. Lets me avoid the Sidekick/Big Damn Hero Dymanic. And also I'm figuring it'll let me deal out backstory bits and portions of worldbuilding the first one wouldn't be privy to without an info-dump. Plus, it'll force me to tell the story in another character's voice and without the dialect. That dialect my first protagonist has spun up is really a lot of fun, but I don't want to let it become a gimmick.
Which brings to mind this question: Does anyone find their characters becoming the boss of them? I've found that as mine's personalities get started, they pretty much start to develop on their own, which is just fine... but the plot issues start to develop in a way that compliments the character's growth. While my overall story arc and it's tent-posts remain intact, but other than that things develop in a way that compliments the character. It turns into a collaborative effort with them reading over my shoulder and saying things like "Oh, I'd never die like that. I'd die more like this..."
I'm not at all complaining about this, since it seems to be working, just wondering if this happens to anyone else.
--- End quote ---
Do what makes you comfortable. I didn't feel like I had problems doiing side characters in either of my two books.
As for the characters bossing you around... hahahahha. Jim Butcher says his characters obey him. But as for me? Its like herding goats sometimes. You get them where you want them to go... eventually. Not all the time or anything but yeah. Sometimes its like with Cattle, you need a herd dog off to the side to keep them fromm going through the fence.
the Depose dKing
Paynesgrey:
Yeah, they're not keeping me from getting things done, not even in the way I want them done. I'm just sometimes baffled at how it seems the story has taken on a life of it's own and is something I'm uncovering rather than something I'm building.
Either way, it's great fun and extremely gratifying.
Snowleopard:
My characters do that to me sometimes, PG.
What it means to me is that subconsciously you truly KNOW how your characters will react to
a situation and when you try to force them into something wrong - they act out.
Also that subconscious spec sheet will lead you into different things than you may have planned.
I have a book called - Writers on Writing by Jon Winokur.
A lovely book of quotes about writing by writers.
And some writers have characters that do their own thing and others are in complete
control of their characters.
(I recommend the book - particularly for what writer's have to say about each other. OUCH!!)
I think it may have been H.G.Wells who commented on George Bernard Shaw - "He writes for
the ages. The ages between 4 and 12.)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Snowleopard on September 29, 2012, 04:35:17 PM ---What it means to me is that subconsciously you truly KNOW how your characters will react to
a situation and when you try to force them into something wrong - they act out.
--- End quote ---
The reason why this generally doesn't happen to me, I think, is that I tend to find characters for stories in the first place by starting with what I need them to do in the key emotional moment. ("What sort of person will, after being bullied by his father for much of his life and then finding a crashed spaceship while riding to war at age twenty, come back in the middle of the council scene that's the turning point of the book, face him down, and take over the duchy in exactly this way that I need to have exactly these consequences, and subsequently be minded to approach the peace conferences from exactly this angle to get to the resolution I have in mind ?") I may learn a lot more about them in writing the story, and acquire other things they care about and secondary plot threads, but those all expand out from being the person who will have the reactions and make the decisions that are core to driving the plot along, so it isn't really possible for them to under cut that.
I really admire people who can handle stories that thrash about under them, or who even set out to do exactly that. The webcomic Problem Sleuth for example, which starts off with one guy stuck in his office and ends up as 1700 pages of witty, surreal noir parody of several genres of video game, was written with the "command" describing each page (the "next page" buttons links are in the form of old-school text-adventure commands) selected from an online forum of reader responses to the previous; it has a couple of bumps early on but it develops and satisfactorily resolves a fair degree of complexity along the way and makes it all make (a somewhat twisted form of) sense. That is lightyears from the edges of anything I can see how to do.
--- Quote ---I think it may have been H.G.Wells who commented on George Bernard Shaw - "He writes for
the ages. The ages between 4 and 12.)
--- End quote ---
heh. According to Rebecca West's bio of Wells, Shaw bullied him awfully, so I am not surprised he had some snark to deliver in return.
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