McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Chapter Perspectives and How to Start Them

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drewavera:
i dont think you need to start each chapter with the persons name: John kicked the ball... sorta thing. but i do think its a good idea to put that characters name somewhere in the first paragraph. you could describe a setting or something and include the persons names a sentence or two into the paragraph. that way you take away the mystery of who the character is without writing it in an elementary way. just my 1.413 cents

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: drewavera on October 10, 2012, 06:22:41 PM ---i dont think you need to start each chapter with the persons name: John kicked the ball... sorta thing. but i do think its a good idea to put that characters name somewhere in the first paragraph. you could describe a setting or something and include the persons names a sentence or two into the paragraph. that way you take away the mystery of who the character is without writing it in an elementary way. just my 1.413 cents

--- End quote ---

Yah, but if it's a mystery who the character is after reading a paragraph inside their head, then (unless you're doing something deliberate with that mystery) you really want to look again at how distinct a voice each character has.

Describing the setting's a good way of doing this, actually.  (Everything is voice, and voice is character.) Because if you've got one POV character whose instinct on entering a new room is to check for access, doors, windows, points of escape, points someone could shoot at you through and so on, and a second POV character who on entering a new room immediately notices what colour everything is and thinks how it visually fits together, and a third who does not pay much attention to his surroundings because he's fretting over this plot he's got stuck in, a sentence beginning "He walked into the room and thought... " will be unambiguous as to which character it is within a few more words without needing you to explicitly say who "he" is. 

drewavera:
if he is changing to third person perspective then the narrator is describing everything. i thought he mentioned that he was not gonna do first person perspective. if he does third person then there is no voice for each individual character until the dialouge comes into play. if its first person with multiple view points then it sounds like its gonna be a head ache trying to voice each person differently.

Galvatron:

--- Quote from: drewavera on October 10, 2012, 06:52:13 PM ---if he is changing to third person perspective then the narrator is describing everything. i thought he mentioned that he was not gonna do first person perspective. if he does third person then there is no voice for each individual character until the dialouge comes into play. if its first person with multiple view points then it sounds like its gonna be a head ache trying to voice each person differently.

--- End quote ---

Read the First Law books be Joe Ambercrobie if you think third person pov can't give each character their own voice.

Quantus:

--- Quote from: drewavera on October 10, 2012, 06:52:13 PM ---if he is changing to third person perspective then the narrator is describing everything. i thought he mentioned that he was not gonna do first person perspective. if he does third person then there is no voice for each individual character until the dialouge comes into play. if its first person with multiple view points then it sounds like its gonna be a head ache trying to voice each person differently.

--- End quote ---
Well there is Third-Person Subjective, and then there is Third-person Objective.  Subjective still has a voice, and is describing internal thoughts, feelings, opinions etc of the "voice" character, it just doesnt go so far as actually saying "I did this and that."  The Objective voice tends to be more neutral and dehumanized, but the Subjective one is more "over the shoulder" and still gets inside the characters' heads.  Given that he was switching from 1st POV to third purely to allow for multiple POVs in different scenes, I was assuming he was intending to use the subjective form.

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