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Novel Architecture

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the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: meg_evonne on March 02, 2008, 03:39:27 AM ---I've corresponded with neurovore concerning the complications of multi-POV but this is the first serious discussion that touches upon the proximity of the narrator to the character or characters.

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The explicit narrator and sort of got broken in the nineteenth century, with the modern bestseller-omni that hops from head to head with no discipline at all as the resultant monstrosity, for which I basically blame Dickens.


--- Quote ---I continue to pull apart short stories and novels trying to key in on the subtle differences and i still feel that i am no where close enough to give it a try.

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if it helps, what seem the really major tonal changes to me are between: headlong/braindump where you are getting the story as it happens, and story with an implicit later frame in which they are being told [ both of which can be either first or third ]; story that is always inside somebody's head, and story that does any moments at all of camera-eye [ Sometimes an end-of-scene pull back from an inside-somebody's-head story will go close to an almost camera-eye last line, in things I write and in a few things I read, though first seems a lot less prone to doing this messily (first-with-frame can of course have this as the narrator going back and filling in things they did not know at the time)  like "They talked of other things then, long into the night", or one line of the empty room the POV character has just left. ]; between narrative perspective and protagonist perspective - the gentle art of showing a viewpoint character doing stuff that makes sense to them and that they care about and believe in which your book as a whole does not necessarily want to support - and lastly, between having an explicit narrator and not.


--- Quote --- (Thus this is why i haven't responded to your kind response, neurovore.  I've left the work on the back burner while I let it gel.)

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Entirely fair enough.


--- Quote ---In another thread Dom, you discuss that you sometimes resent the time you are pulled away from what you consider the main character or perhaps an interesting 2ndary character.  It's easy to say that the story structure was lacking in someway or that the author wasn't proficient enough to pull it off.  Especially if the secondary character is what you want to see more often.  It also seems possible that the author may have done such a great job in presenting their characters that you are personally drawn to one over the other.

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Just simply having a preference for a single narrative POV is fine, as a preference; as a technique it limits the stories you can tell, a lot.


--- Quote ---There must also be an overwhelming tendency to move that narrator distance in closer for characters that an author is personally drawn to instinctively.

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I don't find it so.  That is, I avoid doing close-focus POVs of sorts of people I find incomprehensible, because I can't do them; but I can definitely do sorts of people I find familiar but distasteful. Some flavours of religious maniac that you get on either side in the Northern Ireland conflict come to mind as ones I've seen a lot of; there's a degree in their worldviews of translating everything into their terms before considering it in any other way, so no external evidence can ever get through, that I find really creepy and unpleasant but not hard to depict.


--- Quote ---The key that I'm carrying away from what I've pulled apart in my own study is that it is the consistency of the distance held that must hold true for this format to work.

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It depends on what you are trying to do. Sometimes deliberately jarring is what the story wants.


--- Quote ---Further there is the concern that as lovely as it would be to manage to pull this off successfully, are you not still left with the average agent or publishing house that will not quite grasp what you have accomplished?  Run of the mill may be boring, but it seems to work and be marketable.

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There are enough books doing Weird Things still seeing print, that I have hope in my own oddities some time seeing the light of professionally published day.

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