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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: belial.1980 on August 07, 2012, 04:09:59 AM
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Hey there all,
So I was helping to seek some advice regarding POV. When writing from 3rd person limited, I've found that I like to include minor characters' POVs from time to time, just to freshen things up. These are usually "one shot" scenes written from the perspective of minor characters ranging from innocent civilians caught up in a slaughter, to the protagonist's mother, to the family cat.
I do it because it seems to be more interesting to tell that bit of the story from an otherwise unexplored angle. In the case of the protag's mother, it felt more visceral to see her son in pain through her eyes than to stick with the protag's POV. She doesn't have a major subplot dedicated to her POV, but I just thought the particular scene worked better when seen through her eyes.
I just ask because I feel like I don't see a lot of this in the published books I read. Therefore, I'm wondering if it's something to avoid. It seems like everything I can remember reading in recent years will include the POV of the main protagonist and usually a handful of secondary characters, each with their own well-defined subplot.
So, are there any thoughts on this? Is it kosher to use a few one-off viewpoints that belong to characters that don't have their own major subplot? Or from a reader's (and a potential publisher's) standpoint, do ya'll think this is something to avoid? Thanks in advance for any advice!
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The failure mode of one-off viewpoints for a reader, sfaict, is that they look undisciplined.
As a writer, I think they can be an unduly easy out - where it might make for a better story to figure out how to get the relevant information in, or imply it, within an existing POV.
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I think it depends on where and how you do it. To give an example: In the Codex Alera books the main plot POV's are Tavi, Amara, Fidelius, and Isana. But in several of the books there were brief parts that were told from other POV's, often as one-shots. These included Erron, Varg, and a 'redshirt' soldier getting eaten by giant bugs.
To me it didn't take away from the story in those cases though in general there is a danger of throwing off the rhythm of the story. In general, every time you shift POV's is an opportunity to loose your reader, so you want to make sure they are going to be interested in what you are switching to, which much easier with established characters and plotlines. It is much easier at the beginning of the book (especially in a Prologue, which is already set apart to some degree) while you are setting the stage and events have not really gotten moving; later on it is much harder to cleanly jump to an unestablished POV.
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Terry Pratchett has made effective use of this, occasionally switching to the POV of a minor character for a brief scene. I think the trick is to keep these scenes few and far between, as they retain more impact that way.
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Whatever works. If you think it makes the scene more effective, then do it. The only time I find multiple POV distracting is when it's being constantly switched to the point you can't keep track of it. The goal is to create an interesting and entertaining experience for the reader. Anything that you do towards that end is fine.
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Personally, use small characters rarely but with reason. Some times you need to show something happening half a continent from the main characters. Sometimes you need to show how dangerous something is without killing off somebody important. Just don't abuse it. 3 or 4 per book at max, likely less if you change Point of view frequently.
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I do it because it seems to be more interesting to tell that bit of the story from an otherwise unexplored angle. In the case of the protag's mother, it felt more visceral to see her son in pain through her eyes than to stick with the protag's POV. She doesn't have a major subplot dedicated to her POV, but I just thought the particular scene worked better when seen through her eyes.
Going by this, sounds like it's possibly the right choice for the scene. Yeah, it's not done often, but in part that's because most people haven't seen it done often. I can't say off the top of my head where I've seen it done, if I've even read any books like that, but in one episode of Writing Excuses, Brandon Sanderson talks about this sort of thing. In one of the Mistborn books, he switched from main character POV into a minor one-off POV. The episode is hazy, so I don't remember exactly why he did it, but in part it was to give a different perspective on something happening, and to also heighten the tension a bit, I believe.
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I think it depends on where and how you do it. To give an example: In the Codex Alera books the main plot POV's are Tavi, Amara, Fidelius, and Isana. But in several of the books there were brief parts that were told from other POV's, often as one-shots. These included Erron, Varg, and a 'redshirt' soldier getting eaten by giant bugs.
To each their own; that is, I think, a large part of why those books never quite gelled for me.
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As a writer, I think they can be an unduly easy out - where it might make for a better story to figure out how to get the relevant information in, or imply it, within an existing POV.
Thank you! This really got me thinking. It reminded me that sometimes imposing limitations can cause you to be more creative. IE it forces you to do more with less. I've actually reworked a couple of POV shifts in my head and plan to take some of these one off's and rewrite them from one the major view points I've already established. I think it should work out better overall.
Personally, use small characters rarely but with reason. Some times you need to show something happening half a continent from the main characters. Sometimes you need to show how dangerous something is without killing off somebody important. Just don't abuse it. 3 or 4 per book at max, likely less if you change Point of view frequently.
Yeah, I actually finished reading a book that had a lot of POV shifts to minor characters. Basically, a whole town was getting turned into vampires and we saw the victims' POV. It was kind of cool but a little annoying at the same time since it's hard to really care about nameless victims #1-17. If I end up using some one off viewpoints, it will definitely be in a limited capacity. I'm going to try and stick with 4 major POVs for this draft: 2 protagonists, 1 antagonist, and 1 that's both and neither at the same time. :)
They all have a large part to play in the story and we should get pretty good development of plot and other minor characters through them.
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To each their own; that is, I think, a large part of why those books never quite gelled for me.
Fair enough. Ive never really minded it, and there are some authors that I respect for their ability to use one-off POV characters well. Ive seen authors that can establish a character with full characterization, motivations, unique voice, etc with less than a page, which always impressed me. Guy Gavriel Kay is a good example of this, but to be fair Ive always had an irrational love of the Fionavar Tapestry, so Im probably biased. :)
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A good example of a limited but pivotal additional POV's would be Lois McMaster-Bujold's A Civil Campaign. But it's something I'd use sparingly, not shotgun-style.
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A good example of a limited but pivotal additional POV's would be Lois McMaster-Bujold's A Civil Campaign. But it's something I'd use sparingly, not shotgun-style.
That book's not using one-off POVs for incidental bits, though, but multiple significant POVs. I suppose some of them are one-offs on a series scale, but I still think there's a qualitative difference there.
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That book's not using one-off POVs for incidental bits, though, but multiple significant POVs. I suppose some of them are one-offs on a series scale, but I still think there's a qualitative difference there.
Ah, quite right. I was thinking of terms of POV shifts in general, not small splashes in particular. With that in mind, I'd use the small splash very, very sparingly.
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I want to extend the discussion. Why should you use them.
The biggest reason I can think of.
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.
My next project has way too many one offs though. One of the major plot points is that a series of Madrox style clones that can shapeshift(The last thing shifting allows is self cloning and it makes for a really fun villain) are running a mafia organization and somebody is hunting them. All of tyhose Madrox clones are slightly different characters, but in many ways the same. But I need to show hings from their perspective... It'll be an interesting project.
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I want to extend the discussion. Why should you use them.
The biggest reason I can think of.
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.
My next project has way too many one offs though. One of the major plot points is that a series of Madrox style clones that can shapeshift(The last thing shifting allows is self cloning and it makes for a really fun villain) are running a mafia organization and somebody is hunting them. All of tyhose Madrox clones are slightly different characters, but in many ways the same. But I need to show hings from their perspective... It'll be an interesting project.
I used POV characters in my first book for two reasons. One was to provide a second point of view. My first character was all 1st person, so we only got to see what he saw. It was nice to give you a little base line impression of what was happening underneath his feet.
The second? Comic relief. Preferably I'd do both. Chief Engineer Spalding was a great example. Bombasitic, informative in his whole, he listens with a scowl, nods slowly before exclaiming 'That's a bunch of space rot lads! Now you'll do it how I say!' insert sound of a plasma torch being lit up followed by a few practice swings. Then he'd go off to 'save the day', which in Spalding's estimation could be anything from getting the crew to stop 'slacking' and go preforming a few safety drills, to personally walking into a leaky reactor core with no hope of survival. To him both were vital tasks, vital you here, to the survival of the ship!
With other characters, the situations they found themselves in were interesting asides, and the conflicts might be funny but not so much the basic natures of the characters themselves. With the Chief Engineer I had a POV character who took himself so seriously it was comic relief from top to bottomus.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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 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.)
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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.
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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..."
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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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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.
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.)
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.