I have an MC who uses an alias. He is known to the reader by his real name at the start. There is a shift and the reader is told in this way: 'Frank, as Danny now called himself,...'. From there on in, until it is revealed to the other characters that he is using an alias, he is referred to as Frank by both the narrator and the characters. I did wonder if the narrator should continue to call him Danny, but feel this would lead to a lot of confusion for the reader. Any thought on this? Has anyone had a similar scenario?
Frank--is he impersonating the drug dealer? This is an interesting situation that lends itself to some nice little tricks. You might sometimes say something like 'The man calling himself Frank' or 'The man who had introduced himself as Frank'. This would work nicely in scenes where he's interacting with people who don't know who he really is, and of course after he had actually introduced himself that way to them. In fact in those scenes you wouldn't have to directly refer to him as Danny at all. I suppose that would work best though if the scene were being told from the POV of someone else, who doesn't know who he is. That way you could either let the readers know it's Danny if that's the way you want to handle the scene, or let them think it's somebody else (Frank) for a while, or play in the in-between area, let them wonder for a while. Or it might even work better from a floating Objective POV. For instance, start the scene something like: "A man with a black goatee in dark clothes approached the tall man on the street and said something to him no-one else could hear, then the two of them moved quietly toward the door of the bakery and stepped inside. They moved in such a way as not to garner too much attention from the few passersby who were out and about at the early hour. And yet to someone observing them closely, a certain surreptitiousness might be noted in their movements, as if they were deliberately trying to look nondescript. Once inside they didn't behave like ordinary bakery customers, nor did any of the employees take note of them. They stepped behind the counter and through a doorway into the back of the bakery, where people were busily putting rolls and loaves and biscuits into large industrial ovens. None of these employees took note of them either, aside from maybe an initial glance that was quickly averted. It was clear that this sort of thing happened at times in this bakery. The two men didn't stop in the kitchen either, but moved on through to a small dingy room that housed nothing but an old battered wooden table and an assortment of equally old and battered chairs that could have been purchased at rummage sales decades ago. It wasn't a room that served any purpose in the business of the bakery, at least not any kind of business the public would be familiar with." Sorry, I'm having too much fun with this. But for the kind of approach I'm thinking of, where you don't directly tell readers that this is Danny but let them guess it, this would be fun. Or you could be less mysterious and just say 'A man came in and introduced himself as Frank.', and then throughout the scene keep referring to him as 'the man who had introduced himself as Frank'. The Objective POV is custom-made for scenes like this, and similar to Omniscient, can move freely wherever needed. Its movement is motivated only by what the reader needs to see. But unlike Omniscient, you don't need to keep moving into the heads of characters and giving their innermost thoughts. It's perfect for mystery, spy and detective stories, and in fact is used in them frequently if not all the time. It's also known as the 'fly-on-the-wall' POV. Then when the scene ends you go into the POV of whoever the next scene is told from, or the standard narrator.
