I just dug out an old idea I had long ago and am still in early development. Not sure where this will end up, but it's something I want to play around with. It's a story in first-person POV. The MC/narrator, a high school kid, disappears suddenly during a sort of dare. He wasn't alone when it happened - two friends were with him. The MC doesn't know he disappeared to another reality though. To him, he completed this dare but now his friends are just gone. In his friends' perspective though, they basically DID see him disappear. So my question is, what's the best way, if any, to switch from first-to-third person mid-scene? I want to describe what the MC's friends saw, and share their dialogue, but the MC doesn't know what they saw, nor can he hear them, because to him, he's still in normal reality. So I can't really describe this part from his first-person POV, it has to be from theirs. But I don't want to confuse the flow by going back & forth... Clear as mud?
Couldn't you just end the scene at that point and pick it up in a different POV in the next scene? Or stay with him at the transition, then cut to the other POV next chapter?
I could end the scene from the MC's POV and then pick it right up with the other characters' dialogue, I suppose. It's a short, so the natural chapter break up isn't there. (I should've mentioned that.) So that's why I was concerned on conveying each POV without going back and forth too much.
The next thing that occurs to me is, could you write it in 3rd person, so it wouldn't be as jarring when you switch?
The original idea started out in third person but I switched it to first before getting too far into the story. I thought a perspective from 'the disappeared' might be interesting...
It definitely could be. I realized that after posting, but it would be tricky to handle well I think. I suppose the only way to know would be try it and see if you can make it work that way.
Always was under the understanding that changing POV automatically marked a change of scene anyway, so I don't think that you can technically change POV within a scene.
I wish I could remember which book I read this in. (I know exactly where I was when I read it, but I can't remember the title.) You can scene break and switch POV mid-sentence. You just em dash around the scene break. More properly, call it a section break, because the scene keeps going in another POV. You don't have to break the sentence, but you can. I guess that proves the power of the em dash / section break combo. The point is, the section break will let you switch POV. Add those em dashes and you can do crazy things. Mr. Roper sidled up to the Regal Beagle's bar and plopped gracelessly onto a stool. He was right next to the blonde with the feathered hair and the prodigious bosom. She stared blankly forward, as if he wasn't even there. Courage. The pamphlet said to be bold. If this fine specimen wasn't totally awesome possum, then no woman in here was. He downed his whiskey, choked, paused for the laugh track. He made his move. "Is it hot in here—" * * * "—or is it just you?" Jack couldn't breathe. The cocaine filling his bra was leaking. Those crooks had shot him in the boob! It was an affront to women's rights. His nose itched, and by god, now he was inhaling enough blow to feel a real buzz. And a hand. A hand was squeezing his knee. On week three of quarantine, I tried my hand at Three's Company fanfic.
I would suggest that you write the scene as you envision it. Make sure you include enough detail to make it feel rich. But if you're not going to spend a lot of time with the characters left behind in the real world, and you only want to show the reader that the character has truly disappeared and is NOT in the real world any more, it does make sense to switch to third person for their portion of the story. If/when the main character returns to the real world, is there going to be a time gap—his friends are all dead or grown-up, etc? Or is he going to pop back into their world in the exact spot where he left it, WHILE his friends are still standing there, wondering where he went? If that's the case, make sure you leave us with a good, memorable image of what his friends are doing when he pops off. That way, the return will bring it all full circle.
OUTSTANDING Three's Company reference I guess the challenge is I'm trying to possibly flip the POV describing what different characters experience in the SAME moment. The MC disappears, only he doesn't know it. He thinks his friends did. His friends lost sight of him. They are still there, but the MC is gone. I'm not sure yet if the MC will reappear. I have a couple ideas in mind - one is to keep him alive but in this flipped reality (think along the lines of Stephen King's The Talisman/Black House), and the other is to have him reappear at some point.
Paragraph break, switch to third person, make the perspective obvious. Any reader with a few working brain cells will catch on.
Not sure if my idea would work because it'd involve omni for a very brief stretch, but... first POV of your MC, break with the em-dash as @Seven Crowns suggested... omni, one paragraph for each of the friends, what they'd experience when your MC vanishes. Ideally there'd be about three or four friends on the scene (because the reader needs time and paragraphs to settle into this sudden new storyline mood), ending with an em-dash at the end of the paragraph of the friend that's going to be... em-dash, continuing third POV of the new MC. I admit it's highly irregular, but I'm counting on the first em-dash to alert the reader that something unusual is happening, and I also count on the last em-dash to tell him that the story goes on, just in a different head.
Thanks, all. I think I've found a way to do it incorporating some of the suggestions here, and also putting a timestamp on it. This shows what each person experienced, but also shows that a different amount of time has passed in each reality. So what feels like a few minutes to the MC is actually more than an hour to the other guys - this allows them to have their own little subplot of trying to figure out where the MC went, notifying authorities, etc.
Okay, I think the timestamp idea is working. It's pretty clear what happens when and to whom. But now, I may have another self-inflicted dilemma... As I said in the OP, it's a first-person story, and the MC essentially gives a play-by-play of what he is experiencing. During his incarceration in the 'other' universe, he discovers a way that he might be able to get word through this dimensional wall to his real world. It's quite literally like a note under the door. He keeps trying, but doesn't fully know if it's working. But having limited resources he starts to panic, on the verge of going mad. So that being the case, what if I write the beginning as the end? As if the MC prefaces it with a kind of "this is what happened to me, I'm writing this last page in hopes someone finds it" vibe. Then the story itself would be what he subsequently writes, trying to push through the wall. Is that too obvious/cliche/bullshit? Or could that be worth trying?
No, I mean look at Virginia Woolf for example. She would change POV multiple times in a scene or a paragraph. But Woolf’s style isn’t something everyone wants to emulate.
