Switching pov?

Cause i want to give some info/tell the events that the pov character has no access to.

Such as: I want to reveal parts of the antagonists' plan in accordance with the situation that the MCs are in right now. Some scenes if revealed at just the right time it could create a much more powerful impact rather than being told much much later. Also if i told it in one go it would be info dumping.

Now that i think about it maybe i should find a way to change it at the end of the chapter rather than in the middle.

 

Have you thought about doing a chapter with your villains perspective and following it in the fashion of not telling this info through dialogue but maybe showing it through action and their motives, limiting dialogue from the villain verbally but perhaps use thought tags as if in real time they are scheming/thinking?
Or you could use dialogue as if they are talking to themselves and thinking their way through a plan. But flip back and forth from verbal thought to inside monologue. It may be easier to control in this approach you are going for. It'll give that information the readers need and keep you in a single pov style.

 

The reader won't have access to your rationale for why you think switching from close to omniscient is a great idea. They'll just see that you've done it. And things like this really stand out, and can look amateurish if not don't right. Honestly, I would just switch to the antagonist's POV for a chapter, even if it's a really short one.

 

But what exactly do you mean by this? Maybe I'm just really really stupid, but these kind of threads perfectly highlight why I struggle with, and have avoided, a third-person POV for so long.

Switch to the antagonist's POV in what respect? Close, as in from in their head? Or distant where we're simply observing their actions and listening to their conversations with others?

I know I keep using the movie analogy, but can anyone explain why, or indeed if, using this style for a novel is a bad idea. Just to reiterate what I mean by this, I'm talking about using close third for the protagonist and then distant 3rd (in a simple observing capacity) whenever I switch to the antagonist.

 

I'm struggling with 3rd person as well. Now that I've taken a professional approach to it, to learn, and such to make my writing work and be sellable. It's almost as if the quality of my writing went down after I started reading way to many articles and blogs on writing. Everyone has a different opinion. http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/blog/2014/04/30/head-hopping-fiction-writing/ This is what I'm struggling to understand myself. If it seems to be a matter of opinion on the quality of writing, how does a writer take a step back and look at it from a readers perspective? I've tried this and I'm taking junks and focusing and fixing, I find problems, but for the most part, I'm having trouble telling a bad transition from a good one since they are all opinion based. Some people have read my stuff and say it's fine and they can follow it and others tell me the transition is jarring. If anything I think the op and I have a lot of work ahead of us. Learning for the school of hard knocks.

 

Exactly, @Xboxlover. Too many differing opinions, and while that's everyone's right and no one person can be criticised, it doesn't help people such as you, me and the OP get their heads around it all.

 

This may be totally irrelevant, but I babble:

In the HFV, I've been playing with different levels of narrative distance with one of my characters, all in third person limited.

I wasn't actually going to have any scenes from his POV at all, but then I needed him to have a dream, so obviously he was the only POV option. But the "camera" was almost entirely outside him--all I gave from inside his head was facts with a hint of intention, like "And now sleep was stalking him with increasing persistence."

Then I needed him to apologize to someone, and barely edged into his thoughts; we didn't just see that he smiled, but what he usually used that smile for. ("...the smile that he kept for frightened children and...") But he still mostly just walked and talked.

Then I had a scene with a big chunk of internal conflict for him--the ruthless thing that he should do was a thing that he couldn't bring himself to do--and dove into his feelings, though there's still some distance, because HE maintains a lot of distance from his own feelings. If I were omniscient, I could tell the reader everything that makes him vulnerable, but he doesn't acknowledge that, so, nope. On the other hand, in first person I would be further away from him, because he wouldn't even admit to the conflict. (Edited to add: For example, what in third person might be, "He couldn't bring himself to do it." would in first person be more like, "I changed my mind." or "After some thought, I chose a different strategy.")

What's my point? Not sure. I guess just that third person gives me the flexibility to do this without, I hope, too much of a jolt for the reader.

 

I don't understand.

Why? Why would writing in first-person take you further away from his motives and intentions?

As a first-person fan and writer this just doesn't make any sense to me. What you're saying here is exactly the opposite of how I interpret a 1st and 3rd POV.

The fact that you say 'I would be further away from him' (in first-person) tells me you and I see this POV in very different terms. Yours is an alien concept to me because when I write in first, I AM the narrator. I am that person. Or to be more precise, I'm playing the part of that person.

 

Because people lie about their thoughts and motivations. Let's imagine that I'm ashamed of how much I dislike my late mother. I'm not, but it's fairly easy to imagine, right? If I'm a character, and I'm meeting a person who reminds me of my mother, and I intensely dislike that person, the description of that scene will be more informative the further we get from first person.

In first person I might flat-out lie, pretending that I dislike the person because she resembles my mother but doesn't fulfill the standards of my mother's glory.

In third person, the narrator can communicate my dislike of the person, and delve into the flickers of memory of my mother that come up,

In omniscient the narrator can flat-out tell the reader that I dislike my mother. For that matter, depending on my level of denial, that could come out in third person as well. What we acknowledge in our thoughts, and what we'll say, to anyone, is quite different.

 

But you could do that in first. In fact first-person is the perfect POV to do precisely that. Yes, the character could lie to the reader, but there's nothing to say he has to.

 

I don't think that people are that aware of their feelings. People are masses of self-delusion, and a first-person narrator who admits to things that hardly anybody admits in real life is going to be hard to believe. But a third person narrator can shine a light on those things.

Is a mother going to say that she regrets having children?

A tough-guy man going to say that he's afraid of the dark?

An abuser going to say that he enjoys inflicting fear?

Now, it could be argued that most people would realistically be aware of, and would admit to, their deepest thoughts and feelings. But that's absolutely not how I see humanity. We're all walking talking bags of secrets enclosed in skin. And first person just doesn't work for revealing secrets.

Even if you assumed that the Evil Villain injected the characters with truth serum before they narrated their story, there are still countless secrets that they won't tell because they don't know them. They've spent much of their lives weaving the lies.

(Edited to correct silly errors.)

 

Readers are pretty smart. The reveal can even come through first person, with some hints as to unreliability. But it can definitely come through third person limited.

 

Any luck @Surcruxum ?

 

Well i decided to take mashers' advice, to create a pov for the antagonist. I know it's going to be short, but at least the pov structure will be consistent

 

At least it's something for the time being. Shoot me a text on here and let me know how it goes. I'm curious about how you're going to decide to work it and how you feel you did. I'm having to figure out how to give pov to my antagonists too. I feel they are a very important in story telling. The more a reader can relate a protag to an antag the better. I want to blur the lines in my novels.

 

It sounds from your later post that you've already figured this out, but I'll clarify anyway. I meant that at the point where you need information from the antag's POV you should find a way to end the chapter, then start another also in close 3rd but from the antag's POV. Once you have showed what you need to, end that chapter and switch back to close 3rd from the protag's POV in the next.

In a film, nobody is telling the viewer what's going on. They are effectively the POV character themselves, and they work things out themselves from what is shown. If there is misdirection, the viewer can feel satisfied that they were not privy to all of the information or misinterpreted it.

In literature, however, if the narrator takes a 3rd person omniscient perspective, they really should be honest throughout. After all, if they are omniscient, the only reason for them not to tell everything accurately is to deliberately mislead the reader. This is annoying, and cheapens the thrill of the mystery.

 

But this isn't quite what I mean or why I am suggesting I stay 'distant' for the antagonist.

All I mean is that while I want to keep the reader up to date on the antagonists movements, I don't necessarily want to get inside his head like I do the protagonist.

To me, writing close 3rd for multiple (or even two) characters would be like writing two separate novels. Just as I'm getting a sense of the protag', getting to know him, what makes him tick, what kind of person he is, to then switch to the antagonist and do the same thing would lift me right out of the story. Like I say, it would be like writing two separate novels.

And I'm sorry, but I'm going to go back to my movie analogy because I think it's valid.

Take a film like Die Hard. Right from the off we get to know McClane. We quickly learn that he's estranged from his wife, and that he's probably the one most at fault for their difficulties, and that deep down he blames himself but is too stubborn to admit it (until he does admit it to the traffic cop, Al, over the walkie-talkie when he thinks his number's up)

But with Gruber we're only shown what kind of man he is. He shoots two people in cold blood, within the first hour of the film, and doesn't bat an eyelid. He's ruthless, cold, but we only learn this from a distance and by observing his actions.

That to me this can be likened to a close 3rd protag' and a distant 3rd antag' in a novel.

 

I haven't seen Die Hard so can't relate to your analogy. But what you're describing isn't a shift in POV. It's just a different level of detail in the same POV. We're still a viewer watching things happen on screen. A change in POV in film would be a voice-over narrator, or a fourth wall break.

Bear in mind that when watching a film, the viewer is the third person. But when reading, the narrator is third person and the reader is a fourth person. So it's difficult to equate the two or to use film as an analogy for literature. That's why screenplays based on novels are so different to the source material.

If you feel that adding a second POV would break the narrative then this is fine of course. It's a perfectly valid position. Bear in mind though that lots of novels do it and it can be an effective way of showing information which cannot be known by another POV character.

I think the issue for me with altering the narrative distance is consistency. When I'm reading, I need to get a sense of where the narrator is positioned, and what they can and cannot know. If that suddenly changes during the narrative, it's jarring.

 

I can see where you are going. It will depend on how you execute this. You'll still need sections that follow whether distant or not the antagonist experiment with a passage and post it up in the workshop and we can take a crack at it. We will be able to better see what you are trying for.

 

Thanks everyone.

I think I'm probably leading people to think I intend my POV between the protag' and antag' to be drastically different, but this wouldn't be the case. In fact I can well imagine there'd be no noticeable difference in the style at all. Just as @Homer Potvin says I'd simply be pulling back from the baddie slightly, and narrating his movements and actions in a slighter more observational capacity.

 

Since you don't want to delve into your antagonist's head, why don't you pick a character who is near him to narrate the scene instead? You don't even have to name them. For example- most of my story is narrated using close 3rd person from my MC POV. I don't want the reader to necessarily know things that she doesn't. Yet, to build rising tension and further the plot, I do still want to show scenes that she is not present for. She doesn't know yet who it is exactly that is opposing her. But I wanted to show that someone IS plotting against her and planning nasty things.
So I wrote a scene using a sort of 'throwaway' character- a servant girl who is spying on my MC at the behest of my mysterious antagonist. I had her reporting to him what she had learned about my MC, but used no names- she was "the girl" and he "the man". Keeping the mystery while still elaborating on the plot, and staying in 3rd person POV.