Gary, thank you for your input. I greatly appreciate it. I was having a lot of trouble expressing myself; even when I was trying to explain my concerns to a friend earlier. I think my insomnia has just overwhelmed me and I was having problems thinking straight. I think this clears things up for me. I'm not head hopping, nor is it author intrusion. It also isn't info dump. So I'm probably doing a lot of worrying over nothing. I think the test would be whether or not the story will hold up if the scenes I am concerned with are removed.
Hello, friend. Hmm... I would say for someone that is starting a story, have five POV characters may be excessive; I will suggest two or three. This mainly because you are just beginning and that may confuse you a little during the process of your story. Not to mention that even if you plan to have five characters, you may realise that three or even four may not be your mains but just one. In my correct project, I have two main characters and six secondary characters. With just two POV characters is not only easy, but it's also good to focus on the plot and their motivations.
I'm usually not a fan of small throwaway POVs, though there are effective ways to use them. Right now I'm going with 4 POV characters for Stars Extinguished. Three generally good and one bad. Each is introduced through the story before their viewpoint comes up, and while they all go off and do wildly different things throughout the world, they do come together and interact some. This lets me do fun things with control of information and when the reader receives it. For example, one POV character starts acting oddly and the POV shifts to another character before we can see why.
I had never heard of limited omniscient. I may look it up, as well as the "passing down to one actor" and so on.
If your story is plot-driven, I think you can get away with more POV characters. The reader is more interested in the story's events rather than the development of the characters. Multiple POV characters can put lots of 'eyes' in lots of different places, so this works. The reader doesn't need to get emotionally involved with the characters in a plot-driven story. If you are writing a character-driven story, however, it's usually a good idea to stick to one main POV character, with maybe only one or two secondary POVs to achieve insight. In a character-driven story, the reader's interest lies in watching that character change and develop during the course of the story. It's the inner person, not the events, that makes the story. A single POV helps to keep the reader immersed in that character's inner life.
The concept is actually quite simple. In most omniscient writing we have a godlike or grandfather like or something-like invisible narrator who is presenting story from some distance. Now, at some point within the story that invisible narrator hands the viewpoint off to an actor on the ground and limits the view to that perspective. Later, that limited actor might hand the viewpoint back to the omniscient invisible narrator, and that narrator might hand it back again, or if within the design, hand it to someone else. Thus you have moments of omniscience and moments of limited 3rd. Generally speaking, if you control it and are fairly persnickety about not wandering afield willy-nilly, it's a bonified limited omniscience handling. Two things, but handled by the author with what we hope is a level of expertise, so as to employ the best of both worlds, without head hopping.
In my soon to be released novel, Daniel Fights Racial Bio-Genocide in Sting of the WASP, I have Daniel and his team, the FBI, Homeland Security, the antagonist, and that guy who’s supposed to be a protagonist but does more damage than the antag. I couldn’t think of a way to show all the different things that were going on without a change in POV. Maybe I need to learn how to write in omniscient ltd
Sounds to me like you need someone else to be the viewpoint for a while, which would call for multiple limited 3rd. One person is viewpoint for a chapter or so, then someone else is, for a while. The intrusion of a distant narrator seems like something different, as I hear you describing it.
One quick question: are we talking about different scenes here, or the same scene? I've tried to look it up but searching "limited omniscient" all I get is limited 3rd vs omniscient. You don't happen to have a link by any chance, if only to get me going?
Viewpoint, in general, is rarely covered well, particularly using sources on the web. I feel for you, there. In fact, I went to about twenty sites that seemed to be interested in explaining limited omniscient, and all twenty were utterly useless and mostly misleading. So, I found one small source that does sum it up, though without much help in defining HOW it is applied: *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person In this source it calls it third-person alternating (also sometimes called omniscient limited or limited omniscient) simply says: Third-person, alternating[edit] Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the third person limited and third person omniscient. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal third-person limited narrator. Typically, like the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, a switch of third-person limited viewpoint on some character is done only at chapter boundaries. The Home and the World, written in 1916 by Rabindranath Tagore, is another example of a book switching among just three characters at chapter boundaries. In The Heroes of Olympus series, the point of view changes between characters at intervals. The Harry Potter series is told in third-person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient on occasions, particularly during the opening chapters of later novels in the series, which switch from the limited view of the eponymous Harry to other characters (for example, the Muggle Prime Minister in the Half-Blood Prince).[10] *** What this basically means is that if you have an external narrator who might see many things broadly, at some point in time that external view hands view down to an actor, through whom the story is then told, until that actor hands it back up or has it taken away. There is no rule to when that happens, other than it is suggested that it is clear and necessary. I would not wait for a chapter break because it would seem like the external narrator is not controlling the pass, but that's case by case. Further, you might only have one limited view actor or you might have more, each in well-controlled turn, of course. All of this differs from head hopping, which by definition means the writer is showing no control, completely the opposite from being very much in control of where that view is passed. One interesting book that shows how creative you can get with viewpoint is Gregory MaGuire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. In that book he has a narrator who we sense as external, but in the end realize is not. From that source, we sometimes visit other views, from time to time, chearly handed to by that "external" narrator. At one point in the book there is a ball scene, wherein viewpoint swirls around the room, from one actor to the next, like the energy of the ball itself. Then in the end you see who the external is, and why that external narrator is always a little constrained. The book is a masterpiece of alternative viewpoint work. And, I say all this from the perspective of one who has written many novels, none of them limited omniscient. I could do it, but I'm just not interested. (Full disclosure)
@Gary Wed Thank you. "A Song of Ice and Fire" seems what everyone is doing these days. I like to think of it more as a collection of chapters in 3rd person limited than omniscient narrator. My idea of omniscient narrator is more around the 19th century classics. Yes, with head hopping and narrator intrusion and all. But I haven't read any of the mentioned books. (I read the first Harry Potter but I wasn't paying attention to POV. I never did when I was a "normal" reader.)
Hello writers, I have finished writing My YA fantasy novel. It is about 105.000 word. So rewriting such a novel will be along journey, but I am willing to do it, if there is no other option. My problem is with POVs I started the novel with my character’s POV, with her own words and feelings, until the end of chapter 1. Starting from chapter two, I used limited third-person POV, for about two pages, and shifted back to my character again. The whole novel I am focusing on my character, and I used the third person POV in limited paragraphs. For example, I started chapter one with Katniss Everdeen, started chapter two with president snow. To make it more clear: chapter one, Katniss said " I wake up.... Until I want to volunteer. Chapter two starts with: president snow saw the girl who wants to volunteer. We spend Two paragraphs with him, and we shift back again to Katniss until chapter four. Now, I don't know if there are novels written this way, I read novels that writer switch the POV in each chapter, but in my novel, I don't have much to write about others for a whole chapter. I can simply rewrite my novel using only Third limited, but I want the readers to get so close to my character. If my way doesn't work, I will rewrite the whole novel again. Any suggestions will be helpful.
Stupid Question coming up what is a POV? Is it point of view? You may want to state that someplace if that it what it is. Second, when I am changing points of view, I often find myself not rewriting to story, just changing prospective. I hope this helps.
Yes yes yes! It is a point of view. I am not rewriting the same events from another point of view, just telling other events in someplace that my character doesn't know about, but the readers have to know.
The question isn't whether you can do it ...of course you can. The question is: does it work? The only way you'll find out (and congratulations for finishing, by the way!) is to polish it up a bit, then give it to a couple of beta readers. If they don't have a problem with the way you've handled POV, then you are probably okay. If they do have a problem—possibly related to getting jerked in and out of different heads, present and past tense, AND first/third person perspective—you might need to consider revising a bit. There are quite a few ways to deal with POV, but because you chose to write the story this way for a good reason, give it a chance. Let a few people read it, and see what they think.
You mean you wrote in first person in chapter one and then third person in chapter two. And mixing these in a single book has indeed been done. I think James Patterson did it with one of his sci-fi books but I've forgotten the name - the one about characters with wings. However I've never seen the point of that. To me, the two are basically a stylistic difference - the voices are different and create different feelings. But the same thing can basically be achieved with both. In any case, I don't understand your dilemma. Mixing first and third persons is done, though rarely. That it's done rarely may be a sign that it's something best avoided unless you're experienced and know what you're doing. But whether it's ok to do it? Yeah, sure. Only question is: how well have you done it?
Sometimes what you think will work just ...doesn't. I remember having the clever idea, when writing the first draft of my novel, to present a few of the same events from two different points of view. How wonderful it will be, I thought, to let readers inside the heads of two different characters. Two different perspectives. Makes perfect sense, right? What's not to like? Except ...it didn't work. As soon as the readers figured out they were getting a replay of a scene they'd already experienced once, they got annoyed. I had to go back and remove all the replays. But which POV to keep? I had to choose which character's POV best fit my purpose for that scene. That—and a little tweaking to make the other character's reaction clear—did the trick. My point is, your idea might be good, but the finished article might not work. You can think, 'Oh, if I show Katniss using first person present, this means the reader will feel close to her.' That's your plan, so you write in first person present. It might work. It might not work. The only way to find out if it did work is ...ask. Let your beta readers tell you.
I don't even have to read it to say I think mixing first and third the way you're doing it is a big mistake. I imagine it would be quite jarring and confusing. There is a reason you don't usually see this in books. I have read books where the whole thing might be in first and then there is a chapter in third where the narrator is not present. And doesn't one of Faulkner's books do something like this? Her has each chapter in third focusing on a different character and then the last chapter is in first by one of the character. Help me out if anyone know what I'm talking about. It's going to drive me nuts not recalling the story I'm thinking about. Anyway, I honestly don't think what you're doing works so well or is going to work. Your story is going to lack consistency if you stick with this and voice is going to be all over the place just as much as your POV is. I would use your second draft to clean this matter up and stick to a method that's known to work. If you keep on this way throughout your second draft, I would think that would probably just waste time and not really doing anything to actually fix a problem you're eventually going to need to take care of before you start contacting agents and publishers. If I was you, I would dedicate my second draft to fixing your POV issue since that's where your biggest problem probably is. Just my thoughts on this, but I really can't imagine what you're doing is working and I can't see myself trying to read this sort of story. It sounds like it would be a big distraction from what's important which is the actual story. Tricks like this can feel sort of gimmicky even when they d work, and anything that feels like a gimmick to me is a distraction from the story in my opinion.
Hemingway does this in To Have and Have Not (sorry to keep banging on about that book) and it's one of the most frustrating reads ever - utterly void of immersion. I agree with @Mckk - you're jumping in at the deep end... without any armbands... and some bricks tied to your ankles...
I second having Beta readers decide whether it works or not. And if it doesn't, ask which character's POV they most want to read. That will show where they're invested, and where you as a writer should invest your time.
Thank you Everyone, that was really helpful. I decided to go with first person point of view, and I will see how it goes.
If I may add, I wrote a novel in first person which desperately needed a change in POV, so I did just that. I added a chapter in the husbands’ POV but still in first person.
Hey guys, first post here as I have a qestion I'm dying to know the answer to. I'm working on a story about a community, a strong sense of community being the theme. There are three characters I want to use for the main characters for various reasons, including a sense of community (more than one), and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to go about telling their backgrounds. In a first draft I wrote the first three chapters, each chapter from the point of view of each individual until their paths met, then I wrote from one charcter's point of view to keep from jumping back and forth as there was no longer a need to do so. There's really no need to tell this story from three different points of view, so I could tell it solely from the main protagonist's point of view. My question is, if I do that, how can I go about introducing large sections of the other two's back stories without changing to their point of view. It's important their backstory be told, but I'd like to keep it from a singular viewpoint. Thank you in advance.
