Actual writing content

[kiya]

Been a long time since I had brainspace to actually think about writing, but was chatting with Heartshadow of flamekeeping today about theologies underlying worlds in which we write, and got to pondering viewpoints. (Heartshadow, incidentally, is writing a serial novel on her webspace at Warriors of the Sun God, and asked me to link to her.)


So she and I were chatting about some of the background of The Night's Tale, which got me thinking about that project -- I wrote a goodly amount of it, and got stucked because it had sort of petered off into nothingness, and I think I started writing it wrong from the beginning, and I need to start over.

I think it's in omni. I think I need to poke at the sort of omni it is and make it consistent and be clear on what I'm doing with it, because it's a peculiarly limited omni, and it needs to deal with the central puzzle of the character-story.

Specifically: who/what/how/whatever is Dawn, the main character? (The event-plot of the story involves Dawn's father going missing and her looking for him.)

Dawn is spectacularly incurious about herself in a lot of ways, which means that it can't be written from her POV; the POV who is interested in her peculiarities is Gem, the sidekick character. She also doesn't connect her own strangenesses up to her father's disappearance in any way, though my first reader has, so I can mention it without spoilering him or anything.

At the same time, though, some of the information that I need to feed the reader is only available in her POV, and a lot of the subtle word choices I've been making to layer in some other stuff have to do with the shape of the way she perceives the world.

At no point do I go deeply into their thoughts; it's all surface, and seems to be gliding between the two of them fairly lightly. It's like a surface-thought-reading camera eye perspective, situated between these two characters.

It's not really multiple viewpoints; the distance is too great for them. I don't know if other characters will pick up the momentary focus of the POV; I suspect this is something I need to work out in my perspective on things to do this right. It's possible that a couple of other characters would wind up well-enough integrated into the group-of-central-charactersness to have focus for a while, especially in the time period in the story in which Gem is distracted by a pretty girl.


This is going to be fiddly.

Comments

[zeborah]

I haven't heard a name for this, but could you do a sort of collective viewpoint: ie from the collective povs of Dawn and Gem? I'm thinking of various children's books (Narnia, Swallows and Amazons, Five Children and It, that sort of thing) which are omniscient; but if you ignore the really omni comments (like CS Lewis' more patronising moments) you get a focus on the main characters which is almost like a group pov.

I'm also thinking of a memoir of a concentration camp I read which was almost narrated in first person plural. Technically it was only one person narrating it, but she spoke about "We felt" and "We wanted" and "We hoped" so often that... it wasn't quite first person singular.

I don't know if this is as coherent as I'd like it to be; icon chosen to match.

[kiya]

The icon is terrific.

Yes, that's basically where it seems to be coming out -- a group POV. (There will be other people travelling with them eventually, who may get integrated into that group? I don't know whether it'll happen o the rewrite, though.) I do wonder if there's useful terminology for it.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite children's books (De Brieven van de Generaal by Paul Biegel; sadly it hasn't been translated into English while four of his other books have) is in group POV, three siblings. It's "we" when they do things together, and [name] when someone has a solo scene or a speaking part in a group scene. Very cleverly done; completely transparent until I started to read it to the girls.