Author Topic: First verses Third  (Read 9528 times)

Offline Aminar

  • Posty McPostington
  • ***
  • Posts: 1386
    • View Profile
Re: First verses Third
« Reply #45 on: August 23, 2011, 06:43:49 PM »
I may be misreading what you are talking about here; if you're talking about character A describing character B when character A has only just met character B and does not yet know character B's name, how does the reader know character B's name ?  Is that something set up elsewhere in the story ? I thought you were talking about writing with a single viewpoint character.
Nah, bouncing between characters while restricting the character to their own knowledge is where i gets awkward.  For instance I introduced a POV character about 70 pages into a story.  The main characters had shown up on her doorstep and she was listening in via spell to find out who was there.  At that point the characters were, Her Uncle, male voice, and female voice with odd accent.  To anyone who had read the previous 70 pages they knew these characters by name, but the character didn't.  Was a little awkward.

Offline the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh

  • O. M. G.
  • ***
  • Posts: 39098
  • Riding eternal, shiny and Firefox
    • View Profile
Re: First verses Third
« Reply #46 on: August 23, 2011, 10:35:38 PM »
  At that point the characters were, Her Uncle, male voice, and female voice with odd accent.  To anyone who had read the previous 70 pages they knew these characters by name, but the character didn't.

Seems to me that if you do that at all well it's going to be self-evident who the characters are she's interacting with, so I'm not seeing that it has to be awkward to the reader.
Mildly OCD. Please do not troll.

"What do you mean, Lawful Silly isn't a valid alignment?"

kittensgame, Sandcastle Builder, Homestuck, Welcome to Night Vale, Civ III, lots of print genre SF, and old-school SATT gaming if I had the time.  Also Pandemic Legacy is the best game ever.