POV Advice

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Fantasy tends to have characters with amazing abilities, abilities they are so used to that the sense of awe or terror just isn't there.  So throw a section in from Joe Blow's perspective where he watches the main character doing something the character sees as routine.  Suddenly that routine thing is probably EPIC.  Or at least that's where I need to use them.

That's the kind of thing that strikes me as an easy out.  Characters who don't see how spectacular they are just means needing to get stuff in around the limits of their POV, and that's totally doable - it's done in pretty much every DF book, clues to the mystery in early that Harry does not get, but that a reader can.

[Dom]

I'm sort of "eh" on it.  I bet a good writer could do a story that's nothing but 100 different POV characters, never repeating.  (In fact, sounds like fun!)

I think the onus would just be on your character-building skills, and your plotting skills.  If those are both strong, so that the new POVs are both vibrant and bring something to the story's plot, you could probably pepper in as many of these as you need and be ok.

And if you're weak in these areas, it's probably not the extra POV scenes that are killing you...although people may misidentify the extra scenes as being the culprit.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I'm sort of "eh" on it.  I bet a good writer could do a story that's nothing but 100 different POV characters, never repeating.  (In fact, sounds like fun!)

I recommend Geoff Ryman's 253 to your attention.  253 characters, a 253-word chapter each, the action of the whole novel spans seven minutes, and yet it has plot tension and character development. (It's available online, but it is to my mind much less impressive as hypertext because you can hop about all over the place in all sorts of thematic links and you lose the focus of getting a story despite the format.)

[Paynesgrey]

I can tell that one wouldn't be my cup of tea save to perhaps as a learning exercise to see how Event XYZ is interpreted from several points of view.  I love character driven work, like the Vorkosigan series.  A well written, engaging character can go to the grocery, read soup labels, and it's still a good read... but when you get a slew of characters, I find myself getting annoyed at having to read through the ones that don't interest me just to (hopefully) get back to the ones I find interesting.  Same thing with too many plot threads. 

This is by no means a value judgement where I claim ">X Characters is bad, mmmkay", just my personal preference.  That and to point out that there's a potential danger in too many POV's... the writer must ensure that they're all engaging, or become one of those writers about whom people say "it's ok if you skip past Blofnorp's stuff and just pay attention to the Whompetting League's storyline..."

It's like the MMO Grind in a way... one risks alienating readers when one goes from intellectually challenging them to must making them "work"  (i.e. slog through meh stuff) to get to the stuff they like.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

This is by no means a value judgement where I claim ">X Characters is bad, mmmkay", just my personal preference.  That and to point out that there's a potential danger in too many POV's... the writer must ensure that they're all engaging, or become one of those writers about whom people say "it's ok if you skip past Blofnorp's stuff and just pay attention to the Whompetting League's storyline..."

Oh, agreed, and that's not the only downside; I think there's a pacing problem that often arises with writers who like adding POVs to cover things from different angles, or to solve problems of one sort or another, and then find themselves in Book 9 with 12 different POVs to visit, and even with a hefty brick of a book that leaves you not a great deal of room to develop each individual thread and the series as a whole slows right down.  Or you can leave half of them out of any given book and have it disliked by the people who like those characters best, or you can kill the ones you do not need any more and upset people who don't like that.  (I did this myself in an unpublished and likely unpublishable earlier story, which I was envisioning while writing as most likely split into three volumes if it ever saw print on practical grounds, so any lack of charity in what I just said is aimed at my own failed experiments.)  I remind myself of this every time trying to write a single first-person POV drives me crazy with how to fit information in.

253 is basically stunt writing, like that Vikram Seth novel entirely in sonnets, and I'm not advising it as a model for following so much as an example of how far out the limits of the possible are.

[Paynesgrey]

Huh.  I actually find first person POV easier because it allows me to focus on the world from her eyes, what she reasonably knows, how she goes about doing or finding things out... keeps me from getting lost in my own meanderings.  Artificial discipline... I have to do a lot of intellectual judo on myself sometimes.  She becomes the mechanism and filter by which I can regulate how miserly I dole out nuggets backstory.  I can keep things focused by just using her to give the reader information as she weaves in and out of the other story threads.  I think for me, it would actually be more different to do anything outside the first person, single PoV. 

Maybe after I get a couple done I'll try my hand at multiple PoV's but for now I'm probably best off getting one PoV at a time good and solid.  I've read too many books where the tone/voice of different PoV's got mushy and tangled, so I want to make sure I don't stumble into that sort of inconsistency myself . 

When I get this one nailed down, I'll probably do the next one from her friend's POV as the two are frequently separated by circumstances while doing Awfully Important Things.  Lets me avoid the Sidekick/Big Damn Hero Dymanic.  And also I'm figuring it'll let me deal out backstory bits and portions of worldbuilding the first one wouldn't be privy to without an info-dump.  Plus, it'll force me to tell the story in another character's voice and without the dialect.  That dialect my first protagonist has spun up is really a lot of fun, but I don't want to let it become a gimmick.

Which brings to mind this question:  Does anyone find their characters becoming the boss of them?  I've found that as mine's personalities get started, they pretty much start to develop on their own, which is just fine... but the plot issues start to develop in a way that compliments the character's growth.  While my overall story arc and it's tent-posts remain intact, but other than that things develop in a way that compliments the character.  It turns into a collaborative effort with them reading over my shoulder and saying things like "Oh, I'd never die like that.  I'd die more like this..."

I'm not at all complaining about this, since it seems to be working, just wondering if this happens to anyone else. 

[The Deposed King]

Huh.  I actually find first person POV easier because it allows me to focus on the world from her eyes, what she reasonably knows, how she goes about doing or finding things out... keeps me from getting lost in my own meanderings.  Artificial discipline... I have to do a lot of intellectual judo on myself sometimes.  She becomes the mechanism and filter by which I can regulate how miserly I dole out nuggets backstory.  I can keep things focused by just using her to give the reader information as she weaves in and out of the other story threads.  I think for me, it would actually be more different to do anything outside the first person, single PoV. 

Maybe after I get a couple done I'll try my hand at multiple PoV's but for now I'm probably best off getting one PoV at a time good and solid.  I've read too many books where the tone/voice of different PoV's got mushy and tangled, so I want to make sure I don't stumble into that sort of inconsistency myself . 

When I get this one nailed down, I'll probably do the next one from her friend's POV as the two are frequently separated by circumstances while doing Awfully Important Things.  Lets me avoid the Sidekick/Big Damn Hero Dymanic.  And also I'm figuring it'll let me deal out backstory bits and portions of worldbuilding the first one wouldn't be privy to without an info-dump.  Plus, it'll force me to tell the story in another character's voice and without the dialect.  That dialect my first protagonist has spun up is really a lot of fun, but I don't want to let it become a gimmick.

Which brings to mind this question:  Does anyone find their characters becoming the boss of them?  I've found that as mine's personalities get started, they pretty much start to develop on their own, which is just fine... but the plot issues start to develop in a way that compliments the character's growth.  While my overall story arc and it's tent-posts remain intact, but other than that things develop in a way that compliments the character.  It turns into a collaborative effort with them reading over my shoulder and saying things like "Oh, I'd never die like that.  I'd die more like this..."

I'm not at all complaining about this, since it seems to be working, just wondering if this happens to anyone else.

Do what makes you comfortable.  I didn't feel like I had problems doiing side characters in either of my two books.

As for the characters bossing you around... hahahahha.  Jim Butcher says his characters obey him.  But as for me?  Its like herding goats sometimes.  You get them where you want them to go... eventually.  Not all the time or anything but yeah.  Sometimes its like with Cattle, you need a herd dog off to the side to keep them fromm going through the fence.


the Depose dKing

[Paynesgrey]

Yeah, they're not keeping me from getting things done, not even in the way I want them done.  I'm just sometimes baffled at how it seems the story has taken on a life of it's own and is something I'm uncovering rather than something I'm building. 

Either way, it's great fun and extremely gratifying.

[Snowleopard]

My characters do that to me sometimes, PG.
What it means to me is that subconsciously you truly KNOW how your characters will react to
a situation and when you try to force them into something wrong - they act out.
Also that subconscious spec sheet will lead you into different things than you may have planned.

I have a book called - Writers on Writing by Jon Winokur.
A lovely book of quotes about writing by writers. 
And some writers have characters that do their own thing and others are in complete
control of their characters.
(I recommend the book - particularly for what writer's have to say about each other.  OUCH!!)
I think it may have been H.G.Wells who commented on George Bernard Shaw - "He writes for
the ages.  The ages between 4 and 12.)

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

What it means to me is that subconsciously you truly KNOW how your characters will react to
a situation and when you try to force them into something wrong - they act out.

The reason why this generally doesn't happen to me, I think, is that I tend to find characters for stories in the first place by starting with what I need them to do in the key emotional moment. ("What sort of person will, after being bullied by his father for much of his life and then finding a crashed spaceship while riding to war at age twenty, come back in the middle of the council scene that's the turning point of the book, face him down, and take over the duchy in exactly this way that I need to have exactly these consequences, and subsequently be minded to approach the peace conferences from exactly this angle to get to the resolution I have in mind ?")  I may learn a lot more about them in writing the story, and acquire other things they care about and secondary plot threads, but those all expand out from being the person who will have the reactions and make the decisions that are core to driving the plot along, so it isn't really possible for them to under cut that.

I really admire people who can handle stories that thrash about under them, or who even set out to do exactly that.  The webcomic Problem Sleuth for example, which starts off with one guy stuck in his office and ends up as 1700 pages of witty, surreal noir parody of several genres of video game, was written with the "command" describing each page (the "next page" buttons links are in the form of old-school text-adventure commands) selected from an online forum of reader responses to the previous; it has a couple of bumps early on but it develops and satisfactorily resolves a fair degree of complexity along the way and makes it all make (a somewhat twisted form of) sense.  That is lightyears from the edges of anything I can see how to do.

I think it may have been H.G.Wells who commented on George Bernard Shaw - "He writes for
the ages.  The ages between 4 and 12.)

heh.  According to Rebecca West's bio of Wells, Shaw bullied him awfully, so I am not surprised he had some snark to deliver in return.