Comments on: Points-of-View

By: tqft

tqft — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:16:40 +0000

Haven’t read it yet but 2nd person POV
Halting State by Charles Stross
Interview here:http://www.fantasybookspot.com/node/2379
“Lawrence - The novel is most notable for its unique second person perspective. I admit I approached the novel hesitantly at first, but I quickly found it worked out pretty well. After a few pages, it was feels as ‘natural’ as a first or a third perspective for that matter. It got me thinking, though. Why this perspective?

Charles Stross: It’s the natural voice of the narrative computer game, all the way back to the 1972 Colossal Cave Adventure on mainframe — “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”. The computer *is* the narrator, and it’s addressing you, the player, from outside your own head. I wanted to give the book some of the feel of a computer game.
“

By: SJ

SJ — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:26:49 +0000

Wanted to say thanks for posting this article! It’s very clear. Sometimes plotting a story is fun and easy but actually writing it out and sticking to one appropriate POV is really tough.

By: Point of Views « Orbis Writings

Point of Views « Orbis Writings — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:35:16 +0000

[...] said that I wanted to present this post that I found written by a published author. The whole blog itself has some amazing post and I [...]

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:57:29 +0000

I would love it if someone could expound on the difference between head-hopping in tight third and straight omni. Is it simply the overlay of the narrator? What if the narrator is so unobtrusive that it looks basically like tight third?

Basicallly: head-hopping is what it is called if you screw it up. Free indirect style is what it is called if the author shifts into it without the gears grinding and it has all the appearance of tight third. But there are times when it is deliberately not unobtrusive (see related thread regarding Flaubert).

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:40:18 +0000

When writing first-person, the first questions to consider (if not to answer) are:

1. Who is your narrator telling this story to?
2. When?
3. Where?
4. Why?

Conventions let us dispose of all those questions, but it’s worth looking at.

Of course, once you answer them, you are not “really inside the head of the person telling the story.” You are listening to him tell the story, with all the perils and pitfalls involved.

If you really want to underscore that, you use a “frame story” and tell how the narrator comes to tell the story.

By: Sherwood Smith

Sherwood Smith — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:23:26 +0000

Green Knight: yes, I think of that as part of first person. The assumption is that it’s being written later (unless of course it’s Pamela–but that was epistolary, and part of the fun is the idea of them all over the house busy writing letters) with the perspective of hindsight.

Indeed there are soooo many levels of narrator, but that post was way long enough. What I wanted to hammer was the fact that all stories have a narrator–I keep seeing surprise when this discussion comes up in F2F.

By: Sherwood Smith

Sherwood Smith — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:21:24 +0000

Merrie: these things can vary from reader to reader, but if you don’t notice the slide from character to character, it’s usually because the writer has a firm grasp of narrative flow, which is omni. If you’re confused by pronouns, if you can’t figure out who’s thinking a given thought because so many thoughts have been reported on, then it’s head-hopping.

some will insist that you can’t slip from one POV to another in a page, or a paragraph, or a sentence, yet I’ve seen Kipling, Austen, Flaubert, Trollope, all do that and it doesn’t seem to upset anyone. They’ve got a firm narrative grip (but also, I think modern readers expectations can vary from book to book, too: what one won’t tolerate in a new book is accepted in a classic because “that’s old-fashioned”.

By: Merrie Haskell

Merrie Haskell — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:04:32 +0000

I would love it if someone could expound on the difference between head-hopping in tight third and straight omni. Is it simply the overlay of the narrator? What if the narrator is so unobtrusive that it looks basically like tight third?

By: green_knight

green_knight — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:06:57 +0000

There’s a subset of first person that I like to call ‘first person omni’ because it’s told after the fact, from the point of view of an older, wiser, self, and while that narrator can’t look into other people’s heads, and thus remains a little unreliable, they can do things like ‘I would later change my mind about the usefulness of mud, but for now, I hated it’ or ‘what I didn’t know at the time, was that on the other side of the hill, Colonel Whatsit had not yet finished giving his speech about the necessity of polishing brass buckles, so while we were stuck throwing mud clods at the Indians - all other ammunition having been used - his troops admired their reflections in their horses’ bridles.’ In other words, things that happen outside the narrator’s sphere of influence, facts he learnt later, things other people tell him about their thoughts - they all can flow into the first person narrative, and that, to me, makes it a subset of omni.

And I’d disagree about the narrator - I think there’s a use for limited as well as unlimited narration (some omni is restricted to a set of characters, some might give you the emotions of inanimate objects, and anything inbetween); and then there’s the distinction between an involved narrator and an uninvolved one as well as the explicit/impicit divide.

Me, I don’t have enough of a handle on the story to write omni, although my latest idea might just make me change my mind.