Comments on: A Different View

By: pcwrede

pcwrede — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:18:53 +0000

Annie - Welcome aboard! I did my first novel in a muddled omniscient, and didn’t really even start to understand tight/subjective/personal/whatever third-person until much later. I’ll do a post on the varieties of third person in a bit, but I don’t like to do too much in a row on the same topic unless it’s a special occasion.

By: Annie Parker

Annie Parker — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:25:22 +0000

Thank you! I’ve been working hard on point of view, lately. It is tricky. Until recently I had never delineated in my mind between a modern omniscient and a more personal third person POV and surprise, surprise I muddled them in my writing too. I love the 7 dwarfs as an example. All the best!

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:41:08 +0000

I wonder if anyone could say your post three times fast without stumbling?
However, it is very helpful! I never even knew that the character or view you are telling the story would also be view point, as well as first person/second person/omniscient view/ect… Thanks!

By: Michelle Bottorff

Michelle Bottorff — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:27:15 +0000

I just did some revisions on something written in an camera-eye kind of limited omniscient. I’m now anxiously waiting for my husband to read it, and tell me if it actually works or not.

Writing it was easier than I expected. I just sat down behind the camera and wrote, instead of sitting down beside and/or inside a character and writing. It didn’t feel like I was doing anything new, strange and different.

Doing revisions was harder. They kept coming out as tight third, and I wouldn’t even notice until I was re-reading, and then I’d go “whoops!” and have to re-write the re-writes all over again.

By: pcwrede

pcwrede — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:45:09 +0000

lisa - I’m not quite sure what you mean - is this multiple-viewpoint, with some characters in first-person and others in third, or are you planning on testing out some key scenes by writing them both ways before you decide which one to settle on? Or are you doing something completely different that I haven’t even thought of yet?

Gray - I found it possible to learn at least some things about viewpoint without having any vocabulary or clear conscious awareness of what I was doing (beyond “messing around with my work”), but it has certainly been every so much easier to figure things out and experiment more deliberately (and get results faster!) since I learned the terms for what I was doing and started talking and thinking about them more analytically. This seems to be one of those things where mileage varies a good deal, however.

By: Gray Woodland

Gray Woodland — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:41:03 +0000

I seem to have two natural viewpoints - a somewhat distant and ironic omniscient, which gets tangibly more emotionally engaged and partial as the story gathers momentum; and what is probably its flipside, an intensely engaged first person which tends to get more philosophical, discursive, and reflective as it goes along, and starts thinking twice about some of the things it’s seen.

It was incredibly difficult to even begin to address the problems with either of these, let alone to detect the correspondence, until I’d seen and participated in some good discussions about these. Yes, many of these discussions started with one of your posts.

I do true tight third very rarely, and then it’s very different - notably, it’s usually much terser, and somewhat more action-oriented.

By: lisa

lisa — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:50:50 +0000

Thank you for posting about this. There’s a novel I am just starting on, and viewpoint (as in first- versus third-person) is going to be really important. I’ll plan to experiment with it as I go!