It’s already time for another open mic! How are your holidays going? News? Problems? Accomplishments? I’m still trying to figure out how to import my cat pictures…
It’s already time for another open mic! How are your holidays going? News? Problems? Accomplishments? I’m still trying to figure out how to import my cat pictures…
Still doing a cooling off period while waiting for beta reader responses to my novel that has long been in progress. I hope/expect to get the responses back after the beginning of the New Year.
In the meantime, I’ve ended up working on a few holiday short stories, with a single excursion on the next novel. Alas, the holidays are Thanksgiving and Yule – nothing as interesting as Venturesome Sheep Day.
🙂
So I wrote a novel wherein the first-person viewpoint character picks up on other people’s thoughts. I was torn while writing it as to how I’ll-call-it-esoteric I should make the novel. No indication whose thoughts are being related? Or flag everything and make it easy for readers?
I’m curious how the rest of you feel. I ended up on a middle course, and reader feedback suggests it was a good choice. But I wonder if it was the best choice. How much should I have challenged readers?
Personally, I like interesting challenges. So long as it’s obvious which bits are thoughts and which bits aren’t, I think it’d be fun to read something like that.
Well, you can if you like, it’s free, you just have to create an account: http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0100750008-In-the-Service-of-the-Queen–In-the-Service–Volume-One-by-Johnson-Kevin-Wade.aspx?
I personally prefer it tomatch the character’s experience as much as possible. So if they don’t always differentiate or note the source, then stick to how they notice it.
That’s pretty much how I did it…
I hit a point in my story (novel, dammit, I don’t appear to be able to write anything shorter) where the characters learn a Dire Secret and decide that the protagonist needs to be made to forget it temporarily.
Struggled with how to write this. I initially had a forward moving linear narrative where they work out that this had to be done, then do it; but then there’s a jarring disconnect between the reader’s point of view and the protagonist’s. The protagonist doesn’t remember, and the flow of narrative seems to get broken.
I didn’t like this and it felt like a missed opportunity to do something a bit stretchier and more clever.
Current draft cuts out the “we need to do this” scene and jumps to a later point where the protagonist is nursing an uneasy sense that something is wrong. She confronts the others, they are forced to explain, and we get the cut out scene as a flashback/memory. (And then she must reluctantly agree to have her memories fixed *again*, and pray the cycle doesn’t repeat….) I am much happier with this order.
I still don’t know where they are going with this plan, though, it looks like they’re winging it. They know they don’t want to reveal the Secret but in the long term, what are they going to do with it? Right now it’s just tying them in knots.
I like the sound of that idea, Mary.
Does anybody know of any books where the story is told from the viewpoints of both the hero(es) and the villain(s)? I’m thinking of trying this style out and wondered if it’s been done before. I think it could be interesting to get to see each side’s plans and how they interplay and mess one another up. I feel like that’s a perspective we don’t often get in stories.
On another note, my finals are all done and I’m very happy to have started Christmas break! Now, I’ve got three weeks of chilling out to do, and maybe by the end of it I’ll have recharged enough mental juice to write a big paper next semester. Somehow I get the feeling that my fantasy output is going to drop a lot while I’m taking English 2010… (Sigh)
The Redwall books by Brian Jacques have a very predictable rotation where every chapter shows the good guys, the bad guys, and usually a secondary good and/or secondary bad group. Then they all come together in the end.
I found it disorienting at first until I figured out the pattern, but after that it was interesting. They are all third-person, not first-person, so I’m not sure if it is exactly what you had in mind.
I think I’ve read something else that follows a similar pattern, but I can’t immediately recall what it was.
@Nat — You know, I loved Redwall as a kid, and somehow I totally missed that element of the story. I really ought to go find my brother’s copies of those and read them; it’s been a while. 🙂
@Deep Lurker & @Kevin Wade Johnson — Why is it no surprise that it’s the thriller and mystery genres that have examples of this? Thanks for the recommendations!
What I think of as “Thriller” multiple POV generally has that. David Weber’s doorstoppers, for example, are thick with scenes from the heroes’ POVs, the villains’ POVs, and even POVs from various minor characters on both sides.
Robert B. Parker did it in one of his Spenser mysteries, and gave both Spenser’s POV and the murderer’s in first person. The murderer’s was all in italics, so not too jarring.
_Banewrecker_ by Jacqueline Carey does this. It edges towards being a retelling of the Silmarillion with most of the weight on the “villains'” points of view.
If you’re in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, you might mark your calendar for LTUE (Life, the Universe, and Everything; ltue.net). It’s a three-day science fiction and fantasy symposium that’s been going for about 30 years. It has a lot of everything writing related. February 15-17, 2024 in Provo, Utah.
For coming up with ideas, I would recommend the XDM Random Story Generator. X-treme Dungeon Mastery (XDM) is a book written by Tracy and Curtis Hickman about being a dungeon master for role-playing games. The story generator appeared in the first edition but is more fleshed out in the second edition (It’s in the appendix.).
It works like Mad Libs, where you pick two nouns, a verb, and an adjective and plug them into a sentence.
You roll a d20 (20-sided die) to select one of the sentences from the list and then see what parts of speech it calls for. For each part of speech (noun, verb, etc.), you roll your percentage dice to pick a word from a table with 100 options.
You get things like
A [power-hungry] [gnome] is [trick]ing a [witch] with a [floating] [hourglass] in the [scarlet] [cave].
You can go with that or swap out a word or two to make it better. The objective is to spark your imagination.
(Hope the square brackets make it through the comment system.)
Thanks for mentioning LTUE! I’ve got my full-event pass now. 🙂
Hey, I’ll be at LTUE too! Look for me under the shredded query letter. 😉
The XDM random story generator sounds cool, but the trouble is that things like “A [power-hungry] [gnome] is [trick]ing a [witch] with a [floating] [hourglass] in the [scarlet] [cave]” are not complete stories in even the most skeletonized form. They’re setups, and I can do setups on my own all day long. They lack endings, and it’s endings that I crave and seek help in producing.
@E. Beck — David Weber’s Honor Harrington series spends a good deal of time with the villains — some of which are really-and-truly villains, while others start out as adversaries but end up allying with the good guys. Very few of Weber’s bad guys are Pure Evil, and it’s interesting to get their points of view.
Rick
Good to know. Thanks!