Picking a viewpoint character seems to be one of those things that writers either have no trouble with at all, or else struggle with for weeks and/or multiple drafts. It seems to be a particular problem for people who are writing multiple-viewpoint structures, where there are several
Read more →So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s
Read more →This week I got an email question about switching point of view within a scene. It’s one of the hardy perennial questions, but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it directly in this blog. First, an example: Jennifer paced the room, wondering where George was. It’s three
Read more →Last week, I got an interesting question in my email, sparked by the posts on multiple viewpoint. The writer wanted to know about switching types of viewpoint – that is, writing a multiple-viewpoint story in which some POV characters are written in first-person and some in third-person.
Read more →I recently read a dual-viewpoint story that I nearly put down right in the middle, even though I’d been thoroughly enjoying it up until that point, because of the way the author handled the viewpoints. Specifically, the question of which viewpoint to use to tell the reader
Read more →A couple of folks had questions about the last post, most notably “How do you know your story is complex enough for multiple viewpoint?” and “Does it count as multiple viewpoint if it’s a camera-type that follows different characters?” So I thought I’d spend another post on
Read more →Note to self: When the blog posting date happens the day after a major busy day (like, say, the day the taxes are due), write it in advance, because you are going to get home from dropping stuff in the mail and collapse and completely forget to
Read more →Alright, last week I promised Wolf that I’d do some comments on the bit he used as an example. For those who didn’t see it or don’t want to go back and hunt it up, here it is: “I’ve often wondered—why did your people send only
Read more →One of the conclusions that folks could have, and perhaps should have, drawn from my last post on omniscient viewpoint is that it is easy for editors and critiquers to mistake it for something else. When this happens, you are likely to get “you have viewpoint problems”
Read more →First a housekeeping announcement: I am going to be off on vacation for the next couple of weeks. I’ve left some posts for my webmaster, but I won’t be viewing comments and moderating new people will likely be even slower than normal. It also means that the
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