POV Tricks and Control

[sartorias]

David Jauss says about POV:

The effective author uses Point of View to control the distance between the reader and the characters to maximize the response the author desires--whether that be moral, intellectual, or emotional.

and

Within Point of View the author employs various angles of perception, utilizing degrees of depth within each angle

Comments

[negothick]

I seem to have lost half the above comment. Just as well. Anyway, the commiserations were for sherwood!

[sparta5]

LOL! I read your first comment twice, and was thinking: how does a comment equal a jaunt? Then when I read your second comment, I had to laugh ... a much needed giggle in this heat! Yikes - we're supposed to see 103!

It reminded me of something the hubs and I did a few years back:

My hubby being a programmer-geek, we once put a letter to a friend through some language code which mixed things up a bit. The opening line? "Dear Bruce, sorry to hear from you." We then sent him both letters separately, but at the same time. He received the mixed one first and was very confused until he read the second one which arrived the next day. We still laugh about that.

Sorry for the sidetrack, but thanks for the giggle. :-)

[sartorias]

Oh, it was pretty nasty out yesterday, but I spent a good part of it hanging out in the hard rock cafe.

[scribblerworks]

Oh great! I get to your post, just as I should be wrapping up some computer stuff (I have things to go out to this afternoon/evening)! And I only skimmed. A good subject.

And it occured to me: Why not set up BitterCon as a community? That way, you won't have the total responsibility of generating the topics. You can be the RingMaster, though.
;)

POVs! Man... so much to say/consider. I'll be back later this weekend to read and jump in!

[sartorias]

There is already a Community, and it's so much better being free-form, it doesn't need me fussing and hovering. If you clock over there, you'll see a bunch of people linking up there.

Come back when you have time--the next 2 days will be fraught here, as the foreign student's year comes to a close.

[david_de_beer]

my brain shuts off when I write, I find that works better. I love reading up on the theories behind writing and of writing? I love thinking about them, digesting and internalizing them, duscussing them even

[shweta_narayan]

Would it really be more immersive to get more of Lizzie's thoughts? Austen's word choice implies a great deal both about what she's thinking and about the world. Things like "who says what to whom" wouldn't be nearly as important if she just told us what the character was thinking.

My general thought on POV is that it's worth thinking about when it doesn't work, and when it does it's just part of the process. I'm with msisolak about it being something I'm much more aware of in crits and edits than in writing mode.
But then, we'll see whether I can make that work at novel length.

[sartorias]

Yeah...I think it's worth pondering when a scene doesn't work, indeed. POV is one of the many questions a writer can ask herself when trying to puzzle out what's amiss.

OTOH there are probably brilliant writers who can clinically plot out their POV changes and angles beforehand, in order to lay down symbolic tracks. Wow, is all I can say. Wow.

[shweta_narayan]

Whenever it seems planned out in advance to me I feel a bit cheated. Like the author's being clever instead of telling the story. Now, if the POV is doing something really important to the story, I'd accept it, but I have to admit that Deep Symbolic Tracks turn me off. I much prefer your kind of writing, where the story's told, I care about the characters and the world, and there may well be something I'm left thinking about afterwards, or dreaming about, or wanting to steal for my roleplaying game. But it's *my* choice, not thrust on me by authorial tricks.

I probably love many books where POV is carefully plotted out. But it can't seem that way, for me. It has to feel organic.

[scallywag195]

It's the difference between right brain & left brain activity. Of course the right brain kicks in when we're cooking or doing some other almost mindless chore and never is there when we want it to be. Taking notes about writing fiction is a left brain activity. All the notes you listed sounded great--to my left brain. But my left brain isn't what creates the "realness" of the people or the settings I write about. That's all right brain activity.

So the catch is to turn the left brain off long enough to allow the right brain to create. Using the notes from the con will only spur the left brain to strive for perfection. If we've been writing awhile, and intellectually know the "tricks of the trade" it will only foul us up to try to write for perfection. Perfection really comes from allowing the right side to take over and ignoring the left brain's need for nice and tidy. Perfection is when a reader connects and emotion is felt. What does left brain activity know about emotion?

[sartorias]

Good point, especially about emotion. Yet some manage both sides really well, leaving me in green glowing envy.

[shweta_narayan]

You might already know this, but the "left-brain/right-brain" thing has very little to do with the actual left and right brain. What was historically attributed to the left brain does cause *more* left-brain activation, but it's rather more blurry than the name suggests. And most of what was historically called "right-brain" happens all over the place and seems to be more integrative thinking

[dame_grise]

I cannot control POV worth a damn. The best I can do is pick whose story I think it is and try stick to what he or she knows, feels, and thinks (and hope I catch the errors later). Though I think this lack of confidence comes from getting a club critique something with psychic empathy in it where the narrator knew what certain other characters were feeling as a fact (at least how she interpreted those feelings) and I got accused of "POV shift."

I fail to see what's wrong with more than one POV in a given story, though I can understand that some radical change in a scene can be confusing.

[sartorias]

It sounds like the club was seriously conflating POV with narrator. They are different animules, her honor! (Well, sometimes one and the same, but two different functions.) That would indeed be less than helpful.

[dame_grise]

I can understand if they thought I meant shifting narrators, but I wasn't. And if it's so confusing to have more than one person's thoughts and emotions, why do writers still use omniscient?

[sartorias]

That's just what I would have asked the group. :-)