Let's talk about point of view!

[sholio]

So I'm at about 9000 words on the WIP-of-the-moment, and I've realized, as the plot evolves, that the viewpoint I'm in is probably not going to work for the whole story.

Which reminded me that I love talking about the writing process, and I haven't made a writing post lately.

The tricky thing is that the current viewpoint character (Sam Carter) is probably going to be perfect for about 80% of the story. It's the rest of it that is giving me fits. I could probably unfold the plot just fine in Sam's POV by leaving out big chunks of the self-indulgent and world-building stuff. *g* But it's fanfic, dammit. If I want to play in my AU world, I don't want to deny myself for purely mechanical reasons. And I want to tell those parts of the story, even if they end up not being wholly necessary from a strict exposition standpoint.

Re-reading some of my long stories (or parts of them) when I was redoing my website over the holiday was a bit of an eye-opener. I'm shocked at how much more careful I've gotten about viewpoint. In "That Which is Broken", I actually switch POV in the middle of a scene. (Bad writer, no biscuit!) In "Fading Sun", I narrate several chapters from Rodney's POV and then, inexplicably, switch to another character, and continue switching throughout the rest of the fic.

Fanfic, as a medium, is a lot more forgiving of that kind of thing than pro fic. I doubt if most readers noticed. Obviously I didn't notice myself when I was writing. Technically, I could just go on for another 5000 words in Sam's head and then hop into Character B when it becomes necessary -- I think the audience would forgive it. But I don't want to -- now that I'm aware of the issue, I'd like to do better this time around. So I'm dithering with various solutions, which basically are going to involve giving up on some of the scenes I really want to write, or massively rewriting some of what I've already got.

So, readers, writers ... talk to me about point of view! I'm really not fishing for solutions (I've got several of those, just have to decide which one hurts me less *g*) but I'd love to chat about what you think of a story's POV when you write and read. Does it bother you if a story suddenly hops narrators in mid-plot, or do you even notice? Do you prefer stories that stick to one character's POV, or stories that hop around, or do you care? Is the choice of narrators a major writing decision for you, or something that happens organically? Is it different for AUs vs. canon-based stories? Do you have any anecdotes about stories you wrote where the POV did something interesting, or stories you read that made you think about POV in a new way?

Comments

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think fanfic is *less* forgiving than profic in some ways. When I was a little baby fangirl, I was 'brought up' in fic to think that it's flat-out wrong to switch POVs mid-scene, but it happens a lot in published fic -- and it annoys me when I see it in profic in a way that I know it wouldn't if I weren't involved in fandom. I was reading Audrey Niffenegger's latest book, Her Fearful Symmetry, and she switches POVs on the very first page -- the opening POV is a dying woman in hospital, and a couple of paragraphs later we switch to the POV of her lover, who is in the room with her. If a fic opened like that, I'd hit the back button on my browser at that point. I don't, for the record, think that changing POVs is in fact 'wrong', because I don't think there's anything in writing that's actually WRONG: you can do anything, the question is how well you do it. POV switches in fic often ping as 'wrong' because more often than not they are not a conscious choice of the writer but a sign that the prose is not fully under the writer's control. A POV switch could be fine where it's clear that it's been a conscious choice on the part of the writer, in order to achieve a specific effect.

In SGA, all my longer fics have been from a single character's POV (mostly Sheppard's). In fact, I've seen that so much in SGA fic I'd almost call it a fandom house style. My own view (and this is an incredibly generalised statement, sorry) is that if the focus of a story is on a relationship -- platonic or romantic -- then the narrative probably falls more naturally to the POV of a single character, because what will be driving the story forward is that character's interactions with another character or characters, and the resolution of the dramatic tension in the story is more likely to hinge on a character realising something about a relationship. Where the story is more driven by plot, then you very quickly start to need more than one POV character, because you're more likely to have situations where, in order to tell the story, you need to have different characters doing different things and finding out different stuff.

The longest story I ever wrote solo was a novel length BSG fic that had a fairly involved action/drama plot and also a het pairing. I had four POV characters (Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, Baltar and Cmdr Adama), who were the four characters who went through their own arcs over the course of the novel. Laura Roslin had a fairly prominent role, but I didn't make her a POV character at any point because everything she did in the story served the plot -- she wasn't any different at the end than the beginning, whereas my four POV characters were (boy, were they ever). Having a group of POV characters kept the writing experience more varied and interesting, which was important in helping to keep me motivated when writing something that long. And, additionally, I was able to draw parallels between the four main characters. For example, each of them, in the story, had some variation on the line "I thought I could do it, but I can't" -- they all had to do something which they initially thought they could but eventually realised they couldn't. Multiple POV characters starts giving you a lot of fun opportunities to do things like that.

The most interesting thing that happened was that at the beginning I only had Baltar as a POV character because that was necessary for the story I wanted to tell -- I wasn't really all that interested in him in canon. But writing in his POV forced me to think about who he was and his motivations, and by the end I came to really enjoy writing his parts, charming little weasel that he was. I think it's the one time that writing in a character's POV has actually changed how I think about them.

[sholio]

In SGA, all my longer fics have been from a single character's POV (mostly Sheppard's). In fact, I've seen that so much in SGA fic I'd almost call it a fandom house style.

I suggested above in a comment to trobadora that maybe this is a gen vs. ship/slash thing. It seems to be generally true across fandoms (based on the fandoms I've been in, obviously *g*) that rotating POV is the norm in long gen. But SGA is the only fandom in which I've extensively read slash, so I'd assumed that sticking to one POV is a slash/ship norm, whereas it might just be a hallmark of SGA slash. (I can definitely vouch that gen in SGA tends towards POV-switching -- not all of it, but the majority.)

This would fit nicely with your driven by character vs. driven by plot divide, because all of the long gen that I can think of off the top of my head that *does* stay in one character's head for 60 or 90 thousand words is concerned largely with developing that character, whereas the majority of gen leans in a more plot-driven direction.