Babble on POVs

[donutsweeper]

Just a question, and I'm not sure of the correct terminology here, but when reading (or writing), do you prefer a tight 3rd person POV  (where all events are seen and interpreted through one character's eyes) or switching between people's 3rd person POV with obvious page breaks or markers to show the new POV?

For example- my entire Charming the Pants off the Pashahads SGA/Jack crossover is told from Sheppard's POV, there is no scene where we see what Jack thinks about falling into the Pegasus Galaxy.  At points there are Sheppard's interpretation of Jack's actions (he notices a hedged answer, an avoided question, but doesn't know why Jack  answered that way).  If it had been written with switching POV's there could be the scene from Shep's perspective, noticing what he notices and wondering about it, followed by the same scene retold from Jack's, where he explained the reasons for saying what he did.  There also could have been scenes left out from the story the way I told it- I never did explain how Jack managed to get his hands on the Pashahads (because Sheppard wasn't there and wouldn't know).

I've been noticing more and more of the latter showing up in stories lately.  Presuming this babble actually makes sense to anyone, do you notice the difference between those types of POV styles and do you like one more than the other?

Comments

[adela-nightmoon.livejournal.com]

Personally, switching between characters drives me up the wall. I don't mind it so much when the POV steps back and can sorta see both people, but actual phsyical switching where it sits there and changes back and forth, and everytime you have to sit there and figure out where the point of view is now, is really frustrating to read.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

More often than not, that's my opinion as well, but I'm seeing it everywhere in fanfic these days. I understand that it's easier to write in a lot of ways, but I still find it annoying and/or frustrating so I was wondering what, overall, people thought.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

I absolutely notice it, which I think is mostly due to the way I read/write. I'm a visual person, and if the POV changes, I find it disorienting, because I'm literally looking at the scene differently. While I don't mind switching between scenes, within them, I find it immensely distracting. (Important note - that doesn't make it wrong, just not my taste ;))

Personally, I also like tight POVs because they can force the author to really *think* about what's important to the story, what do people need to know? So in yours, I don't think it matters how Jack got the Pashahads, and I like imagining how. It becomes part of Jack's mystery, part of how Sheppard sees him. There's a big thing in the second A-Team episode (stick with me here ;)) where they mention how Chase got a cadillac for a scam in the middle of the Vietman jungle. We never find out how, and I've never read a satisfactory fanfic explanation. We just know that Face is the kind of person who can get a Cadillac in the middle of the Vietnam jungle. *that's* the important bit.

Speculation and observation can be rich tools, and ways of telling us about the narrator as well as what he's watching. You can throw stuff in that the narrator misses but the reader notices, and the narrator's reaction is often just as important as the actual action.

I've read seriously good writing that alternates, and I've done fic where I've played with POV (my best Housefic IMHO is one where I tell the same story from 3 different points of view) but it's been because I want to say something about the characters, not to give the reader more information, if that makes sense. If you're adding to my knowledge of the characters, then I don't mind the alternation, but it can be just as interesting to be limited in what the narrator knows.

Um. As you can probably tell, this is something I'm pretty interested in - I wrote a whole meta on POV here (http://community.livejournal.com/housefic_pens/25690.html) quite a while ago, although I still find it fascinating to talk around.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I shall have to read that! I knew you guys had to have some interesting opinions on this.

ahh, the speculation of what the other characters are doing/did, that's a good point. The wandering POV really detracts from that and, in a way, can wind up explaining too much and then there is no mystery.

[becky-h.livejournal.com]

Switching back and forth makes me insane. I dont' mind if it changes from chapter to chapter but rapid changes annoys me. It also makes me think that it's too much exposition and just role-play posted as a story.

Says me, who wrote that one story with POV shifts all over (http://becky-writing.livejournal.com/55436.html#cutid1).

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

in limited cases, it works and provides the necessary choppy feel. Absolutely.

If done in chapters (1k or more before a shift) what do you think? Or would you rather it remain the tight single POV?

[stackcats.livejournal.com]

Whatever the story calls for, to be honest. If it's fanfic, one perspective is best, or it can get confusing, but I fail at writing anything longer, or any original stuff from only one point of view.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

I think you hit the nail on the head- Whatever the story calls for- if the story needs to be told that way, then by all means do so, but too often it just doesn't (in my opinion anyway)

[unfeathered]

I don't mind POVs switching as long as it's not every other paragraph. And as has already been said, sometimes it's what the story needs.

Like my Angel/Jack fic - I got completely stuck on that because I was trying to tell it all from Angel's POV. Then I tried switching POV and it all fell into place. I think I did only switch back and forth about four times though, in a 4K+ story.

What's weird is that most of the stories I read when I was young were - um - I think the word is omni-POV? Where you tell the story from the POV of a *group* of people, occasionally dipping into someone's head and then popping out again. Now, because it seems to be more fashionable to use a strict one person POV, I find that sort of thing extremely distracting, and yet it's how I wrote all my early stories.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

oh yes, omniscient POV, I remember reading a lot of that, especially when younger. I'd probably find it distracting these days as well.

The Jack/angel fic worked, you got the flow between POV's right which is what's important.

[tejas.livejournal.com]

Limited 3rd, definitely. I find it a far more enjoyable reading experience. That said, in novel length works, I *expect* changes in who the POV character is on a chapter by chapter basis (new POV, new chapter, don't rehash events the reader's already read), but not in shorter works as a rule.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

novel length can shift pov easier than the average length fanfic, certainly.

Unless the author's going for a specific style, the rehashing of events is just annoying

[aeron-lanart.livejournal.com]

I actually don't mind POV shifts - I'm nosy, I like to know what everyone is thinking - but I do like there to be some delineation between pov shifts and I kind of prefer a broad omni to a tight pov that switches. If that makes sense.

I'm trying to keep my 3rd person pov much tighter now than I used to, the Mystery We Are, for example, was pretty much written as 3rd person omni/switching but I tried to make sure there were at least paragraph breaks between each shift and I rarely wrote the same scene from more than one pov at the same time, with one major exception that springs to mind, but it was smut so I'm not sure that's as important and it worked for that part of the fic anyway.

In comparison my current WIP Eight Hours is mostly from Jack's pov, though it actually starts out from Ianto's pov. Once you get two paragraphs into the second part it switches (with a nice properly marked delineation, natch) and then stays with Jack no matter what is going on for the rest of the fic (or it will do once it's finished).

To me it's actually a lot easier to write 1st person rather than a tight 3rd person pov, but I know a lot of people don't really like 1st person stuff. It depends on the fandom and the character as to whether 1st person works or not I think for instance that Dresden Files lends itself more to 1st person as that is how the books are written, but there's no way in hell I could write Jack or Methos from a 1st person pov. However I think they both work well as characters being seen from a 1st person pov though I suppose I would, having written them both that way.

And none of that is probably any help at all.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Dresden Files also has canon based 1st person, something I screwed up with my main foray into that fandom.

[karaokegal.livejournal.com]

I'm a POV nazi when it comes to doing beta. If you want to do transitions, they need to be marked EVERY TIME. And within POV sections, it's gotta be tight. Nobody who isn't psychic can know what someone else is thinking. They can guess, they can assume, they can hope, but they can't know. They can't describe their own features unless they're looking in a mirror.

Floaty POV's are a curse.

As a reader, I prefer 3rd person past tense, but obvious there's a lot of fanficcers who do brilliant things with present tense and in some cases first person. Second tense should only be done with a permit, by an expert. Seriously.

So, yeah. I've got some opinions.

[tejas.livejournal.com]

When you say "marked" please tell me you don't mean "titled with the character's name". Few things make me hit the back button faster.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

floaty povs are terrible. There's a difference between "Confused, he quirked an eyebrow" and 'He quirked an eyebrow, looking confused."

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

Um...this ended up much longer than I expected. Apologies for the rant.

I think it depends on the story, the genre and the person writing it. When I'm writing, I know right away what POV the story has to be from. It sort of chooses itself that way.

1st Person is tricky, because, unless your narrator is someone interesting with an interesting view of the world (Harry Dresden, say, or Archie Goodwin), you're stuck with them and they can only report what they're seeing and hearing and thinking. When you have a boring narrator though (like Bella Swan in Twilight), it's not good because you only have her boring thoughts. I think this tends to work best in a 'autobiographical' way, which you're telling a long story that spans several years. Philippa Carr, for example, used it all the time in her historical romances, which worked because the heroine's whole life was the focus of the story, not just one event in it.

The 2nd person POV ('you walk down the street and notice a red balloon') trend drove me up the wall. It was sort of like self-insertion fanfic at its worst. I never understood that.

3rd person limited (where only one person is viewing the events) is limited in the same way 1st person is. You can really only tell what one person is thinking and doing, but you do have more leeway in describing the world where the characters are living. You can narrate what colour a tree is in 3rd person, whereas in 1st person, would your character really spend that much time on the trees? I notice sometimes that people start in one POV and then make just a one sentence statement about something the character wouldn't know and it just throws me right out of the story.

3rd person omniscient (where you know the thoughts of all the characters) can get confusing, but someone like Neil Gaiman tends to use it a lot to great effect. In Good Omens, say, you get the story from The Them, from Crowley, from Aziraphale, from Anathema, from Newt, from all these people and that's a really neat way to view a story. But he has very clear delineations when it switches POV. The same goes for Jim Butcher in his Codex Alera series.

So, I don't think I prefer one way or another. It just depends how good the story I'm reading is. I think multiple POVS can be very interesting, though. Like the episode of due South where you see the events in the mall from RayK, Thatcher and Welsh's POVs and you see how they all saw something different. That can be very cool too.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

1st person can be done really well. In fact there is this Nero Wolfe that, because Archie interprets events one way, we the readers do as well and it all goes to hell in a handbasket as a result.

I think you're right about 3rd person omniscient- it's the lack of clear delineations that drives me batty. It can be done well, but in fanfic it's often not.

Anything, done well, can be interesting, right?

[travels-in-time.livejournal.com]

I think it really depends on the story. The first "real" story I ever posted had different characters in different timelines, and I had to switch POVs to track what was happening in each timeline. Even within one timeline, I switched between two characters because I wanted the story to be about how they saw each other, and it's hard to do that from one POV.

Switching doesn't bother me, as long as it's clearly marked (a row of asterisks works for me...of course I also use that to show time passing or a scene change. I probably confuse everyone. :D) and as long as it feels necessary to show us something about the characters.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

As long as it's necessary, I think is the key here. and well marked. Good point

[thaddeusfavour.livejournal.com]

As others have said, I'd go with whatever the story calls for and not switching indiscriminately. I've been reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere lately, and I don't think the story would work at all if the POV didn't switch occasionally. Though, I swear I caught an indiscriminate flick between POVs in one paragraph. Even the pros miss the occasional "oops". (And he's so good that's not going to ruin a story for you.)

Another case where it works, for me at least, is when you're writing a fic that's patterned like a TV episode. It's normal to follow first one set of people and then the next on a TV show. And if someone points out, like someone did, that a TV camera can't get into a person's thoughts, well, Yes, it can. It's a visual/audio medium and that gives far greater clues to what someone's thinking.

I might be biased since I wrote my zombie fic that way. Come to the dark side of the donut shop!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

*uses appropriate icon*

*nods* So, the consensus seems to be that, like any style, it can work, if done well, but works best if there is a reason for the switches. Makes sense to me!

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

The first time I really thought about a tight (limited) 3rd person POV was when I was reading the Harry Potter books and a friend pointed out that it was all Harry's POV. And I was impressed, because it really was very consistent. In my fanfic writing I had to think about it again when my betas got onto me about sloppy POV shifts within a scene, to the point that in a story I'm working on now, I had almost a crisis about POV because there's no way I can tell the story without shifting, and I thought that was bad form in fanfic and would make all my betas and readers cringe. (I considered posting to ask the question, much like your post here) But I realized that I had read plenty of professional stories with POV shifts, I would just need to do it right and make sure there was a good reason for it. (I had a good device actually - the POV was going to shift as an object changed hands, but then that fell apart... well, I'm still working on it. Although just writing this has possibly helped me figure out my problem with the last scene!)

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

That idea? *points to object as POV shift* is brilliant and would totally work.

[chatona.livejournal.com]

Most of the time, I like the first much better, both for writing and for reading. It's nice to get a view into another characters head, sure, but a story just reads that much more smoothly if written from one continuous pov.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

That's what I tend to think. Like your bigbang. It would be an entirely different story if any was from Gibbs' POV or if we saw anything from the people back in D.C. while Tony's in spain. Not necessarily a BAD story, but completely different

[aeron-lanart.livejournal.com]

*boggles*
211 comments? Your flist got chatty again obviously. We're good like that.

212 now *g*

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

the majority actually related back to the topic though!

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

Late to the party but third person

or naturally occuring (defined by a paragraph change/page break) limited omniscient

are the things I find easiest to deal with.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

you may be late, but you look mahvelous...

so tight POV from 1 character through out or with limited- but well marked- shifts