I was listening to a scientist the other day, talking about how modern kids, because they now get most of their entertainment through screens, are more used to sensory input. She thought that earlier generations, who mostly got their input through books, had more of a cognitive diet. She didn't necessarily think one was better than the other, although she thought sensory input tended, by its very nature, to be faster, brighter, full of sudden jumps and changes.

Quite a lot of modern fiction seems to be written more from a sensory position. At least, this is often the case in science fiction. It amounts to the author POV being more like a camera than a narrator; or, if there actually is a narrator, his observations tending to be more sensory than cognitive.

I'm raising this point because it's something I'm currently struggling with. Personally, I prefer cognitive fiction on the whole, although I also enjoy well-done sensory stuff from time to time. As Emma says, any point of view - or approach, or voice, or tone - is fine as long as it's done well. However, what constitutes 'well' can be something of a slippery customer these days. For example, I'm currently reading a book by a big-selling author which, for me, starts well because it has a natural fit between sensory description and cognitive depth. But after a chapter or two, I felt the author was getting torn between a more thoughtful approach that had worked in the past and a more modern compulsion to make the book more cinematic. The problem being that the author's voice - not direct here but as a guiding presence - loses its grip on the story and in no time the characters are just coat-hanger types and their motivations are undetectable below the surface imagery.

Terry

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I think what I'm trying to say is that POV is like one's 'I'; one's sense of self. The stronger and more consistent it is, the more charisma it produces and for the most part, it's a story's charisma that attracts a reader. But maybe it's more difficult, in these days of so much sensory input, to develop a strong 'I'; therefore, perhaps what writers tend to see as a problem of selection, where POV is concerned, is actually at root more to do with having strong, consistent, inner conviction about their material.

The writer's: maybe it's explicit in the form of an authorial narrative, but in most cases should be stamped on when it rears it's ugly head

I have nothing against it - when it's done correctly, ie, unobtrusively. But the version that rears its ugly head is the one which says 'oh look at me, aren't I a clever writer....'

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I would show you one of mine, but I stamped on it a while back.

I met one of these intrusive shifts last night, so obvious it jolted me out of a doze. I was listening to one of these audio books - very restful on the eyes after hours staring at a screen- and two characters were having a converstion. (It's Iain Banks' 'The Steep Approachto Garbadale' Although third person, most of the action is from the POV of the young man. Anwyay, he's talking away to his love-object, noticing the sunlight on her copper hair, etc, and there's a sudden switch when she compresses her lips and it says 'She wanted to keep it a secret.' It's obviously quite a significant point, so the reader's attention is attracted to it, but there's also no indication that the young man would know this. It didn't say' It seemed as if she wanted to keep it a secret', although he may have inferred from the compression of the lips. It just stood out as an example of a change in POV. It's a bit frustrating not to be able to pinpoint it as it's on a disk. Maybe it was just ambivalent.

So I agree they can be obtrusive but hard for the writer to spot.

I've just finished a Ruth Rendell tape , 'The Lake of Darkness' which has chapters narrated from a single point of view that shifts between chapter. She does this a lot in her books and it works very well, I think, although sentences like ' Fin parked the car some distance from the house' makes it clear it's third person narrative really.

It's used a lot in crime novels where you can be in the mind of the killer in first-person stream-of-consciousness. I seem to remember 'Silence of the Lambs' was like that, and a reent one I read by Nicci Gerrard. It was chilling to have a chapter about what the police were doing and then one where the killer's mind was one step ahead. It made the killer more 'real' than the detectives, so increased the suspense.

Sheila





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I didn't intend the smiley - it was supposed to be a bracket