Hi,
I have a story told in third person from the perspective of one or two main characters (ok, three to be exact) with the POV consistent within each scene / story block and swaps occurring at natural transition points (such as chapter start / end and so on). Reading it aloud, it is smooth and natural sounding and so I think I have it right.

However...

For one specific character, I want to use the directness and raw connection of first person - and only ever first person. Moreover, I would really like to be able to transition into this POV in the middle of scenes from another character's POV. I have ever so many dramatic reasons for wanting to do this and it makes ever such a lot of things fall into place on ever such a large number of dimensions.

Except...

It doesn't work. I tried signalling to the reader through a deliberate font change, but read aloud, it sounds awful and nonsensical. I need the transition to be rapid, but it just feels under-explained as is.

HELP ME!

Has anybody seen this type of switch done well? Are there any examples anyone can direct me to?

Thanks,
Gaius

I think you need to ask yourself why you want to do this. Is it to give the reader more information? Is it to justify why a character does such and such; to explain his motivation? By doing it are you giving too much away to the reader?
If it is for any of these reasons, then, as a reader, I would advise leaving it out.


- NaomiM

Not for any of those reasons! Otherwise, I'd agree.

The simplest way to explain it is "the elephant in the room".

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I'm not saying it's the only way. Just that it's an idea that, if I can get it to work, gives me a whole new dimension of signalling to the reader that will pay massive dividends. (As well as making my last chapter work really, really well.)

Could you put it in as notes, (maybe in a notebook or diary or on scraps of paper_ - maybe the character is writing down his/her thoughts - which they read back to themselves, or another character finds and reads them, or it's conveyed to the reader as though they are looking over the character's shoulder as s/he jots them down?


- NaomiM

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or even have them texting on the mobile.

I tried signalling to the reader through a deliberate font change, but read aloud, it sounds awful and nonsensical.

I know what you mean, and I've long been a huge fan of reading aloud, but I think sometimes things which seem odd read aloud actually work fine when read on the page and in the head.

If it were me, I'd make sure I'd established whose voice it was, and how this thing was going to work - you have to educate your reader in how to read the book - then use italics, maybe with a line above and below, maybe indented left and right as you would a letter. And then I'd be prepared to change my mind if it still didn't work. Suspect it would depend a good deal on how long the first-person passages were.

I would also want to check that this dilemma wasn't telling me I should be writing the whole thing in that voice and PoV, even if it did mean replotting it.

Emma

Could you put it in as notes

The action is very much happening in the present and the dramatic benefits I hope to achieve are very much with the contrast. In a way, it is story short-hand to prevent the need to write the same scene twice in a row from different perspectives (and you can imagine how dull that could be...) or revisiting parts of the scene in a contrived discussion later (yawn...).

Earlier drafts of the same novel spent so long covering old ground that even I found them dull. As a result, story time has been condensed from 35 years to about 3 weeks with a corresponding increase in momentum which requires me to keep things in the present as much as possible. By drip-feeding the first person character throughout the book, I hope to be able to bait some hooks and signal very strongly about certain traits in very few words as well as to dispense with the need for flashback and dry info dumping exposition. More importantly, it allows me to develop a central story character without giving him (as per another thread) "equal column inches".

EG: I want this guy to participate very actively in some of the scenes and to be a catalyst for an awful lot of things to happen, but to write the whole scene entirely from his perspective would require so much back story infilling that the whole lot would grind to a stupefyingly dull halt in the midst of a tedious lesson on politics and history.

So, although I can understand why you are pushing me away from POV changes, I am not ready to give up on it until I have at least asked the question and given it a decent go.

FYI, I've found some web references about changing perspective, and they have given me some ideas, but although the techniques seem to work, they are all based around going from third-person to third-person.

If it were me, I'd make sure I'd established whose voice it was, and how this thing was going to work

Oh yes. That bit was quite fun actually. I'd been struggling for a few days and then, when I realised what to do, it gave me the entire last chapter! I could hardly type fast enough to get it all down... (Um. Another reason why I want to stick with this approach for a while.)

you have to educate your reader in how to read the book - then use italics, maybe with a line above and below

I've set up a Word style named after the character in question which (at the moment) is a different font with different indentation. Actually, this has been a big help in navigating as I can simply search for the next instance of a given style.

sometimes things which seem odd read aloud actually work fine when read on the page

And... sometimes (like today) not.

Once I had heard the crunching of gears, like the vase / woman optical illusion, it was impossible to read it (even in my head) in any other way and a reader found a similar difficulty (that I had tried to ignore) with the same passage. Although I agree (hope / pray / etc) that the reader will learn how to read my book, the first time they meet it, it has to work... really really well.

I have managed to alleviate things a little by applying a technique I read about in some url or other from Google. Essentially, I have depersonalised a sentence or two to act as a bridge. The slight abstraction is a bit like using the clutch to change gear. But there is still a slight jarring and I know (hope) I can do it better.

or revisiting parts of the scene in a contrived discussion later (yawn...).

Yes, it's one of those things they warn writers about in How Not To Write A Novel -which is a great read.
However, there are a number of novels which have contrasting povs for the same incident, which work well - so long as different information is conveyed to the reader as each character takes their turn at being the 'unreliable witness'.
Perhaps you are trying to condense too much information into the one scene, and some of it can be left out and revisited later.


- NaomiM



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And not forgetting that the reader is yet another pov on the scene, sometimes it's best to let them make up their own mind as to what is going on.


Sorry, all generalities, I'm afraid - not having scene the excerpt in question.

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scene, lol. Of course, that should be 'seen'.

there are a number of novels which have contrasting povs for the same incident

I've seen it done very well for film / television (did you ever see the episode in Coupling where Jeff meets the Israeli woman with the flat-chested friend?). But for books?

Hmm.

I'm happy to be educated by others who are better read, but the only one that springs to mind is "The Collector" in which the first section from the pov of the collector is brilliantly written, tense and very effective... after which the second section (from the pov of the collected) just seemed a bit bland and unsurprising.

The first and third parts of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith are the same events, told from the PoVs of the two main participants. IT succeeds astonishingly well: as well as enjoying it I couldn't help thinking, 'You cheeky sod, how dare you do this, and do it so brilliantly!'

Emma

I'm currently reading David Guterson's Snow Falling On Cedars and this seems to be the way he's heading - he's certainly got a lot of different povs in it.
Of course, this is a who dunnit, so I suppose crime tends to be a combination of different povs of the same murder.


- NaomiM

The easiest way to do this is to make all the narrators first person narrative - as in the examples given. That's what I do - perhaps because my background's in TV and it seems perfectly natural to me to switch POV several times in a single scene. Michelle Lovric does it brilliantly, if you read her at all - and she also uses different fonts for each character.

However, it sounds as if you want this one character to be different from the others, and that is hard. The minute you do that, you're shifting the way the reader regards even the third person narrative - because if Person A is narrating his own stuff, who is the God-like person telling the stories of People B and C? If you retain third person for them, you yourself as writer have somehow become a player in your own book.

To me, that sounds exciting, and I wish I'd thought of it. Suggestions of how to do it? Er....

You could try 'sourcing' it (that's what I do). Say your 'first person' sections are an actual document - a diary, a statement given to a police officer, an interview, a tape recording made by a psychiatrist, or whatever. That 'document' is now a fictional 'third person fact' in the same way as the other characters are, but can be told in a different way. All you'd need would be a heading every time you cut to it. An example of this would be Dorothy Sayers' 'The Documents In The Case'.

As others have said, make it stand out in the text. I'd avoid different fonts if he's the only one - why not use the standard convention for shifting outside straight reporting of action and just bung it in italics? Stephen King (for instance) does this every time he moves from 'he said, he did' into a voice inside someone's head. It's standard, it's easily recognized by readers, no-one will question it - BUT you need his voice to be very different from the others so there's no confusion as to whose head we're actually in. If possible, you'd want to segue into it every time from a mention of the character himself, so it's like a kind of arrow.

All I can think of, I'm afraid. But it sounds brilliant - I do hope you persevere.

Louise

Yes, yes, yes and no. But not in that order!
Thanks, Louise, tv is very apt for what I want. And yes, the character is very different and very differently treated with an unmistakable voice.
Sourcing is not immediate enough. This is real time, live footage. Like swapping the camera inside the green man's head (a la peep show) at a key point in the hulk then jumping back out again as if nothing has happened.
Since your post I have been trying to think of film or tv transitions that do this. Actually, I can only think of action scenes that do it without support of the narrator and there is usually a visual clue.
Can you think of any tv examples that happen unanounced?

And then...
The effect on how they read the others?
ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC!
I keep on forgetting about the narrative voice, but yes, this is one of the effects I want to achieve.

I'll look out some Michelle Lovric, not heard of her before, but it sounds interesting.

I'm afraid film/TV is of limited use really, because it's simply changing POV whenever the camera moves - eg when you're suddenly seeing your hero's back you know someone's behind him, when you see a bunch of legs you know you're a shark etc etc. When something more sustained is happening, you're right, there are usually big visual signposts, eg the long zoom in one someone's face, or even the dreaded 'wavy line' dream-sequence effect - yuk.
The only TV example where I think there's the kind of experiment you're talking about is Dennis Potter - in The Singing Detective the narrative suddenly switches into a musical, and in (I think) 'Lipstick On Your Collar' the colours suddenly go bright and gaudy. It's a very long time since I've seen these, so I hope I haven't remembered them wrong, but it's something like that.

For the immediacy of the head-switch, there's one thing I'm sure you've already tried, which is the shift to present tense, but even this would probably need to be accompanied by italics. You know the kind of thing:

They walked on up the path, the castle drawing nearer and nearer with every step. They think I cannot see them. They think I am invisible. They are ants on white paper and above them the whole sky.

OK, that's crap, but you see what I mean. I think tense changes can work well (I hope so, I do a lot of them) particularly if you segue with a phrase that stretches time, eg moving first from perfect to imperfect (he kicked - he was kicking - he kicks) or with repetition (nearer and nearer).

This still might be too pedestrian for what you want. I'll keep thinking... This is a wonderful question, and it really makes me want to read your book!

Louise

I really want to read your book

Thanks, I really want to finish it!
(again )

I'm using tense changes, but it felt clunky without the lead in. However, your example puts me in mind of a few things worth trying.

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The Singing Detective the narrative suddenly switches into a musical

Also, "I'm Alan Partridge".