Hi All, I know this is more of a beginner question but I can't post in there at the moment until I get full membership status.

Is it acceptable to have your main character leave the current scenario and then carry on to tell the reader what is happening in their absence, within the same chapter?

I think the one-scene-per-chapter 'rule' is a) very recent and b) not a rule. Chapter breaks are - or can be - used as part of your larger structure, in which case you might well want to keep going after a scene has ended.

FWIW, my work-in-progess has ten chapters, and will probably be 150,000 words. Lots of scenes and breaks and transitions in each.

Emma

Is it acceptable to have your main character leave the current scenario and then carry on to tell the reader what is happening in their absence, within the same chapter?

It would be unusual. The MC would be acting as an onmiscient narrator after he leaves the scene. It might be easier just to switch to another character's point of view from the moment the mc leaves.


- NaomiM

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I'm assuming you mean the scene continues with the same set of characters, after the MC has left.

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If you mean the scene changes, and we follow the mc to the new location, then that's fine. Chapters are often made up of a few scenes - I tend to use 2 or 3 scenes per chapter.

Is it acceptable to have your main character leave the current scenario and then carry on to tell the reader what is happening in their absence, within the same chapter?

Sorry, Naomi's answer has made me realise I mis-took the question.

It depends if the point-of-view is limited to the main character's. If it is, then you can't really just pop up with a single little bit of other people's. If you've got multiple viewpoints in the book, with or without a knowledgeable narrator holding everything together, why not stay with the remaining characters? - it's just a PoV switch.

Emma

Thank you for your replies,

It would be a PoV switch then. Is it better for a story to follow the MC throughout?

There's nothing wrong at all with using more than one POV in a novel, Janstar - it's absolutely normal in a third person narrative. And a POV switch at the end of a scene is no problem, either - it's mid-scene switches which are much harder to get right, and the advice is often to avoid these completely.

The only general bit of advice I'd have about using multiple POVs is that for every POV character you are going to need to think very carefully about his/her narratove voice. So that using more than three or four main narrator characters is quite demanding, in my opinion - all those voices to get right. (Of course, for dialogue, all your characters will have to develop theior own distinctive voices - but that's qualititatively different from the work you need to do to get the narrative that's in their voice/POV coming across right.)

Rosy

P.S. Emma, what on earth did this 'rule' against multi-scene chapters come from? Yeesh. I've never heard that. Like you, I use multiple scenes in almost all my chapters.

Is it better for a story to follow the MC throughout?

It depends entirely on the needs of the story. It can be easier to make sure that the reader's engaged with the MC, but it can make plotting awkward. Plus you're restricting yourself in what you can do and say with other characters, if they're all from the MC's PoV.

P.S. Emma, what on earth did this 'rule' against multi-scene chapters come from? Yeesh. I've never heard that. Like you, I use multiple scenes in almost all my chapters.

God knows. I assume scriptwriting, where they really do have to think in scenes - certainly some highly commercial fiction seems to have a zillion little chapters, which I think wastes the potential strength of chapter-endings. Better to have a break within the chapter if you want a jump-cut. (And sometimes it's a cheap trick to create a cliff-hanger within a scene. Hm. Do it a better way, I'd say...)

But then I blame scriptwriting for most of the rules - or the idea that there are rules at all. Thinking in terms of scriptwriting can be hugely helpful for plot and structure, because it's a much tighter form than the novel, for both commercial and aesthetic reasons. But other than that... Fine. Leave them to it. Just don't impose this tight-arsed stuff on our lovely, accommodating, fluid, flexible, all-encompassing baggy monster of a form...

Emma

Hear, hear!

Just going back to the original question for a second, because this was something I was advised against a few years back, but that is because a lot of amateur writers are very keen to learn the rules and then go on to apply them to all cases. I think this is the natural way of things with any craft, and you do really need to know those initial guidelines before you start trying new things.

However, of the last three books I've read, two of them broke some of the most set guidelines you can get. One did away with punctuation almost completely (and it worked!) and both broke the "new speaker, new paragraph" rule where you would get a bouncing conversation between two people all in the same paragraph. I've also just remembered, in the other of those three books, there were several POV slips - but I thought of them as just sloppy, where in the other two, the grammatical style was clearly deliberate, and more importantly, consistent.

So, continuing a scene when the main character leaves. Why not? We do it all of the time in normal tale-telling. In fact, a sitution happened today...

I was busy stripping wallpaper upstairs but got a shout from the kids outside that there was a problem. I went down to see the waterslide they were playing on had become disconnected from the hose. I reconnected it, told them to play nice and went back upstairs. But as soon as I'd left them, they decided that it would be more fun to get buckets of water, filled from the kitchen, so the next thing I hear is a scream as my wife came home to find the kitchen flooded. Can't turn your back for two minutes!

So in natural dialogue, we slip from first person to omniscient and back without any problem to the listener.

A way of cheating is to have something like, 'As I left the room, everything was fine and dandy, and had no idea that that Eric, bored with eating his noodles, decided to put them on Jennifer's head. It was only later...'

The last few words pull the reader back to first, allowing you to give details of how you discovered the unseen events.

Write it, play with it, see if it works!

Colin M