I love the satisfaction of working something out the hard way and then being told a theory that explains and then builds on the reasons why.

Oh, me too. In fact, I think it's the better way to learn, which is why I always advise people to do lots of writing on their own - however badly in that sense - and only to take a course when they've ground to a halt. It's those flying hours under your belt which help you to sift what the course tells you, pounce on some things, ignore others, try others still out with an open mind but a bit of scepticism.

Emma

Gardner describes it thus: 1) It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway. 2) Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms. 3) Henry hated snowstorms. 4) God how he hated these damn snowstorms. 5) Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul…

Emma, you are always handy with the fabulous illustrations. This one is perfect!

R x

It's good, isn't it. I whooped when I came on this bit of the Gardner book, and now it beats me that no one else seems to discuss this absolutely fundamental issue except in the vaguest terms.

James Woods is very good on how this basic stuff evolves into free indirect style, as the foundation of by far the largest part of fiction from Austen onwards (by far the largest part is one of many reasons why I fight against this peculiar new orthodoxy of no moving PoV...). But Woods doesn't actually pinpoint how the writer does the different points on the psychic range, which Gardner does, bless him.

Emma

Totally brilliant Emma, thank you so much. The whole thread is now printed and on the bulletein board!

I'm sorry, I'm skipping posts to reply to Emma's earlier point (I'll go back and read them afterwards, promise ):

But I would question that it takes a whole novel to learn many of these, and I strongly believe that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly because, apart from the few things which do come naturally to you, you won't do it well till you've done it badly a few times. Shakespeare's early plays are not as good as his late ones... Why not write a short story to try these things out? (With apologies to all deep-dyed short fictioneers who are sick of people treating their transcendant art form as a five-finger exercise for the Real Thing of a novel). And, as a bonus, you may find that letting go of the need for your short story to be perfect - because it's only an exercise, after all - means you end up with a really good one.

I'm not convinced that writing a series of short stories would really iron the kinks out of pov in a novel, because some of the pitfalls one could get away with in a short piece, but could ruin a whole novel if allowed to continue unchecked - one of the common ones in Childrens fiction is the adult sounding 'voice' that comes with using omniscient pov.
Yes, it would be nice if writers learnt how not to do it by the end of the first draft of their first novel, but part of the problem is writers who work alone and only show their work to a third party when they are gearing up to submit to agents, by which time it's a bit late because the mss is shot through with pov problems.

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On WW it's less of a problem because the pov problems get nipped in the bud in early chapters of new wips, but on some sites where the writer is only just getting feedback on a completed mss it is a big problem, and less easy to untangle because that way of writing has to a certain extent become ingrained.

by which time it's a bit late because the mss is shot through with pov problems

Seriously though, is that really a problem?

In my case, if I had known how badly I was doing my first draft, I would have cried off writing entirely (I stopped writing for a year when I found out). But because I had a completed draft, no matter how bad it was, I had something to build from for the rewrite.

It's like running a marathon;

The goal for the first one has to be to get to the end and getting to the end is in itself a worthwhile outcome.

The hardest thing is not fixing the problems once you can see them, but recognising the problems to be able to fix them and that (for a novel) requires the sheer volume of work that is a completed draft at any level.

G

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ps: I think what I'm saying is;

Don't let the quest for quality paralyse your creative dream.

Or, to put it another way, you can't polish a turd, but you can be inspired by one.

Seriously though, is that really a problem?

Well yes, if they are then spending most of the year submitting to agents and wondering why they're getting standard rejections. It also breeds excuses for not doing the extensive rewrite necessary to bring it up to scratch, such as pointing to authors like Limony Snicket and Terry Patchett and saying 'but they do it', without understanding why those authors can get away with it.

Naomi, I see what you're saying (though actually on the whole I think you can get away with less in a short story, because you haven't got much room to, for example, establish that more adult voice as one end of the psychic range), but I don't see that PoV problems are any different from a hundred and one other things which you have to keep trying to get right, and then get righter in revision - voice, characterisation, pace, show/tell, etc. etc.

To my mind the thing that's most difficult to change after you've written the first draft - and so most worth struggling to get right from the beginning, is the structure. And to the extent that structure affects PoV decisions, because you have to decide which bits of the story to tell, and through whose eyes, I would suggest that it's better to get the structure right, using the PoVs that the structure demands, and accept that you may not get the transitions right, or control the interaction of voice and PoV (which is what Gardner's going on about with his psychic distance) properly. Those are ironable-outable later, though, once you know the structure works.

Emma

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I suppose what I'm really saying is that I don't see what's special about PoV, as a technical, which means you should limit yourself so drastically if it's not what you want to do. Yes, of course doing it badly will lead to rejections, but then so will doing anything else badly. If your plots are feeble because you're restricting yourself to what's possible with a single PoV, you're even more likely to get rejected, because plot is king when it comes to selling fiction at any end of the literary-commercial divide.

Maybe I'm seeing it round te other way, Emma - alot of structural problems are caused by using pov the wrong way. 'Voice' being one of them - and modern fiction is so dependent on a distinctive 'voice' these days, especially in Childrens.
The most common cause of pov missuse, as I see it, is the writery urge to give too much away to the reader, too early in the mss, and so resorting to omniscient pov to feed in unnessary background info, having the antagonists pov because they don't understand how to build suspense, giving secondary characters the pov because the mc can't be in every scene, or because they don't trust the reader to get the nuances, clues and cues, etc.
As I say, using it wrongly leaves an mss shot through with problems in prose and structure which are difficult to rectify.

if they are then spending most of the year submitting to agents and wondering why they're getting standard rejections

All part of the learning curve...
Sorry, but life's tough.

Well I have become a great believer in writing as an apprenticeship, and Hemingways 'first write a million words' in recent years, Giaus.

alot of structural problems are caused by using pov the wrong way.

This is really interesting - I'm going to have to chew on it.

And, actually, the novel after the WIP is going to be classical 3rd person moving PoV, status of narrator as yet unconcerned. I've never done it so extendedly before, so I'll be learning an awful lot, awfully fast - I could be back here, eating my words as well as chewing on yours. I'm certainly wondering if it'll affect the planning at the pre-writing stage.

Emma

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"status of narrator as yet unconcerned."

Think I meant 'unconfirmed'. Or it's a Freudian slip because maybe the narrator unconcerned - your typical modernist external narrator, neutral, observing, without comment or opinion...

"status of narrator as yet unconcerned." Think I meant 'unconfirmed'. Or it's a Freudian slip

Lol, Emma.

I expect this is merely a generalisation, but maybe omnicient pov is a natural element in historical fiction, otherwise one can't indulge in the wonderful historical aspect the genre affords the reader? The same with a lot of Fantasy fiction, as one is building this strange world around the characters. Pratchett has his humorous authorial asides, Limony Snicket the 'author' is a character in his own right, right down to the pseudonym.
It is wonderful when it's done right, and there are some lovely examples in the Childrens fiction group right now. But I do feel it is all to easy for the writer's ego and/or inexperience to get in the way. Where, rather than fill the characters' shoes and write from inside them, they wrest the shoes away from the characters and write what they want to tell the reader, leaving the character's as little more than bit players in their own scenes.

As a new writer it is very encouraging to see so many replies to this question, but I'm now concerned about my work. Here's an example...

Earlier the boys stood at Gorbals Toll, along with the other kids. They waited for the supporters’ buses to pass. They waited for the supporters to throw their pennies. Peter and Stevie shoved and pushed with the others as coins chinked and bounced and rolled on the tarmac. Boys dashed and crawled over each other. Some tracked the coins onto the road. Cars swerved. A silver coin got immediate attention as it reflected in the sun. Peter dived and captured it and stood up and turned away from the scrambling pack. A Toll boy blocked his path. The Toll boy was tall and fat and had a shaven head and scabby lips. Peter felt his stomach turn. He tightened his grip around the coin. The Toll boy, saw Peter clench his fist,...

Two points of view, Peter's and the Toll boy's. Is this not okay?

I would suggest that in a scene like this, where you really want the reader to experience this fast-moving riot, it's safer to stick to the PoV of a single character, so that he is our representative in experiencing the riot, as it were.

You could argue that saying 'the toll boy saw Peter...' is no different from saying that the boys dashed and crawled over each other - a neutral, general statement from the PoV of the narrator, as you've got earlier in the paragraph. You could even say it's Peter's PoV - he sees the tollboy notice his gesture of clutching the coin. So it partly depends on how it continues after this para.

If you really need us to be inside the toll boy's head, I suggest you don't jump straight from Peter seeing the toll-boy to the toll-boy seeing Peter, which is a bit of an abrupt head-hop but go via something more neutral and external, seeing them both from outside, as it were.

Emma