Hi

I was reading through old Technique forum threads and came across a thread relating to Show and tell.

My query, however, relates to POV. One of the links provided was to an author's blog where the following was provided as an example of Show:

She leant towards him, her hair brushing his cheek. "Listen. I ..." His pulse quickened. "What?" Carmelle took a breath. She paused. What if her informant was wrong? She shook her head, looked down at the stem of the glass pressed between her fingers. "Nothing."

I assume we are reading this from Carmelle's POV, so how can she know that his pulse is quickening?

Is the piece above technically inaccurate (in terms of POV) or is there another way of writing POVs so you can give information on another character's feelings, etc.?

I am particularly interested in this, as my WIP stays with the MC's POV throughout.

Best wishes

Sharley

I agree there is a change of POV here. You would have to say "She felt his pulse quicken" and she would only know that if she was feeling it!

If you've got an omniscient narrator, they can show/tell you whatever they choose to show/tell you - what Carmelle's thinking, what he's thinking, what the weather's like, what they don't know... and so on. In which case there's nothing fundamentally wrong about this at all.

I wouldn't make a judgement about this until I'd seen a good couple of pages, and seen whether the narrative hops too and fro to abruptly and/or too often - whether the PoV shifts are clumsily handled, in other words.

If this is intended to be limited to Carmelle's PoV then I agree, 'his pulse quickened' is something she can't know: as Jem says, you'd have to convey that to the reader through her perception of it. Having said that, 'her hair brushed his cheek' could be either PoV, and you could argue that she's physically close enough to him to feel the pulses...

For what it's worth, this story set out to be an exercise in handling a point of view which moves between the two main characters. Each is set up with a fairly substantial chunk, and then as they make friends the shifts get more frequent and more significant. But there's no point where the narrator says anything that neither of them could know:

http://www.writewords.org.uk/archive/12696.asp

Emma

Thank you both for your comments.

I'm off to read your Russian Tea piece in a minute, Emma. I read some of the comments first (I'm nosey) and noted that you were trying to use what you refer to as a two-handed POV, which I have never heard of before.

I'm spending the weekend trying to improve my POV knowledge - and also work on smoother scene/time shifts. How to get away with asterisks in the middle of a chapter, etc.

If anyone can point me in the direction of links relating to more sophisticated techniques for changing scenes, etc. I'd be grateful!

Sharley

"Two-handed PoV" isn't really a technical term - it's just third person. As with any third-person narrative) there is therefore an implied external narrator, but in the case of this story the PoV is limited to one or the other of those two characters: the thing I was working on was the shifts between the two.

Have you read Nicola Morgan on Help I Need A Publisher on PoV? She's had a re-jig of the blog so I can't find it, but some googling should.

Emma

Hi Emma

It was your link to her blog that led me to put forward my original question. I'm slowly making my way through the different items (with a brief diversion to Authonomy).

Just so you can find her blog now:

http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=1

Thanks for your help.

Sharley

Okay one more - sorry!

I'm writing in a third-person POV when I feel my WIP might work more in the first-person POV (not that I've actually tried it in first person).

However, I read somewhere that first-person POVs are less likely to make it through the slush pile. Is this correct?

Thanks

Sharley

first-person POVs are less likely to make it through the slush pile. Is this correct?

No.

Emma

<Added>

Oops! Clicked 'post' too soon. Meant to say, thanks for digging up Nicola's PoV posts - very thoughtless of her to have buried them!

Picking up on the first-person POV theme, I would be interested in knowing people's thoughts about the following. It's my impression (and it is only an impression, not backed up by any research) is that female authors tend to use first-person POV more often than male authors. I'm not sure what that's based on, other than that a large percentage of the female authors that I've read seem to use it, whereas the majority of the male authors that I've read tend to stick to third-person.

This also goes back to primary school, where a lot of girls in my class seemed to use first person narratives in any stories they wrote.

Alex

If they do - and I have no opinion on that, though I can imagine it's might the case, though you couldn't ever prove it - then I'd suspect that it's the result of the conventions of the genres each tend to write for, rather than a direct result of gender.

Though of course if there is a gender divide in genres, it's self-reinforcing...

Emma