Hi,

I've just got a quick query about P.O.V.

I have two characters in a scene which, in my head, is from the point of view of a young girl Lisa - there is a paragraph establishing this early on.

The problem has arisen because I have added in actions that relate to the woman she is with. I have been careful to make sure that these aren't interior dialogues. They are exterior actions like 'Alicia rolled onto her side and reached for a Margarita.' and 'Alicia chased a slice of lime around her glass.' So there is very definitely nothing that Lisa couldn't have seen.

I've now had comments back saying that the changing p.o.v. is confusing. Well, to my mind, the point of view hasn't changed. Lisa is watching Alicia do all these things but you can't have 'Lisa watched as...' all the time.

I've spotted a few things I could tweak to help to firm up p.o.v. For example, I had started the chapter with a statement from Alicia, which possibly wasn't helpful. But otherwise, is my reviewer being over sensitive?

Thanks for any help with this.

S

You're right, and your commenter is wrong. If the PoV character can see it, then you can narrate it from inside their head.

I do try not to sigh at, let alone get irritated by, people who say things as daft as that comment, but oh, dear...

Emma

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Talking of PoV, this is a really terrific piece - both intelligent and liberating. But long. Make yourself some coffee before you start...

http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/djauss01.htm

As Emma says, and from your example, your commenter is wrong. The POV character is the one where you've included their thoughts and feelings.
But if the commmenter's comments are from the reader's pov then there could be some substance to them. Maybe they are getting non-visual signals from the body movements of the non-pov character, or dialogue tags, which is confusing them? Or maybe your pov character isn't doing their job of interpreting the non-pov characters non-verbal signals, so the reader is struggling to keep to the pov character's pov? Maybe they are empathising more with the non-pov character?
It's worth popping the extract in one of the forums for feedback.


- NaomiM

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Just to add:

there is a paragraph establishing this early on.

Pov is a constant thing. Informing the reader who's pov it at any one point in the story, doesn't mean it can't change by the very next paragraph.


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sorry, for 'constant' read 'dynamic'.

I am sure Emma and Naomi are both right, but looking at your examples I think I can see where the confusion might be.

'Alicia chased a slice of lime around her glass.'

The word 'chased' feels like a subjective interpretation of the action that only Alicia could make. Only Alicia knows if she's chasing, iyswim, rather than hunting or just tilting her glass with her mind elsewhere - though of course the narrator can assume she's chasing and say so to the reader. If you said, 'Alicia tilted her glass, the lime sliding around inside it under the ice-cubes,' then that would be extremely objective. I don't advise you change it, mind.

I agree with the others here. The fact that a scene talks about a character other than the one whose POV it is, does not make it a change in POV. It's simply an exposition of something that the POV character is observing. POV is about whose eyes we are seeing the scene through, not whom those eyes are observing.

Yes, agreed that PoV is dynamic.

It's also not binary: not either/or. There'll be plenty of any decently-written piece where the answer to "Who's PoV is this?" is "Could be either," or "No-one's in particular," or "No character's: it's the narrator's".

Worth remembering, too, that even if your narrator is a character, and the piece is therefore written in first person, that character-narrator is in many ways different from the character in the scene who just happens to have the same name.

I've taken to thinking of them as "narrator" and "actor" (rather than "character", which is ambiguous). As the Jauss piece argues, there's actually no reason that narrator-Jane can't choose to narrate events which actor-Jane wasn't present at, thoughts of other characters that actor-Jane couldn't know directly, and so on. Narrator-Jane could even let the narration be coloured by other characters' voices - why not?

Though I'd suggest if you're going to take this bold (in terms of modern CW orthodoxies) path, you establish what you're up to early. As Naomi says, PoV is a dynamic thing, but you do need to get your reader reading the piece the right way early on, and then be consistent in how it works.

Emma

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Crossed with Leila and Alex.

Leila, I see what you mean about "chased", though as you say, that it's a way of putting that action which the narrator has put. Alicia might think that too, or might not.

PoV and narrators and so on is all smoke and mirrors anyway. You can't and shouldn't try to eliminate all ambiguities. You're just trying to eliminate potential stumbles.

Wow, that's some excellent feedback chaps! Thank you for the link. I've not looked at it yet but I'll have a look later.

Naomi, you are bang on about the cues in the rest of the text. In fact, I took the comments to mean that, although they were directed at couple of 'Alicia did this..' type sentences, they were in fact a comment on the fact that the rest of the piece wasn't framed right.

So Leila's comments about choice of verbs was really helpful. I had already changed a declension or two, so that they read 'Alicia was doing such and such...'. I thought this would imply that Lisa had just glanced across and spotted what Alicia was doing, without having to spell it out. But I will certainly have a look at the choice of verbs again. I feel 'poked' would be better in this instance.

It is really helpful because I have many multi-character scenes in the book and I really needed some good pointers before I go in and polish.

Sarah

Sometimes, multi-character scenes work best from what you might call a fly-on-the-wall POV. That is, the reader sees the dialogue and actions as they happen, as if watching the thing in a movie. Personally, I never have a problem with that approach, because it's what you get with movies and TV. The only danger is if the writer begins dipping inside the heads of characters, as that's something which does begin to confuse things.

Alex, that's sometimes called Dramatic Narrative - in the accurated sense of being like a play. Or Third Person Objective - which Gardner acuses of "savage sparsity".

You might enjoy the link, in that case. The author begins by dissecting Hemingway's Hills LIke White Elephants, which is entirely written like that. Or rather, very, very nearly entirely...

Emma

I agree with lots of the comments above particularly Steerpike's sister's comments about the verb choice. But also of course there are other elements to POV:
1) What they could have seen
2) What they would have seen - ie is this the kind of thing they would have noticed?
3) How they would have interpreted it.

It's hard to say from those examples, but maybe what stuck out for your reader was not a problem with number 1) but numbers 2) or 3). When you say Lisa is "young" - how young? Too young to know that what Alice is reaching for is a Margarita for eg? If I write a schoolboy POV character noting that his mother is wearing a Laura Ashley dress with a mismatching Hermes scarf that's perfectly ok for 1) but probably not for 2) (crass example but you get what I mean).

Finally perhaps it's the scene in aggregate - if the focus of the chapter is relentlessly on Alice and what she's doing, then perhaps the reader needs something to bring it back to Lisa's experience of it. If the POV character has been completely edged out of the picture then it becomes about us reading about Alice, un-filtered. If that makes sense.

Or, it's completely possible your reader is being oversensitive

I'd also add that your point about beginning the scene with Alice speaking COULD be confusing if:
- We are early in the novel/story and you haven't established the POV strongly
- Alice's words aren't accompanied by what Lisa sees/hears/understands about her, eg:

'See if I care!' Alice lifted her glass. She certainly didn't look as if she cared.

(excuse rather clunky example)

I think Sol Stein's very good advice to always consider your readers is especially important here. Anything that's going to take them out of the story because they're not sure whose POV it is, technically correct or not, is a hindrance to their being involved and reading on.
Susiex

write a schoolboy POV character noting that his mother is wearing a Laura Ashley dress with a mismatching Hermes scarf

But what a fantastic character sketch in those few words! I now want to know all about this boy. What a great exercise, too - to write about the unlikely details different people notice and what it says about them.

I had already changed a declension or two, so that they read 'Alicia was doing such and such...'.

Emma's going to hate me for doing this, but watch your use of 'was's. Overuse can weaken the prose. The subjective 'chased' could be replaced by the objective 'swirled'.

LoL Naomi...

But if you want to show that the PoV character looks at another character, and sees that she's in the middle of a continuous action, and you're using past tense, I'm not quite sure how you express that without "was"...

(In case anyone doesn't know what we're on about, it's here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/05/have-you-heard-the-one-about-was.html )

Emma

More useful points. I hadn't thought about the Margarita point. I'll watch for that as well.

As far as 'was' goes, I think I have already cut quite a few out. I don't have any fundamental objection to them except they don't quite fit the style of my writing for this book. So I'm not at all worried about putting a couple back in.

By the way, I'm half way through the article that Emma posted and I concur that it is a thoroughly terrific piece.

S