I'm getting bogged down analysing POV and would appreciate any comments on the following:

My novel is written from character A's point of view only. So are the following sentences acceptable or have i switched POV to character B?

"B could see that A was upset."
"B watched A walk around the corner"

Would the POV only change if i expressed character B's thoughts and emotions,eg

"B wished that A could see how truly beautiful she was."

Or are all of these B's POV and the only safe sentences are action, eg
"B smiled at A, warmly"
"B shook A's hand."

I'm going around in circles.

thanks.

Casey

Casey, I don't think you can have any of these, I'm afraid. You're inside A's head, and can only write what A would see and think. You can check it out by putting 'I' in instead of 'A', and if it doesn't make sense, you can't have it.

But there are ways round.

"B could see that A was upset" could turn into, 'As A spoke, she saw a flicker of concern cross B's face', or make B say something.

"B watched A walk around the corner" could be 'A walked round the corner, feeling that B was still watching her,' or 'A walked round the corner, and at the last minute she glanced back. B was watching her

"B wished that A could see how truly beautiful she was" can only really be hinted at: 'A was surprised when B took her hand and led her to stand in front of a shop window. Yes, the dress was all right, and her hair wasn't too bad. Why did B keep her standing there?'

Yes, it's harder to write, but so fascinating, because there's always another layer. In the second example, for instance, the reader's aware maybe B isn't watching her. That the feeling might be wrong says interesting things about how A feels about B, (as well as the more obvious thing about what B feels about A) which you couldn't convey with an omniscient narrator without a laborious sentence about it.

Emma

Thanks, Emma. You've made it very clear and i've a nasty feeling i've been slipping out of the MC's POV rather a lot.

Why does this matter, though? My last novel was from multi-POVs and i thought it read all right. Why have i read, time and time again, that it is better to write from just one POV?? - which i am striving to do this time around.

Casey

Multi-POV is fine, of course, but harder to get right, which is why single-POV is often prescribed for people feeling their way in this stuff. But as you're finding, it can be much a harder way(though in a potentially more interesting way) to actually get the bloody story told.

My view is that you can do anything you like as long as you know exactly how far you are inside each character's head at any time. And switches from one to another character need careful handling. For a start, the reader mustn't get confused about who's thinking what. And more subtly, taking your example, if the narrative suddenly says 'C looked cross', then who's thinking that in a multi-POV passage? A or B? What the reader deduces about C, and A's and B's attitude to them, might be quite different, depending.

My story Russian Tea, which I think is still in the archive, began as an early exercise that I set myself to write a two-hander, with a shifting POV. One thing that I found helps smooth the transition but keep things clear is if you have a 'neutral' position between a passage from A's POV, and B's.

A crude example would be:

A felt anger warming her face. How dare B assume such a thing? He was always doing that, and it was really annoying. [very much in her head] She pulled her wrap more tightly around her, and looked across at him. [outside her head, but centred on her] B was fiddling with a pencil and his head was averted. [observing neutrally, but could still be her POV]. Outside a car backfired [something external to both of them - this is the pivot point, if you like, which could be either or neither of their POVs] and he dropped the pencil. It rolled away from him and under the sofa, and when B looked up, A was laughing [shifting towards B - he's the subject - but still outside his head]. He wondered why. Why did everything he did seem to make her laugh? [inside his head now] But he felt a bubble of laughter somewhere inside him, and however hard he tried, he couldn't hide it. [inside his head and body now, and if I was constructing a Cute Moment, making the two POV's converge as they both laugh at the same thing would help it along]

It's a bit more subtle in Russian Tea, but then it took a bit longer to write, too.

Emma

Thanks very much for that, Emma.

I see what you mean about more than two POVs, could be tricky.

I shall have to re-read through my chapters and decide - if i have slipped out of on POV - whether i can carry off multi-POV prose.

This is exactly the type of problem which has made me decide to submit a few chapters to an editorial agency for some feedback.


Casey

<Added>

Oops - out of ONE POV

Could I just say that this is very, very useful stuff. Thank you Emma.

Dee made a POV comment on the piece I uploaded yesterday and I must admit it's not something I've paid sufficient attention to. Just one query though; if there is a cast of characters who appear in different groupings throughout a novel it must be impossible to have a single POV throughout. Does the single POV ideal apply only to each scene?

DaveB

And can you just clarify for me, Emma, because i'm becoming totally paranoid, in the example you gave,

"B was fiddling with his pencil and his head was averted" is fine, if you are writing from A's point of view??, because it is neutral action??

(I told you i was confused)

Casey

Casey, yes, that's fine from A's POV: it's something she can see, and therefore narrate. My only caveat is that you need to check whether, at that moment, it's the kind of thing A would notice (which is what I mean by knowing how far inside a character's head you are) Check she's not so furious or weepy that she simply wouldn't notice something like that. And check that how they're in the room means that she could see it - that you didn't last mention B as having his back to her, say.

Dave, yes, you're going to have more than one POV in that case, but it can still be wise, if you're not confident in handling POV shifts, to stick to one POV per scene or chapter. Suddenly changes of POV - or worse, just muddled ones - is one of the most common mistake beginning writers make, which is why it's so often suggested that you stick to one.

If you want a neutral narrator who's independent of any of your character's minds, that's fine, but again, you need to know that it's those eyes - yours, as author, if you like - which are seeing/understanding the action.

If you do have multiple POVs, I would say that it's a mistake to have absolutely wodges of one PoV, and only the occasional line or two of another. The more time the reader spends inside one head, the more of a lurch it is - even via a neutral-seeming transition as in my dreary little example above - to find yourself in another. Not that the writer needs to count words or anything silly, but it's just something to keep an eye on. For example in Russian Tea I had two people who ran across each other after years. It's introduced with a long passage in one PoV, then the scene when they meet is in the other. Only when they get to know each other again do the passages of each get shorter, until there are switches (always via neutral) every few lines as they really warm to each other.

In a scene with two people in it it's fascinating to have the choice of PoV, but you need to think hard each time about whose eyes you're using, because what they would notice and how they'd describe it would be completely different - and if they're not, it's a good warning bell that your characterisation might be a bit thin.

Emma

Dave, being in a character’s POV, means you can only see, hear, know, experience what that character is seeing, hearing, etc. For instance, at the end of your piece, neither of your main characters can know what the driver is thinking or feeling so, by including that line about him barely registering the impact, you're slipping into his POV. It’s not a structured shift.

You can change POV – most of us do – but it needs to be controlled so that the reader isn’t backtracking to work out whose head they're in. Another example:

Kathy stopped. This was ridiculous. The very idea that Mark might have remembered and come striding across the bridge……. a tear started to form.
‘Where did it all go wrong for us, Jan?’
We’re in Kathy’s POV here.
Janet studied her sister’s face, the lines of sadness drawn under her greying hair.
Suddenly we’re in Janet’s.
At She paused and turned back to her sister, I think (not 100% sure) we’re in Kathy’s, but between these two sections I didn’t know which character had the POV.

As we read, we should be able to relate to whichever character’s POV we’re in. If we can't do that, we become detached from all the characters – and potentially from the story.

Hope this helps,

Dee

Some excellent advice here, Dave.

Another term for the kind of POV you're trying to produce is 'third person limited'. Which means what it says, i.e. that your POV is limited within the third person to one character. So, the question is, why would you want to limit yourself? One answer is to do with the shift in how we receive stories. Older novels often used to shift POV all the time, from character to character--rather like the way a camera shifts in a movie.

But now we have movies to do that, so what can a novel do that a film can't? Well, it can get us right inside a character's head, so we can feel his feelings and see his thoughts. Yes, you could do this for all your characters but there are at least three problems that raises: 1) you'd be writing an awful lot more than the story can probably bear, 2) while a camera only shifts one's vision when it moves from one character to another, a POV switch in a novel would mean also shifting feeling, thought, mood, attitude--too much, in other words, to be comfortable, 3) you lose the reader's emotional attachment to your main character. The last is something that has to be worked hard for by the writer, and is not easy to do. Therefore, shifting POV will inevitably weaken this effect and, ultimately, mean the reader doesn't care much.

Just one more point--yes, it's true that you have to limit your POV character to what he can see or feel or know. Just remember that also includes what's known by the time in which he lives, e.g. you can't have, say, a Victorian character comparing Cleopatra's needle to a spaceship.

Terry

Thanks Dee, thats very good advice - even though it means I'm going to have to go through the whole 105K words - again! Shifting POV is integral to the strucure of the the novel I've written but it is divided into several discrete scenes per chapter so I will try and ensure a single POV per scene.

Thanks again, this forum is very heplful.

DaveB

And thanks Terry!

Dave B

That's an interesting one. My opinion is that if you have more than one POV in a scene then you run a high risk of distancing your reader because they're not truly 'in there', experiencing things close up. You are panning out to a sort of removed, God-like perspective. It's perhaps harder then for readers to be able to identify with the characters.

Emma D seems to have cracked it though.

It's a risk, but if you know what you're doing, you can be right in there with a series of people, as long as you handle the switches properly. Jane Austen is a model of how to do it.

Emma

You could try writing a diary. Go sit in a cafe for an hour every morning and write down everything you can see going on, what you're thinking about,your feelings, memories etc. After doing this for a week, re-read and you'll have a perfect example of writing done from one person's POV - yours!