Alternating between point of views
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- Morgan Jones
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Re: Alternating between point of views
- MedleyLORE
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I usually stick to third person if I was not be controlling more than one characters thought process. Ive given broken adaptive characters the best POV but got lost once it got to explaining the scene. I’m just a little messy with my explications. As you can see^
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Others like it stated because they want to see what’s going on with the other characters.
But personally, I don’t like perspectives that just repeat the same event that happened previously. Not unless there’s something important included there.
- H0LD0Nthere
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Susan Howatch's Church of England series features about five or six novels. Each is written in first-person POV. However, each book in the series is narrated by a different character. So, first you have a book "written" by Charles Ashworth. Then you have one "written" by Ashworth's arch-rival. Then you have one "written" by Ashworth's spiritual director. And so on. It's fascinating to see different characters describe the same people, sometimes even the same situations, and see them completely differently. However, of course they don't just rehash all the exact same events. Each novel gives a generous glimpse into the narrator's backstory, as well as developing the ongoing story that is happening in all of their lives.
In some of her earlier novels (not the CofE series), she has different subsections of the book narrated in the first person by different characters, introduced with the name of the character narrating. Usually just when you start to get interested in or curious about a "minor" character, it turns out they narrate the next subsection.
So, yeah, I'm a big fan of first person.
Agatha Christie has also done some awesome stuff with first person, usually as unreliable narrator. Check out "Endless Night."
- jjmainor
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The reason for the variation was because the captain suffered from a degenerative disease. I wanted 1st person to give the reader the glimpse inside in head as his condition worsened, but by the end of the story, his mind was too gone to effectively write the ending in 1st person. The idea of the 1st person "log" was the compromise.
- H0LD0Nthere
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Sounds interesting and poignant.jjmainor wrote: ↑21 Aug 2018, 21:30 There are no set-in-stone rules when it comes to a writing style, but if you're going to do something unconventional like shifting between 1st and 3rd person narration, you have to be very careful. I did it once in a science fiction story where I opened most of the chapters with the captain's log in 1st person before switching to 3rd person outside the log. The log was differentiated with italics so the reader knew when they were reading the log and when they were reading the objective story.
The reason for the variation was because the captain suffered from a degenerative disease. I wanted 1st person to give the reader the glimpse inside in head as his condition worsened, but by the end of the story, his mind was too gone to effectively write the ending in 1st person. The idea of the 1st person "log" was the compromise.
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