like the view?
Jun. 7th, 2011 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliAh, points of view -- there's good reason, I always remember, why you want to use as few as possible. It's the "as possible" that's the trick.
On one hand, very little makes it harder for me to get into the story than sending rabbits every which way, with four or five or six POVs that show no sign of any relationship. On the other, you want to establish your POV pattern early so you don't blind-side the readers with POV switches when they think it's single POV, and since if you need multi-POV you may need it in the opening. And on the third, as a writer you suffer from the weakness of already knowing their relationships, so you can miss that they are just juxtaposed without being related.
And once it gets going -- it's very hard to pull off showing a scene twice from differing POVs. This can be ticklish in emotionally fraught scenes where you have to choose whose reactions get depicted straight. And in action scenes where the events are more important than the reactions at the time, choosing can be even harder.
On one hand, very little makes it harder for me to get into the story than sending rabbits every which way, with four or five or six POVs that show no sign of any relationship. On the other, you want to establish your POV pattern early so you don't blind-side the readers with POV switches when they think it's single POV, and since if you need multi-POV you may need it in the opening. And on the third, as a writer you suffer from the weakness of already knowing their relationships, so you can miss that they are just juxtaposed without being related.
And once it gets going -- it's very hard to pull off showing a scene twice from differing POVs. This can be ticklish in emotionally fraught scenes where you have to choose whose reactions get depicted straight. And in action scenes where the events are more important than the reactions at the time, choosing can be even harder.