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Playing with POV points of view



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Mon Nov 30, 2015 10:46 am
FeatherPen says...



Hi,
I am planing a short story where each paragraph is written from a different point of view (POV). All together I came up with 11;[i] first- singular, first plural, first peripheral, first- unreliable, second, third-limited, third-objective, third-omniscient, third story teller, epistolary and a newspaper article.

I would also like to play around with tenses.

So far I only have only a vague story outline and characters. There is a witch who can far scry and look though animals eyes and read their minds. Additionally there is a thinking cat who is her familiar. I want to use them to make the story reflect the writing style and to use the line “meow! You’re inside my head again watching yourself” as that is what inspired it.

The witch (called Rebecca for the moment) aims to become master of ceremonies for the upcoming equinox. The cat and familiars of the other witches are fed up of the witches taking advantage of them via scrying and mind probing. They along with some of the younger witches are planing sabotage of the equinox some how.

At the moment I am not satisfied with the plot and would love some advice/ideas on how to make the switching tenses and POVs thing work. Currently I am planing on starting each paragraph with a title indicating what I am writing in.

Any advice, ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.


Thankyou everyone for their feedback, this idea due to lack of time and better ideas surfacing is likely to be scrapped. If I ever do play with POV/tenses I will keep it simpler and not use this story out line. Thanks again
Last edited by FeatherPen on Fri Apr 29, 2016 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
  





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Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:10 am
Mea says...



Well, I'm going to ask you: what are you trying to achieve by using all these different tenses? After all, changing tense so often will be a lot to ask of a reader and will in some ways severly impede readability. So what is it about this story that makes it essential to tell it this way? Why is this the best way to tell this story, and what are you trying to accomplish with it?

It's okay if you don't know the answers to those questions right now - I just think you should think about that. And I'm not saying don't do it - I'm just saying go into the project understanding how the strengths and weaknesses of the format relate to the story you want to tell.

Overall, the general reason I could think of to tell a story like this would be that the idea is to tell it from as many POVs as possible, with each one adding a new layer of meaning. However, depending on your tenses and your plot, I can see how that would be rather difficult.
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Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:26 am
FeatherPen says...



Thanks for the questions Meandbooks; I think secretly I am just trying to be clever. The point is to practice writing in all the different POV because it is not usually something I pay attention to. Framing them as a story makes it more fun for me than writing out the same scene under the different POVs, which is something I have been meaning to do for a while now. Making it easy for the reader is the challenge, to make it difficult to write. Essentially that makes it an exercise that I’m trying to make into an actual story.

Perhaps I should go looking for a story that really needs to be told like this, and not just some quick think of a story outline, which is what the above is.
Thank you for your input, it is just the sort I need.
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Mon Nov 30, 2015 12:41 pm
Lightsong says...



Well, novels with multiple PoVs are of course common out there. Brandon Sanderson in his The Way of Kings play with many PoVs, even including characters that aren't main just to add more substance to the story, which is related to it subtly. Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero series play with its main characters' PoVs as well.

Using multiple PoVs is great to develop each character while moving the story forward. But never have I stumbled into a short story with multiple PoVs in its paragraphs. More often than not, my reviewer tells me to stick with a PoV when writing a third-omniscient PoV. Perhaps you can use multiple for each several paragraphs but not all, since it would be tiresome for readers to focus who at what time.

About tenses, I don't have anything to say but drop it off. Changes of tenses in a short story would be a tedious reading for readers. Not only we need to remind ourselves this is in the past and this is in the present, but we'd also need to know what those things happened. Unless it's a flashback, I don't see why you need to change tenses.
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Wed Dec 02, 2015 8:32 pm
Rosendorn says...



Do not try to be clever. It is the death of writing.

Forced cleverness leads to presumptuousness, which in turn makes your story difficult to read. The tone, in a way, automatically becomes patronizing, which in turn makes readers not want to continue.

When you force cleverness, you are in essence alienating everyone including yourself for what writers are supposed to do: tell a story.

This method, to me, sounds like it puts the formatting first and the actual story second. Formatting exists to be invisible, because once you can see the formatting within a work you focus on it instead of the actual narration.

Focus on the story first, techniques second. There's nothing wrong with stretching yourself, but if you put all your energy into making some supposed to be clever trick work, you're doing a disservice to everyone involved.

Another note— first person is by its nature an unreliable narrator. You're seeing the world exclusively through one character's eyes, meaning you're seeing it exclusively through their biases. No two people will see the exact same event the same way, so as a result the idea that "first person" and "unreliable narrator" are separate is false.

That's my two cents, anyway. Focus on how the story wants to be told and leave your cleverness at the door.
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Wed Dec 02, 2015 9:08 pm
niteowl says...



I agree with the other responders. That sounds like way too many POVs for a short story. Heck, it sounds like too many even for a longer novel.

A combination of two or three of these could work, but they'd have to mesh somehow. For example, the letter-writing could easily display two first person POVs, perhaps combined with something like a newspaper article. I remember reading a short story in high school creative writing that did this pretty well, beginning and ending with a bank robbery holdup note. Unfortunately, I don't know the title or author.

I'd also suggest not changing tenses if you're going to be switching POVs in a short story. That sounds very complicated.

Overall, I agree with Rosey. Put the story first. It sounds like the story would best be served by showing the witch's and the cat's POV in some form, but that's your call.
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Mon Mar 21, 2016 11:31 pm
austinturtle says...



I've actually tackled this before and I've posted my short story here. However I only used third person limited and first person singular, and playing with that many tenses might make your work extremely messy.
Although I think it is fine to start out formulating an idea based off of a technique you want to use contrary to Rosendorn, I do agree with the fact that the story might get lost along the way.
My tips for you are too maybe consider cutting back and assigning a rule for each technique- the artistic purpose on why you change. For example, if the character undergoes a traumatic event, you switch to third person symbolizing repression. Once the problem and experience is dealt with, you switch to first person. However, you need to make sure the switches and the purposes correlate with your story and the message you are trying to get across.
  





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Fri Apr 29, 2016 9:43 am
crossroads says...



Okay, super late popping in, but I'm bothered by a detail. What OP is talking about are persons -- first, third, bla bla bla -- and calling them POVs implies that each of them comes with a different character whose point of view is shown through those persons (and tenses). Which might be true, or it might not. Just my "let's get the terms straight" bug's .02 :mrgreen:
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Fri Apr 29, 2016 2:13 pm
FeatherPen says...



Thankyou everyone for their feedback, this idea due to lack of time and better ideas surfacing is likely to be scrapped. If I ever do play with POV/tenses I will keep it simpler and not use this story out line. Thanks again
The world is what you make of it and the universe how you dream.
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