3rd-p-limited POV question!

SomethingOrOther · Sep 2, 2011

Okay so, in the narrative, we're conveying information that the character knows.

Whenever doing so is convenient and elegant -- and the information conveyed reflects the character's current mindset -- one can use free indirect discourse (introspection) instead of [exposition / narrative / backflashes / etc.].

Okay I have no idea if that even makes sense, so I'll use an example.

(Warning: the example makes zero sense. Analogous sections are highlighted in red.)

[FONT=Georgia, serif]Clyde walked into the room. Snakes draped the chandeliers. His mother had decorated the living room with a bunch of snakes after getting into an argument with his father, and Clyde found it all ridiculous.[/FONT]

That's a short bit of exposition. (Let's assume Clyde "knows" all of that.)

[FONT=Georgia, serif]Clyde walked into the room. [/FONT][FONT=Georgia, serif]Snakes draped the chandeliers. [/FONT][FONT=Georgia, serif] Why in the world would his mother decorate the living room with a bunch of snakes? Did the argument with dad have anything to do with it?[/FONT]

That's introspection.

(Since I'm coming up with this example on the spot, it's probably suboptimal in ways. The introspection is a bit melodramatic. Two questions? I think one would be better? Maybe "His mother had decorated the living room with a bunch of snakes. Did the argument with dad have anything to do with it?"? Anyway, that's irrelevant.)

---

Lol, at this point I remembered that I have two books and a few articles that answer my question.

Okay, I've read those sources and they don't really answer it.

Anyway, when you're dealing with past events (that the character is aware of), how do you decide whether to render them as regular narrative or as introspection?

Becca_H · Sep 2, 2011

They both are okay to me, but I do prefer the first one. The second looks a bit cheesy, like you say.

job · Sep 2, 2011

Sometimes you do one. Some times you do the other.
[FONT=Georgia, serif]
Internals -- the second example -- are 'closer' or 'deeper' POV. Which you choose will depend in part on how deep you want to run your POV at that particular point. [/FONT]

SomethingOrOther · Sep 2, 2011

Becca_H said:
They both are okay to me, but I do prefer the first one. The second looks a bit cheesy, like you say.

Yeah my specific example was quite bad.

job said:
Sometimes you do one. Some times you do the other.
[FONT=Georgia, serif]
Internals -- the second example -- are 'closer' or 'deeper' POV. Which you choose will depend in part on how deep you want to run your POV at that particular point. [/FONT]

Yeah that's the Q.: how do you decide what you want. (Oops, I thought I emphasized "you" in the OP; OP edited.)

"What do you do?" in the sense of "what you do" -- not "what do you do?" in the sense of "what I should do."

Also, this strikes me as one of those questions where some might think that the only real answer is "Whatever is right for the story?" (Please don't reply with that.

) In that case I'll just emphasize that I'm not at all looking for some all-encompassing principles or guidelines or whatever. If you provide one or two specific examples in which you chose one level of relative depth over another, I can draw my own conclusions and get something from that.

melnve · Sep 2, 2011

SomethingOrOther said:
[FONT=Georgia, serif]Clyde walked into the room. Snakes draped the chandeliers. [/FONT]

Nothing to do with your actual question, but this makes me think that snakes are draping fabric over the chandeliers... as in, "Snakes draped the chandeliers with light, gauzy fabric. It is well known that snakes enjoy the design effects of draping and mood lighting." :ROFL:

SomethingOrOther · Sep 2, 2011

Yeah snakes' historical contributions to interior design have been unfairly overlooked by most scholars.

Sage · Sep 2, 2011

It depends on the character and what they know and how they personally would voice their thoughts.

In the example above--realizing it was made up on the spot, but using it anyway--I would choose based on whether Clyde knows his mother well enough to jump from the argument to the draping of snakes all over the chandelier. If this is the type of thing she'd do, he wouldn't have to ask the questions, he'd know. If the argument was about snakes or the chandelier or something that is easy to connect the two incidents, he'd probably be able to jump to that conclusion too. But if the argument was about, say, whether his dad should fix the sink himself or call a plumber, and his mom is not prone to do things like decorate the room with snakes, then Clyde would definitely be asking questions instead of providing answers

job · Sep 2, 2011

SomethingOrOther said:
Yeah that's the Q.: how do you decide what you want.

So you're not asking,
'How do you reach deep POV?'
or,
'What are the techniques for controlling the depth of POV?'
or,
'How do you recognize the depth of POV you are achieving?'

You're asking,
'How do you know what POV depth to use?'

It is generally a good idea to vary the depth of POV just for no other reason than the joy of varying it.

Deep POV is excellent its way. It's what we use for most of the story. It pulls the reader in and carries her along. Deep POV gets its fingers into the guts. It elucidates character. It builds voice.

But we do not want to be there all the time.

1) First off, we want to pull out just because Deep POV, unbroken, becomes claustrophobic. We should spend maybe 10% of the story somewhere else just to lighten the load.

2) Shallow POV marks off psychological divisions in the storyline. When we move away from and toward the POV character this way, we also have a sense of separation in the events.

2a) For instance, we go to shallow in POV when we're about to move from one head to another without breaking scene. Not that you are going to do it, because it is very difficult and mostly not worth it.

3) Distant, shallow POV is good for introducing a scene. It lets us ease our toes in, as it were, instead of jumping in with a big splash. Using Shallow POV to start scenes, we provide variety and interest and clearly mark off divisions in the story and keep the reader awake.

4) Shallow POV varies the pace. We feel the story move differently in Shallow and Deep POV.

5) Shallow POV lets us control the speed of action through the story line. Deep POV is perceived as moving in the realtime speed of the action. Shallow POV doesn't need to.

6) We get -- this seems so obvious when you say it -- we get a different viewpoint with Shallow and Deep POVs.

If we are trying for a literal wide sweep of vision -- a panorama or overview -- we leave Deep POV and go into what I would call 'Invisible Narrator'. This is not so solid as Omniscient Narrator, but it is clearly not in the voice of the POV character either.

****

"Let's get the hell under cover." He scraped his fingers, pulling loose canvas from under the bench. He put his arm around Lois and supported her as she hobbled along next to him. They all headed for the trees.

Lightning crack across the sky ... torrents of rain . . . wind ... thunder rumbled ... yada yada . . . the wide grey hills curtains of . . . hailstones . . . in the distance, the sound of angry waters in the Forestville dam . . . yada yada . . .

The dam's going to give way. "I warned them." He had to shout to make himself heard.

****

You see how we spiralled up and away from Deep POV to give that description? We needed the space to get a picture that stretched beyond the POV character. And we needed that broad vision because we are about to move the reader's attention to something that's happening five miles away -- not right under the POV character's nose. Something he knows, but may not perceive with his five senses.

which leads us to
7) Shallow and Deep POV have different perceptions.

What do you want to notice in the scene? If it is close in, do it in Deep POV. If what you want to fix upon is distant and not really perceptible . . . go shallow POV and it will be less obvious this whatever-you-want-them-to-see is not on the list of the first sixteen things the POV character would notice.

Let's say you want to talk about the fire crackling on the hearth because you're going to burn a letter there in the next scene. Go shallow in POV. Take the POV character's attention off his whittling and let the room as a whole come into focus. Now you can describe that crackling fire on the other end of the bedchamber.

You want to talk about the soldier who just walked in? You want to describe him and the history of his regiment? This is not something the POV character would think about because he knows it already.

Draw out of Deep POV. Stay shallow for a paragraph or two, then do your description in Shallow POV. Drop back down deep again afterwards.

When we want to linger on something longer than is natural for the POV character to actually do this -- we shallow up the POV a bit beforehand so we don't get a weird feeling the poor POV character's eyes have just got stuck.

8) We also draw into Shallow POV or even close to Invisible Narrator to discuss certain philosophical ideas or generalizations or bits of backgroundish that we do not want to put into character voice. This is the equivalent, in the intangible sense, of drawing back from the character to give a physical overview of the scene as per the bullet point (6) stuff.

9) We may shallow up the POV for action scenes, since we want to be more exact and descriptive than the Deep POV of a man in a fist fight would allow.
We may also sneak into Omniscient here so we can describe the fight from some distance and make more sense of it.

10) In a somewhat equivalent way, we may go into shallow POV when the POV character is injured, stunned, petrified with fear, concentrated on some aspect of his internals to the exclusion of what is going on around him, or focused on some one bit of the scene when we have to talk about other parts.

Anyhow . . . that's what comes to mind just off the top of my head when we're looking at times to deepen or shallow up POV

amergina · Sep 2, 2011

SomethingOrOther said:
Anyway, when you're dealing with past events (that the character is aware of), how do you decide whether to render them as regular narrative or as introspection?

Instinct at what works best with the scene? Sometimes I'll start as narrative, then change it to introspection if I've spent a while away from the deep POV of the character.

It's really a question of how deeply into the POV you want the reader to be at that moment.

job · Sep 2, 2011

SomethingOrOther said:
"What do you do?" in the sense of "what you do" -- not "what do you do?" in the sense of "what I should do."

In practice, I don't think about technique at all. I go writing along, immersed in the story, and the technical stuff just falls into place without any particular attention on my part.
I think this comes with practice.

If we are talking specifically about techniques for adding backstory to an ongoing manuscript, I have a quite simple way to do this.

I don't.

I write what the character sees and hears and thinks Right Now. No excursions into backstory.

Along about the end of the second draft, there will be some facts vital to understanding. I go back and painstakingly shoehorn in the two hundred words I need to convey this. It generally ends up in dialog.

DeaK · Sep 2, 2011

What a great answer Job!

CBrothers · Sep 2, 2011

I just do what feels right. I think in. Most instances, either would work..but could affect the overall feel of the story, so which are you going for? Only you can answer that.

nchahine · Sep 2, 2011

job said:
In practice, I don't think about technique at all. I go writing along, immersed in the story, and the technical stuff just falls into place without any particular attention on my part.
I think this comes with practice.

If we are talking specifically about techniques for adding backstory to an ongoing manuscript, I have a quite simple way to do this.

I don't.

I write what the character sees and hears and thinks Right Now. No excursions into backstory.

Along about the end of the second draft, there will be some facts vital to understanding. I go back and painstakingly shoehorn in the two hundred words I need to convey this. It generally ends up in dialog.

This is how I do things, also. No backstory if it can be helped. Everything the reader sees is from the MC POV, and there's no reason for the MC to be going over his/her own history through the course of the story. That is, unless the MC has a flashback, or some vital info comes up that forces him/her to remember something that has already happened before the story started.

Of course, you then run into the issue that you've left out vital info and sometimes it's hard to tell what will confuse a reader. But that's what beta readers are for.

MoxieMoth · Sep 2, 2011

job said:
If we are talking specifically about techniques for adding backstory to an ongoing manuscript, I have a quite simple way to do this.

I don't.

I write what the character sees and hears and thinks Right Now. No excursions into backstory.

I agree with this. My struggle is always telling too much, scrubbing away the mystery with my expansive details. I think it stems from my anxiety that anything can only ever make sense to me, and that if I expose details in fragments a reader will get too confused and put my book down, frazzled and agitated.

I'm getting better at focusing the POV on exactly what's relevant to my MC, or what would occur to them. I think this creates a greater degree of empathy, because it's more similar to how experiences are, well...experienced.

Astronomer · Sep 3, 2011

job said:
You're asking,
'How do you know what POV depth to use?'

Thanks, Job, for that very thorough and thoughtful analysis.

SomethingOrOther · Sep 3, 2011

job said:
In practice, I don't think about technique at all. I go writing along, immersed in the story, and the technical stuff just falls into place without any particular attention on my part.
I think this comes with practice.

If we are talking specifically about techniques for adding backstory to an ongoing manuscript, I have a quite simple way to do this.

I don't.

I write what the character sees and hears and thinks Right Now. No excursions into backstory.

Along about the end of the second draft, there will be some facts vital to understanding. I go back and painstakingly shoehorn in the two hundred words I need to convey this. It generally ends up in dialog.

Ty so much. Great job job.

JSDR · Sep 3, 2011

SomethingOrOther said:
Anyway, when you're dealing with past events (that the character is aware of), how do you decide whether to render them as regular narrative or as introspection?

I really liked job's answer to your question. I, too, have struggled with this topic. I admire the exposition of it as a stylistic tool in the books I enjoy reading, but I have not been able to pull it off to the same extent.

One concrete example I can say to answer your question. I don't add past events as introspection if what I'm about to add is a way for the character to overcome an obstacle or challenge. It seems so contrived to me, and I try to avoid it. When revising, and I find that I have done something like that, I remove the introspection and try to find some way to seamlessly integrate it into action in an earlier chapter.

3rd-p-limited POV question!

SomethingOrOther

-

Becca_H

Where am I again?

job

In the end, it's just you and the manuscript

SomethingOrOther

-

melnve

SomethingOrOther

-

Sage

Supreme Guessinator

job

In the end, it's just you and the manuscript

amergina

Pittsburgh Strong

job

In the end, it's just you and the manuscript

DeaK

CBrothers

nchahine

Something should go here...

MoxieMoth

Curtis was supposed to LOVE ME

Astronomer

I'm an excellent poofreader.

SomethingOrOther

-

JSDR

wants moar baddassery.