Help me choose my POV

If omniscient POV works for your book, I say go for it. But there's a major catch: you will need to work this POV with masterful craft if you hope to pitch it to a large publisher. The technique is not stylish these days, although many past masters have worked in it. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, it's simply not considered sexy right now.

If you go with, say, rotating limited, you're not limited to saying "he said" or "she felt" to show the reader what's in the POV character's mind. One technique is to have the character (for now, let's assume it's Tanya) think or say, "Of course, he understood absolutely nothing about it." Your reader will know from your prior description that he does, in fact, know a great deal about it, so the reader knows Tanya's thought is erroneous.

Typical limited multiple POV handling is accomplished by taking any given scene, determining who has the most at stake in that scene (it won't always be your principal), and writing the scene in that character's POV. Scene breaks are used when POV switches between him and her.

Another note is that many, if not most, romance publishers will not accept a romance where He and She do not meet until a third of the way through the book. And if you write it starting with Tanya's POV, those scenes that do not include her are right out -- you cannot show anything that a POV character doesn't witness, either first-hand or via communication with another character.

Best luck -- keep your mind open as to different ways of handling your story, to give it the maximum chance to find favor.

^^^ Pretty much all of what Deb said. I would add that what you might try is to write Alex's POV from wherever he is at the same time you introduce Tanya. The hero needs his own path--goals, plans, dreams--just as the heroine does. It's in the meeting of the two and the upending of their plans by the other person that the readers want to follow.

I think omni is pretty rare these days, so that's one reason to avoid it - might be harder to sell! And I think it can sometimes sprawl if the author isn't really disciplined... just because you CAN tell everything doesn't mean you should.

Writing in limited third imposes a bit of structure on the story. Not that you don't still have to pick and chose what's included, but there's less potential for going completely off the rails.

In terms of 'explaining the significance' of the love scenes, I'd say you can do that even within limited third, by having your viewpoint character realize things about her partner, or by having the partner actually speak the words you want understood. If the whole book is mostly from one character's POV, I don't think you need to change that just for a few love scenes.

ETA: I missed what sub-forum we were in! OP - is your book women's fiction, rather than romance? Otherwise, I agree with the others about some structural concerns.

Once you reach 50 posts, you could start a thread in SYW for feedback. Perhaps post a sample scene in one voice, then another scene, another voice for comparison.

There are extra challenges to writing in omniscient. It's not just a matter of "you can present everyone's thoughts/emotions without any limitation." Instead, since you're not having the reader bond with the POV character, you need to create a narrator the reader will bond with. That can be more of a challenge than creating a character the reader will bond with (and it's something that requires large numbers of balls or eggs, as the case may be.) It can be the author-as-narrator, but it needs to be a strong enough personality to make the reader bond with it. Someone like Terry Pratchett excels at this, because his authorial persona is so strong that it doesn't get overshadowed by his characters. Not all writers have such a strong and interesting authorial persona.

Generally, omniscient works better in stories where there can be some distance between the reader and the POV characters. That distance is created by inserting the narrator between the reader and the character. (If you study Pratchett, even when it appears that he's deep inside a character's head, there's always some little reminder that the experience is being filtered through Terry's head.) It works particularly well in humor and some types of science fiction, but generally not so well in stories that are all about the emotion (which is the very core of romance and women's fiction).

So, here's the bottom line: readers need to bond with someone in the story, or they'll feel detached from the story. In omniscient, the reader bonds with the narrator (either a godlike character separate from the author or else the author). In non-omniscient POVs, the reader bonds with the POV character(s). If that POV changes every few sentences, the bond keeps getting broken. Bob Mayer has used the metaphor of a video camera (those big, bulky professional ones that weigh fifty pounds or more). Think of the pov character as that camera, observing and recording impressions of everyone around it. Every time you switch from one person's pov to another, the action stops and the camera has to be moved from person to person. It's no big deal if the camera moves every five or ten pages (typical scene lengths, and about five or ten minutes of reading time). Imagine, though, if the camera moves every sentence. That's every few seconds. How deeply connected is the reader going to be if every few seconds she's got to stop and wait for the camera to move to someone else, knowing that she's only going to be experiencing the camera on that person's shoulder for another few seconds, and then there will be another disruption that's almost as long as the time she spent in that pov?

And if you're wondering, if you apply that metaphor to omniscient POV, the camera stays on ONE person's shoulder for the entire book -- the narrator's. There's no switching from shoulder to shoulder, even though the narrator is talking about what someone else is thinking.

So, the question is: who do you want the reader to bond with? Some godlike narrator who's a character in her own right? You the author? Or the hero and heroine (i.e., the main POV characters)? The first two are omniscient; the latter is third limited.

That determines the ideal POV. Omniscient is not simply "third, with no pesky limitations." It's more complicated than that, and a subtle thing that's difficult to put into words. It's one of those "when you see it well done, you know it." If you're at all inclined toward doing omniscient, Terry Pratchett is worth studying, looking for the clues that there's a narrator on the page.

I agree with GinJones in general, but I think it's possible for a skillful writer to have readers bond with characters in omniscient, as well.

Jane Austen, for example, has a pronounced narrative voice, but we bond with her characters because they are so richly drawn.

morngnstar said:

I think you just proved the rule with the exception. I don't think I can be Jane Austen, and even if I could, I wouldn't want to be, not for this book anyway. She spends 900 words on character for every 100 on advancing plot. My plot wants to be too fast-paced for that.

Click to expand...

Well, there are more people who've written in omni than just Jane. But if you're happy with your decision, excellent!

I don't entirely disagree, Captcha. I just adore Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal, so in that sense I'm bonded to him, but it's not quite as tight as if the POV were truly third-limited. There's still this teeny-weeny bit of distance that in a less skilled author's hand would completely break the bond.

I didn't notice on first reading, but when I went back to study the Lipwig scenes in GP, there were definitely little reminders every few paragraphs, that I was delving into Moist's thoughts/feelings, but as translated by Terry. It's close, but not quite, third-limited.

Of course, Sir Terry is a total genius, like Jane Austen, and I know I don't have the chops to use omniscient as well as they do, so I admire them and study them and stick to a pov I know I can handle.

Since you said you want the hero to be a surprise, I'm assuming this is more woman's fiction than genre romance. Romance readers have certain expectations. One of them is that the hero will be introduced early, even if he doesn't get with the heroine right away. There seems to be a very hero-centric trend in romance these days where the hero gets as much page time as the heroine.

What Jules said. Some publishers will not accept a romance novel in which both mains are not introduced to the reader in the first chapter. Some seem to insist on the Meeting on the first page, which sounds dumb to me. Not every convention works for every story.

I'm also wondering if those scenes to which you refer above--the ones without Tanya or Alex in them--are even necessary to your story? I haven't seen your work, of course, so I don't know what those scenes serve to do, but you might consider whether you could "tell" those scenes, convey that information, in a scene with one of the principals in it, instead. Whenever I've tried this and tried to insist it's necessary, my editor has slashed her red pen right through all that erudite brilliance.

HTH