Basically, I've read somewhere (I think OSC was the one who said it) that you should never attempt to hold things that the POV character knows from the reader.
My problem is the following: I'm trying to write a murder mystery. I would like to take the POV of the murderer because I need him to reflect on the impact of something he witnesses (and which only he can interpret). But this is about 30 pages after the beginnning, so I'm not overkeen on having him say that he did it...
How can I solve the problem? Is it ok to break that rule if it is just a short scene?
Try writing it without this particular scene. Or, if this piece of knowledge really is essential, work out how your detective will find it out. Only if you absolutely can't do either of those things would I consider switching pov to include it.
in a murder mystery, you could even build in an almost prose like timing that gave it the heartbeat feel reminiscent of THE TELL TALE HEART... with each exposure getting more intense and heated as the culprit drops clues about himself that the detective finds during that chapter until the FINAL scene where the "bad-guy" makes the fatal mistake that pins him...
ok, i got intense just talking about it.. i think i may start to write murder mysteries
[This message has been edited by cgamble (edited July 20, 2004).]
I have seen this done before and I HATE it. I had one author slip into the POV's of each of the suspectsd one at a time, describing their actions and motivations but holding back the key truth of which one had done it....it was the worst mystery book I had ever read. Some of the older ones are actually using omniscient viewpoint rather than third person limited, and that's ok (but only OKAY)(. I read this one by Sandra Brown recently that was deeply in the POV of a number of characters, one of which ended up being the killer, and I was so pissed off at the end that I'll probably never read one of her books again.
In other words, Silver, I know there are reasons that you would want to do this, but I highly highly highly recommend that you find some other way. There are many possibilities:
1. Just go through the detective's eyes. I'm writing a murder mystery myself write now, BTW. (It's kind of nice to know I have company around here.) And it is occuring to me that despite al my careful planning and detailed notes on the movement of ever character, at the end, the reader is not going to know every bit of it. Don't get me wrong, they'll know woh did it, why, and how, but there are a couple of minor points that the detecitve just won't ever know for certain, one way or another, and so neither will the reader.
2. You can write athriller rather than a mystery. A suspense thriller usualy goes into the POV of the bad guy. We know who did it, why, and how, more than the dtective knows, but we still see him going through the process. The draw of these books is usually an element of danger. But you still don't hide things from the reader.
3. Try a very shallowly immersed omniscient viewpoint throughout the book in which you don't even really know all that much about the detective. Agatha Christie (sp?) wrote like this, but I don't think you can get away with it in today's market.
But basically no, I do not think there is a way to keep secrets from the reader if you are in the POV of the character who knows them without making me want to throttle you. As you can see from my hot-headed examples, it does not make it impossible to get *published* but it does make it impossible for me to like your story.
Use your creativity...come up with a different out. Maybe someone else saw what needs to be seen. Heck, maybe someone else did it. The best advice I got on a story was that nothing is sacred....learning that allowed me to finally ditch the trash I had been clinging to in some of my favorite stories.
You might be able to delve VERY deeply into his thoughts and motivations and provide clues to his edentity for later on.
It seems I've seen this used somewhere--can't say specifically where. Maybe in a lot of places.
I dunno.
Silver, I say GO FOR IT!
I'm just saying that many stories written in different eras could not sell today, for one reason or another. Writing has grown, changed, and evolved. She worked with different rules and she was not writing in a third person limited viewpoint.
quote:
I'm just saying that many stories written in different eras could not sell today, for one reason or another. Writing has grown, changed, and evolved. She worked with different rules and she was not writing in a third person limited viewpoint.
I've thought about this some. What I've often wondered is, where are we going next? We have come to a point where third person limited is well honed and highly popular (though there are plenty of published authors out there who just don't get it). Will we eventually move past this as a general trend? If so, what might we move on to?
quote:
Will we eventually move past this as a general trend? If so, what might we move on to?
Thanks, Eric, I needed a laugh today.
Or should I say...Christine needed a laugh today.
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited July 20, 2004).]
I'd say try to work the story around so you can leave this out, reveal it only from a POV not of the killer, or reveal it from the killer's POV only after we know that he/she is the killer.
The nameless POV segment is probably then the next best bet, but I always find those tend to be on the icky side. Who really wants to find themselves reading along and then plunged into that unbalanced POV?
PS--my daughter assures me that if she had killed someone, and was doing something that required her concentration, she wouldn't be thinking about the murder no matter how soon it was. It makes me wonder whether she has. . . .
In fact, it is impossible to spout out the strem of knowledge that any one person has, even myself. I would miss something. This is why it has always made more sense for me that telepaths read surface thoughts...
But sometimes you have to relay things the POV character knows that are not his immediate thoughts. This happens most often when you have a sentence or paragarph of backfill or background.
What you do create with a TPL POV is a closeness with that character; a feeling of intimacy. You're meant to feel like you know them. If you have a third person limited narrator who holds things back and this is understood, then he is an unreliable narrator and the entire book becomes dubious. At least, that is how I've felt when authors have done it to me.
It's not all about conscioussness and cognitive effort....what you're thinking about at the moment. Something that important and *relevant* to the story being kept from the reader doesn't happen without extreme consequences.
If this is a murder mystery rather than a Homicide Investigation mystery, then the killer is actively trying to pretend innocence, and thus is pretty much always thinking about the murder.
Agatha Christie also did it in one of her novels (I will put the title in my next post)
What they both did was use a form of first person in which the idea is that the story was written by the narrator, so the narrator could put in whatever he/she wished to include--written down very carefully instead of just told with all thoughts included.
What you could do, if you really need to have something in your story supposedly from the killer's point of view, is have the killer tell it in dialog (so you are getting only what the killer says to another person about what happened).
By the way, a good example of showing a murder from the murderer's point of view without disclosing the murder's identity is in DARK MATTER by Garfield Reeves-Stevens and it comes at the very beginning.
iamputtingthetitleinthisformatsoitwon'tbeso
easytojustglanceatandseeimmediatelybecause
thismysteryisconsideredaclassicandidon'twant
tospoilitforthosewhothemurderofrogerackroyd
mightenjoyreadingit
Now, if you made each of the suspects act like an Unreliable Narrator, it might work, but that could get very confusing to the reader.
If you're willing to try a thriller, then including his POV would probably help.
You could cheat and switch to first person for just that one scene/chapter so you never have to actually use the character's name. But I'm not sure if the audience would respond well to that or not...
my 2 pennies....