What I caught myself doing is starting the conversation out from on character's POV. Halfway through, I switch to the other. A bit further on, I switch back, and to wrap it up, I do one final switch.

Yes, I can see all of you out there getting dizzy just thinking about it, and truly, I don't think it's as bad as I'm making it sound. Then again, I'm not most impartial observer on such topics. However, the scene has never felt right, which says to me that something IS wrong.

One of the characters has a scene immediately afterwards . . . I could do a 'reflection' sort of thing, but it loses some of the immediacy, I think. Besides which I had wanted to do that scene from yet ANOTHER character's POV.

You see my problem, I hope. In recent reflection, I realize that this is a chronic problem for me, and is one of the reasons I have only written short stories up to this point. You can get away with rapid POV shifts in short stories if you do it right. But this is a novel-length story, and I'm having trouble slowing everything down.

Anyway, if anybody has advice on how I solve this problem (or whether it's really even a problem) I would welcome it. My writing group'll see this in a couple o' weeks anyway, but in the meantime, HELP!

And finally. Let's have a warm round of applause for Kathleen, who keeps this forum running so smoothly, gives great advice, and answers all her e-mail promptly. There are few better moderators out there.

-Falken

'How about a nice game of chess.' -Joshua

As for your POV problem, my first thought is that it may be okay to do the switching during the conversation if it works. (In fact, if something works, no matter what rule it breaks, it's okay. The "rules" are there mainly to help writers know what works most of the time. But if something works in spite of the rules, then go with it.)

The fact that you aren't comfortable with it tells me that it doesn't work, however.

My second thought is that since you are not sticking with any one POV in your book, the reader will be okay with different POVs for different scenes (and your conscientiousness with regard to the different scenes is good).

What you may want to consider trying, instead of a ping-pong POV arrangement, is to use, just for that scene, omniscient POV (which is tricky, I know, but it might just work best for you here).

What you do is let the reader know right off the bat that you are firmly in everyone's head by sharing each person's thoughts as you show that they are in the scene (as you introduce them). Then you continue to do that throughout the scene.

I don't know if it will work, but it is certainly worth a try--and it's good exercise besides.

Another thing you could try is not going into anyone's head (aka "limited third person" or "camera eye" POV) and see if your characters are good enough actors to convey their thoughts to the reader if not to each other.

If all else fails, you could ask for volunteers to read through your different scene attempts and make suggestions. They wouldn't need to read the whole story, just the scene you're having trouble with.

Now, down to buisness. I think that the idea to use an omniscant pov is a good idea, but you would have to go into it consciously and be careful that you let the reader know right away that you're in everybodies head.

The omniscant view might not work if you've already written a large portion of the story from 1st person perspectives. It would just seem out of place (that happens to me a lot, my current work is first and I usually use omniscant so I have to remember not to. Quite a headache). You could jump back and forth between perspectives, but again that might be confusing. Unless I read the scene (which I gladly will if you would like) I'm not sure if it's nescessary to switch more than once. I would go into the scene from one char's pov and stay in his/her head up until about halfway through. Then put in a minor climax, break, and switch the pov then follow out the rest of the scene with the second point of view. From what you've said that might work, but I don't know. E-mail me if you'd like me to read the scene for you.

My personal feeling is that if you are going to be switching around POV significantly, such that the story isn't told solely from a single character's POV or perhaps the balanced POV's of two or three main characters, then Omniscient isn't a bad choice, but you have to remember that in Omniscient, you are omniscient!

When you write in Omniscient, there is never any justification for not telling the audience when something important occurs, no matter how invisible to all of the characters. If the table is about to collapse because of termite activity in the house, you must mention it, preferably before there is any indication to the characters that the table is going to collapse.

For this reason, good Omniscient is very difficult to write well, and requires detailed knowledge of causality within the world of the story, otherwise it comes off very weak. The best use of Omniscient is in stories that are sort of "proofs" that a sequence of events is possible (Clancy) rather than in stories that ask "what if" something happened.

Because Omniscient stories function as informal proofs in this sense, they are held to a very high standard of realism and detail by readers, who want to know exactly how the events of the story come to pass. When you write Omniscient, you have nothing to hide behind when something inexplicable occurs, because you're purporting to be All-knowing.

Anyway, I just say all this because your central dilemna, which POV or both, seems to require either giving up part of the story you're telling or telling it in Omniscient. I generically would suggest going with just one POV.

On the other hand, I've been ping-ponged pretty badly on occasion even by some of the better writers out there.

Here's my theory: This scene is most likely more pivotal to one character's (A) development arc than it is to the other's. Go with that one.
It can sometimes be more powerful to have the second character's (B) perspective shown at a later time through reflection (or, better yet, through dialogue with a third character with whom B is not so guarded.) The thing that I really like about that is that the reader will have had a chance to experience a scene one way. Then, down the road, you can grab that reader and say, "look, through the other guy's eyes what happened is very different."

LOTR is a special case for a simple reason, it is written as a retelling of an epic cycle (albeit one invented by Tolkien rather than one having prior existance). The actual devices in the writing are realistically primative, though whether this is entirely a consciously developed effect is doubtful. I think that it is far more likely that Tolkien primarially learned how to write fiction by studying the epic cycles that were his scholastic specialty, and thus the primative POV, awkward and contrived dialogue, heroically foolish odds, and other naive features his work shares with the older epic literature is at least partly just his idea of how to write. But even so, the Lord of the Rings is a beautiful example of Epic literature, fulfilling all that Tolkien wished for the work (other than promugating Christianity, in which it doesn't seem to have particularly succeeded).

Have you considered restaging the scene? You might reveal all of this through two or more different conversations. One character might reveal his/her motivation to another character before your conversation begins.

Actually, I did write a short story once that did exactly what you're talking about. The central event was a lightning strike. Was kind of about a whole bunch of people at a party and I went from several of their perspectives in overlapping points of time. Each perspective brings out a bit more of the story, build a bit more tension 'till the final strike. I was actually rather proud of it, and had a lot of fun, but I can't really find anybody to read it, so I don't know how well it worked. None of my family/friends are really writers or have much interest in reading my stuff. *sigh*