The thing is, I have one scene where only one of those characters is present, and he and the others get in a fight and he gets knocked unconscious. I really don't want to have to go into the head of one of the other "main" characters whose thoughts we have never heard, but I can't really skip the rest of the action either. Do I just write the rest of that scene as 3rd person with no deep penetration at all? That seems somewhat... boring. John punched Jane. Jane punched back. etc etc. Without going into someone's head, it gets bogged down.
So do I just write it in 3rd person from no particular person's POV, or do I just have to choose someone else's head to go into for the rest of that scene?
Personally, I'd suggest doing as Paul-girtbooks suggest--sticking to a single POV for any single scene. If you split it between two scenes as he suggests, I think it would work better. On the other hand, I've seen books and stories where scenes in a story have been told over from different points of view. I don't like this technique because I think its cheating and shows little imagination. It seems like the author in these cases just didn't know how to do it any other way, or had no real good ideas on what to write, so they just rewrote what happened before, but some authors do it.
I also don't think its a good idea for any beginning author trying to break into publishing to break the 'rules'. Once established you can break whatever you want, but before then, it's probably a good idea to stick to standard practice.
What I have done for the entire scene is use a type of omniscient viewpoint that can see everything that is going on (beyond what the PoV character is noticing at the moment), but as a rule the viewpoint can only dip into the internal feelings and thoughts of the one PoV character. This character shifts twice, since the first one leaves the scene, and the second one gets incapacitated. At each of those shifts, I leave a blank line in the text and then continue on with my limited omniscient viewpoint, only from the PoV of a different character. It sounds messy when I have to describe it, but it actually flows very smoothly.
Might that work for you?
Edited for verb tense.
[This message has been edited by sojoyful (edited December 04, 2005).]
The "problem" I have here is that the only characters left are ones I've never dipped into. They have been central to the story, and the reader knows them fairly well by now, but I've never written from any of their viewpoints (yet, at least).
The feeling you get (or at least, I hope a reader would get) is not necesarrily that you are following a "main character" through a story, but that you are following this group of 4-5 people, but with an emphasis on those 1-2 whose thoughts I dip into. As such, it feels like cheating for me to cut the action scene right as it's really starting up, just because one of the characters falls unconscious.
Is it really "breaking the rules" to change the viewpoint character (NOT the POV, just the character you're focusing in on) in the middle of a chapter, with a line break like sojoyful suggested?
It is difficult to use Full Omniscient and still draw the reader in. However, I dont think you need the Full Omniscient.
You do not need to have previous used a character's PoV if you need to use a new PoV to describe action.
But, I agree with the theory of letting us know as the primary characters figure out what happened while they were out.
That said, you truly can switch POV in the same scene. I've done it, and nobody moaned. The trick, I think, is making it so smooth that it's almost unnoticeable. In my case, I had the MC fall asleep while his neural implant AI finished up some tasks on the MC's computer. In that case it worked. I switched from 3rd person to omniscient, and perhaps importantly, it occured at the end of a scene for only one paragraph.
The very end of a scene is a good place to do something "unorthodox." But you have to have a good reason for it.
And someone above mentioned using a scene break. Perfectly legimitate if you absolutely must show the fighting as it happened. Break, and immediately pick up where the action left off. No gap in time. You can even go back in time to have the new POV see the previous character getting knocked unconscious, if you want.
Of course, another option is to write the entire scene from another character's POV. Nothing wrong with that...
There's lots of things that can be done...
You can do whatever you like, really. Some people will moan about POV this, or 'you can't do that' that, but if something is done well enough and for good reason, most people won't even notice.
Thanks for all the input.
Whenever a head injury "knocks" a character unconscious it smacks of 1970s detective TV melodrama. It is both cliche and unrealistic.
You can have your POV character taken out of the figtht without losing consciousness. The scene will be more dramatic if the character witnesses the battle while he/she is helpless and in pain.
quote:
Whenever a head injury "knocks" a character unconscious it smacks of 1970s detective TV melodrama. It is both cliche and unrealistic.
I think that's a personal opinion.
Yes, if it's done a la the early James Bond films, where one clean *clunk* on the back of the neck always put the bad guys out, then it'll be a bit hard to take seriously (unless you're going for satire!) But I think it's plenty reasonable for someone to get knocked out during a fight. Especially if they already have other injuries making them weak. I used to do martial arts, and I can promise you that a blow to the head definately befuddles the ol' noggin. Hard enough, and it would put me out, at least.
In fact the only reason he survives at all is my story is in a fantasy setting and one of his friends uses some magic to keep him alive while the others engage the people responsible.
I was thinking of making it from his helpless POV for awhile, but he would be so critically injured, I don't think he could rationally understand what was happening, even if he did stay conscious.
[This message has been edited by AstroStewart (edited December 08, 2005).]
The cliche and unrealistic scenario is when characters are frequently knocked unconscious by head injuries but later make full recoveries. I believe it is especially unrealistic in a battle, where their helpless body seems unlikely to survive unmolested.
Never mind James Bond, that sort of writing might as well be The Three Stooges.