In the past things were very simple. There was a template that all the writers used. Russian writers had a technique were they had a chapter, providing character characteristics, thoughts and life philosophy. English writers had another template.
Today we have an infinity of techniques which is really good if you want to express yourself in a "special" way but it is also very confusing.
I have a book that i wrote when i was young and today i rewrite it, adding more meaning and deepness.
The book was written in a third point of view - the "he did, she said" writing which is, i guess, the easiest way.
Now i am thinking to change it and i wanted your opinion, because the change i want to make is not a usual one.
The book has 3 parts: about a father, about a servant and about a princess (of course!). The first part is informative, introducing the new world and its history. The second and the third part are about two people whose relationship cant grow because they come from different worlds and they need to change in order to become equals.
I have thought of writing the first part in a third point of view, the second part in a first point of view of the servant and the third part with a point of view of the princess. I think that first point of view has a lot of benefits when you are writing about human nature.
Will it be very confusing for the reader? Should i choose just the third point of view and that's it?
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
Whatever you think works when you're writing it---so long as the character is central to the point of the story. But you might want to consider keeping the POV to the servant and princess---those most affected by the story, those most likely to be hurt by what goes down.
Posted by Brooke18 (Member # 10220) on :
Robert's right. Just make sure it flows with whatever point of view you choose and you'll be fine! That's one of the perks of writing your own book!
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
"But you might want to consider keeping the POV to the servant and princess--"
Robert, this is exactly what i want to do. The first part in third person because the world needs to be introduces and it influences the princes birth. The 2 other parts are the crucial ones because the point in them is to show the change in the princess and the servant personalities as they grow from children to youth and until they become equals and only then they can be together.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
You might consider introducing the world in the course of the reader getting to know the characters as they see what the characters are doing. Right now it sounds like this first part might just be info dumping---which can be interesting, too---but making it interesting might be difficult to do.
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
The first part, at least for now, is critical.
The idea of the book: the world they live in, is something like Greek mythology. We have gods who live in their world and we have people who live in a shadow world, created by gods.
Now all people, by the Greek mythology have a future that is known. There are special weavers that weave the lines of the future.
Only one family in this world dont have lines of future, meaning they are a big unknown and this scares gods. The reason the boy without the future can live, is because he is a son of a goddess and he helped the gods defeat some dark power.
Now this whole plot is around the time where the boy is already a man and want to have children. But the gods decided he wont have them because they want this line of people with no future to be gone.
His mother decides to go against all other gods and give him and his wife a child.
This child is the princess and the book is about her birth and hew growing up. In different stages of her life, gods decides if they want to kill her but they need all gods to agree and all the time at least one wants to keep her from different reasons (that depend on her decisions in life).
It ends when all the gods decides that the world need people like her -without a known future. And when she and the servant find their love
I think that beginning the story with her birth omitting the first part will cause a lot of explaining that will influence the fluency of the book. When i describe them in present time, they are active and not passive memories.
Although i dont have a lot of experience, so maybe you can advice me another idea of telling the story?
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
I see what your struggling with.
Sometimes, as writers, we have to write that stuff out before we can really start the story. The key in that case is to make sure we cut it afterward. More frequently than you think, all that background isn't really essential to the reader.
You'll never get most readers to plow through what is essentially a long prologue. Keep that initial section if--and only if--you can make it a real story. Readers will only stick with it if they have characters and/or a story they can care about. Background won't hook and hold them.
Otherwise, at least experiment with allowing the readers to discover the world as they go along, revealing details unobtrusively as they become relevant.
Also, is there a reason why you're segregating the servant's pov and the princess's in different sections? Why not try alternating points of view?
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
Meredith - thanks for the review.
First- the story, as it written now, is flowing with the time. Meaning- i don't write from the future, then from the past or from 2 different perspectives of the present.
The father is the first part and his decisions influence the princess birth and the servant existence. When you say "make it a real story" - what do you mean exactly? How bad is it if you think this is about the father but he is going to die and pass the story to his daughter in chapter 4?
The second part is about the princess and the servant and they adventures when they are children.
The third part is about them when they are young adults.
I thought of telling it from the first person in order to deepen their characters because now i realize that i have two main points i want to have in the story. 1. We make our life. Future is not decided. 2. In order for 2 people to have a loving relationship they must be equals.
So the first part i thought to tell from the servant POV. How he idolized the princess, how she herself thinks about the world as a granddaughter of a goddess. In the struggle their part is changing. When they were children she decided what to do and he did it. Later she is the one who will become a servant and he will be a free man.
So the third part is the princess POV when she is not a princess anymore but a servant. And she changes "down" when he is changing "up" until they meet each other on the equal ground.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
I see several challenges for how this novel's shape is organized and several close similarities to William Thackeray Makepeace's Vanity Fair.
Shape-wise, the central veiwpoint character foregrounded and two other main viewpoint chararcters is a challenge. This creates a protagonist, deuteragonist, triagonist situation. Three focal characters means three personal dramatic complications that should be related, and a need for an overall dramatic complication. That's four at least. More than one viewpoint character and more than one dramatic complication is challenging for a debut novel writer. Also, by and large, multiple viewpoints and dramatic complications are challenging for readers generally to follow along. Vanity Fair manages those challenges.
From what's given, I see the princess as the focal viewpoint character. She has the potentially most antagonizing dramatic complication to satisfy: her loss of her father's place in her life, her loss of social station, her greatest personal costs and greatest potential for personal growth.
A central dramatic complication I see is a theme of social station mobility. The king father struggles to maintain his station, the princess loses hers, the servant's is upward mobility. For many U.S. natives and immigrants, social station mobility is the so-called "American Dream." That fantasy, and by "fantasy" I don't mean the genre, or a fairytale wish fulfillment fantasy, or an impossible milieu reality, etc., I mean an ambition ideology common to a culture, a want, so to speak, that is one of the two identities of a dramatic complication. Problem being the other.
The servant in that regard has the greatest dramatic complication, he seeks better fortunes and faces the greatest obstacles. Yet a fall from grace is a tragedy, from good to bad fortunes, the princess's outcome. Beautiful tragedy outcomes are generally more appealing than comedy outcomes like that. The former are noble inspirations in an adverse world, surviving loss nobly, the latter feel-good optimisms in a cruel world.
The single plot overall, for this and any narrative, is a process of transformation: from good to bad fortunes, bad to good, or bad to worse. Good to better fortunes is not drama and is widely unappealing. The father's transformation is good to bad, the princess's is good to bad, the servant's is bad to good.
Congruent to their fortune transformations are personal maturation transformations: the father loses his maturation growth struggle, the princess wins hers, the servant wins his. Perhaps the father dies still with an inflated sense of self-importance, the princess overcomes her inflated sense of self-importance, and the servant develops a healthy sense of self-worth.
Transformation is a key for dramatic structure--plot. And pecking order for viewpoint agonists--contestants, is another key. Defining the central viewpoint character and the contest and outcome parameters is one way to meet the challenges that this novel poses.
Though the personal journeys are taken more or less physically together, one feature given is a key for starting at a distance from each other for the princess and the servant: their separation in social station. She falls from grace, he moves up, so that they meet in the middle as an outcome. That to me is the overall journey of the narrative.
Please note that POV is a narrative point of view, the overall narrative approach to a narrative. This is a question of who is the narrator and how much access the narrator has to the dramatic action,. First person, the narrator is a participant in the unfolding dramatic action. A third-person narrator has numerous possible degrees of participation in attitude expression and is not usually a participant in the action. For the latter, the narrator portrays participating viewpoint characters' dramatic action.
I've proofread, edited, and critiqued many English second language writers' writing. Your writing that I've sampled so far suggests to me your novel will need close editing scrutiny. That too is a challenge that you will meet.
[ March 26, 2014, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
quote:Originally posted by rysalo4ka: Meredith - thanks for the review.
First- the story, as it written now, is flowing with the time. Meaning- i don't write from the future, then from the past or from 2 different perspectives of the present.
When you say "make it a real story" - what do you mean exactly? How bad is it if you think this is about the father but he is going to die and pass the story to his daughter in chapter 4?
To address the second point first: To quote (I think) David Farland, a story is "A character, in a setting, with a problem". I would add that to make it a story anyone is going to read, the readers have to care about at least one of those three elements--preferably, all three.
In other words, to make those first four chapters work as something other than an extended prologue, you have to make the reader really care about the father. Then you're going to kill him off. Some readers will stop right there.
As for the first point, believe me, I get it. I've got a story right now that crosses two generations. I'm also writing the first draft in chronological order.
The beginning of the story is very definitely a story by the above definition. And readers of the first few chapters (it goes way more than four chapters) have indicated that it's an interesting one. I'm telling that story fully, going deep into the first protagonist's pov, showing his decisions and their consequences, etc. Not just giving an overview. It takes more words to do that, of course, but it's really necessary to hook the reader into the story. One of the absolute rules of writing is "Don't bore the reader."
But I've done this with the understanding that I'm almost certainly going to have to make some structural changes in later drafts. I can't spend the opening chapters making the reader believe this is a story about one character and then just demote him to a side character and switch to two others. Somehow, in later drafts, I'll have to mix things up so the reader knows that those other two characters are coming and they're important (partly to help resolve the first character's problem). It's an issue I haven't resolved yet, but I know I'll have to.
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
extrinsic, first of all - thank you very much for your opinion. You put together the ideas i had from couple sentences that i wrote without even reading the book itself.
I just want to explain - i am not going to write the book in English. I love the language and i read fluently in it but it is my third language and its not mature enough for me to write using it.
That being said, it doesnt matter what language i use because writing a good book isnt about the language, but about all you said - characters, development - the story.
You had the idea of the story correct: The father dies still with an inflated sense of self-importance - he doesn't understand what happened and why and blames everyone else (gods) but himself, the princess overcomes her inflated sense of self-importance, and the servant develops a healthy sense of self-worth.
I have the vision and i have the adventures. I am just struggling with the "how" to begin - with the easiest approach of a third person or trying to make a first person. The later cant be dont for the whole book, and if i choose the later, i dont want to write from the princess view alone since the servant is an equally important person.
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
Meredith, when you solve the problem - let me know
by the way, "The pillars of the earth" are also about two generations. How do you think they solve the death of the main character there?
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
Third person's strength is psychic motility, a narrator's ability to move freely about the emotional landscape of a narrative, through events, settings, and characters, through character thoughts, superficially or deeply, through settings that may not of necessitity portray characters or events. A narrator may arrive at a battlefield before the contestant armies and before events begin.
Basic criteria for scenes' dramatic movement--plot movement--are antagonism, causation, and tension. A swampy battlefield is problematic; therefore, antagonizing, causal, and tension evoking.
Meredith's and your struggle with spanning generations is easiest and most appealingly managed with a third-person limited omniscient narrator approach. The single need for the whole, though, is a relevant, central dramatic complication that spans the whole.
Father generation passes the complication on to child generation unsatisfied. Be that complication external, like a kingdom cruelly oppressed by an emperor tyrant, or internal, like an overly inflated self-importance causing problems. A princess would naturally inherit both, since the king didn't satisfy either. The servant may be the agency by which the princess satisfies the complication. Thus linking the three characters and their dualities of external and internal complications to the central dramatic complication.
Dramatic complication is the kernel of dramatic arts, stage, film, written word, regardless.
Dramatic complication is antagonizing wants and problems wanting satisfaction.
A beginning act introduces a central dramatic complication; a middle act portrays efforts to satisfy the complication; an ending act is the outcome of the complication. This is drama.
[ March 26, 2014, 02:42 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
quote:Originally posted by rysalo4ka: Meredith, when you solve the problem - let me know
by the way, "The pillars of the earth" are also about two generations. How do you think they solve the death of the main character there?
Likely the solution for my story won't be the same as for yours. In mine, the first character survives, having spectacularly failed to achieve his goal. The next generation, in order to resolve their own issues, will have to help him finally get it right. So his story and his failure really is integral to the whole, not background to it.
I haven't read THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, so I can't answer that question.
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
This is drama even though we have an adventure and a fantasy world? Is it ok to mix it up?
I will take your advice and i will remain with the third person. As you said - the father is vain and don't understand life. The princess is like her father but the servant is unlike the princess mother who accepted her husband ruling. The servant seeks freedom and after he is given a chance, he becomes the one that solves their problems and not the princess. So maybe it is a little bit too much criticism but princess parents were two people that were good together because her mother was soft and walk after her father and the plot clearly states that a couple of an equal position has a better chance for a happiness.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
Fiction, regardless of genre, is a dramatic art and is drama.
quote:rysalo4ka: the plot clearly states that a couple of an equal position has a better chance for a happiness.
That's a profound insight about one of plot's more nuanced features and functions, communicating a message and moral using rhetorical methods.
[ March 26, 2014, 02:35 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by rysalo4ka (Member # 10240) on :
So now we just need to see if i will be able to communicate this message using my story
Thanks for all your insights!
Posted by jerich100 (Member # 10202) on :
I've never read or heard of a story that switches between first and third persons.
There's no reason why yours can't be the first. But you must not forget something very important. If you depart from the norm, you must know exactly what you're doing.
For example, Nadia Boulanger (French) was one of the most famous music teachers of her time. Her students included Aaron Copland, Burt Bacharach, and many others. George Gershwin wanted to be one of her students but she declined him. Her reason? Because Gershwin broke musical rules and she thought if she taught him she'd ruin him.
I've read several Stephen King books. I've noticed he likes to change his "style" radically between books, almost as if he's showing off (my opinion). One of his books, "Dolores Claiborne", is one continual discussion in first person. The entire book is one chapter. It is Dolores answering questions from a police interrogator. You never get to read his/her questions, but only her responses. (I couldn't read it—it was like reading concrete.) Another one of his books he wrote entirely in pencil--using the same type of pencil used by the lead anti-hero of that novel (The Dark Half).
Break "rules" by all means, but you'll have to be like Gershwin: be REALLY GOOD at it.
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
I remember at least one Darkover book by Marion Zimmer Bradley in which she switched between points of view. In the book I'm thinking of she has the chapters about Regis Hastur in third person and the chapters about Lew Alton in first person (Lew's POV).
This worked very well, as I recall, and the different points of view signalled to the reader which character each chapter was about.
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