posted
Ok, I strongly suspect that this topic has also been discussed, but I've looked in the last 45 days and couldn't find it.
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?
posted
It _can_ and most certainly _has_ been done like that before now. But it is very unusual for a mystery to include anything in the narrative that isn't known to the 'detective' character, the theory being that it should be as hard for the reader to work out what's going on as it is for the detective. (The obvious corrolary is that everything the detective knows about the case should be in there, so that it is no easier for the detective to work it out than it is for the reader).
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.
posted
Is it possible to switch POV at the beginnning of the chapter and reveal the information as an anonymous third party type person. I have to admit, that technique has really hooked me on one of the books i read in particular.. of course, you cant just do it once, you kind of have to do it for several chapters until the anonymous one reveals himself i think...
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.
posted
Yes, that is a classic suspense/thriller structure. It can be used without actually naming the murderer so that the reader does not know who he/she is, but it usually still means that the reader knows more than the detective and therefore has more ability to guess who it is earlier.
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
LL, I read that story recently, but the trouble is that it was from a different time. Christie was not exactly using third person limitd viewpoint as we know it today. To be perfectly frank, in order to enjoy the story I had to set aside some ideas about poitn of view that I've come to embrace.
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.
posted
I suppose you could do what Dan Brown did in Da Vinci Code... give the character a title of sorts, one that is meaningful (not just "the Killer"), but does not give away his identity. I would not recommend this, though. 1) It's difficult to do without making the reader feel cheated, 2) Dan Brown is a terrible writer and not someone I would ever want to immitate.
Posts: 292 | Registered: Feb 2004
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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?
Eric James Stone knows what the trend is going to be. He learned it from former Presidential candidate Bob Dole: It is first-person narrative in which the narrator refers to himself in the third person.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Gah... Da Vinci Code is an appalling piece of work when it comes to use of POV. Throughout the whole thing, characters (good and bad) continutall withheld information, as a means of rasing the irritation, er.. tension level. Don't do it. What a way to cheat the reader, and subtract from an otherwise amussing puzzle book.
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?
posted
I agree with the general sentiment about withholding info that the POV character knows . . . BUT--the POV character doesn't always think about everything he knows. I do believe that it's possible to have scenes from the murderer's POV in a murder mystery, as long as they are scenes where he/she would not be thinking about the murder. Now, if you want to do this shortly after the murder, it's probably out. Even an extremely calm murderer would probably be a little shook up for a while after the murder, and it would be almost constantly on his mind. But after awhile it's something that would only intrude now and then, and if he's doing something sufficiently engrossing, you could successfully write that scene in his POV without cheating, and without revealing that he was the murderer, because he would honestly not think of the murder during the POV interval. It sounds to me like your situation might fit this--although if 30 pages means less than 24 hours, I doubt you could fairly pull it off.
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. . . .
posted
There are a few cases I've read in which a character can think about something and the reader has no idea what that something is. It has to be done carefully, but it's possible to keep something from the reader that the character knows, while keeping it realistic out of seeming coincidence. It's misleading, but that might be the effect you're going for anyway, considering that it's the murderer of a murder mystery.
Posts: 27 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
rickfisher, I agree with you in fact but not in principle. (That's the reverse of normal, isn't it?)
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.
posted
If I murdered someone, I wouldn't stop looking over my shoulder till the death had been ruled accidental or suicide.
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.
posted
M M Kaye did this in one of her DEATH IN... mysteries (I don't recall which one).
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.
posted
Of course, there is also the approach known as the Unreliable Narrator, but if you used that clearly (and you have to make it clear)in a murder mystery, you'd be telling the reader that this is the murderer in a different way.
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.
posted
I think the closest thing to a murder mystery I've ever read is Lovelock, and of course he confessed that he had committed a murder but it took the whole book to explain who and why.
Posts: 334 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I'm not entirely familiar with the murder mystery format since I don't really read them. But I do read thrillers. I guess it boils down to do you want the reader to know "whodunnit" or not? If not, then I'd say you have to leave his POV out of it, unless you put it in BEFORE the actual murder (assuming it wasn't premeditated or in plan at the time).
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...
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