posted
All the contemporary novels I read seperate the dialog. In fact, I wouldn't even read a book if it kept lumping dialog together.
Posts: 161 | Registered: Sep 2009
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posted
I would recommend Characters and Viewpoints by OSC for a good explanation on viewpoints. There is no point us explaining something that is explained better in the book.
Just as an aside--I wouldn't read a book that didn't paragraph dialogue--I would throw it away. It's not a format I find enjoyable.
I don't need to argue this point--it's not really arguable--as I'm sure you could write a book backwards, if you wanted to--but I wouldn't buy it or read it.
[This message has been edited by skadder (edited November 25, 2009).]
quote:Now hold it right there! Why is it tchernablyelo can carry on repeatedly and endlessly, but you don't ask him if he's just looking for more things to argue about?
Posts by tchernabyelo in this thread: 3 (including this one)
Posts by adamatom in this thread: 23
I fail to see how this constitutes "carrying on repeatedly and endlessly" on my part. I have also responded in other threads - in more than one instance, because you specifically asked for it. I also went out of my way to post story openings at your specific and repeated request, but you then completely ignored them. So much for "wanting to learn how I did it".
This is my last post in any topic started by you. You may play the iconoclast all you wish, but you offer no cogent explanation of why everyone else on this board (successful or aspirant writer) should play along with you, instead of you playing along with everyone else on this board. You claim to have learned more here than at Critters, but your learning style is far too wearisome for me and for others. You come across like a child, constantly pestering a parent, tugging at a sleeve and shouting louder and louder until you get your way - only to then demand something else. But I'm not a parent, let alone your parent, and I am no longer inclined to spend my time on someone whose every response is to demand more time, more attention, more energy from others.
Goodbye.
[This message has been edited by tchernabyelo (edited November 25, 2009).]
quote: In the meantime, I'd love to hear everyone's views on style. At the moment, I'm thinking of POV. I don't really understand what the fuss is over changing POV in the same scene. Explain it to me. Maybe I'll learn something.
For this, I have to recommend SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS by Renni Browne and Dave King. It's the best explanation of head hopping and why not to that I've read. It gives some pretty well known--and successful--examples of the problem. If I remember correctly, they use LONESOME DOVE as one of the examples of POV violations.
POV issues become more important the deeper into your character's POV you go. If you're letting us know what one character thinks or feels, we're in his POV. As readers, we're riding along in his head for this part of the story. It's disorienting (or can be) to suddenly find ourselves in somebody else's head without warning.
One of the things I love about SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS is that they rarely or never tell you that something can't be done. But they explain very well why it usually shouldn't be done.
[This message has been edited by Meredith (edited November 25, 2009).]
posted
The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock concerns itself with narrative point of view from a formalist approach, most narrowly the attributes of grammatic person, psychic access and motility, and the influence of scope and scale.
quote:His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection') became a straw man for writers including Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel. Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction considers that Lubbock's take on the craft of Henry James was in fact schematizing and formal, if systematic, with a flattening effect. Wikipedia: Percy Lubbock.
About the most impenetrably dense writing tome I've encountered; however, it's the one that gave me the most insight into narrative voice, in particular, free indirect discourse, as one of the eight novels under discussion is Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, 1856, and is considered the novel that introduces the method, the method most conventional in the fiction mainstream of today.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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posted
Part of the point of omniscient POV is to hop from character's head to character's head. Then it is in perfect keeping with the style of writing.
When you're deeply immersed into one particular character's POV, it is jarring and confusing to jump to another character's POV without any transitional indicator like a scene or chapter break. IMO deep penetration 3rd should be treated like 1st person in this regard - if the 1st person narrator changed without any warning, the reader would be equally confused.
I second the motion to read OSC Characters and Viewpoint.
quote: At the moment, I'm thinking of POV. I don't really understand what the fuss is over changing POV in the same scene. Explain it to me. Maybe I'll learn something.
I'd love to hear your views on this after you've read a book like Orson Scott Card's CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINTS. If that book isn't readily accessible to you (my small-town library has a copy and can get other copies via inter-library loan) then there are many other excellent books on writing out there that cover viewpoint in at least a cursory fashion.
Perhaps you would benefit from the Writing Lessons portion of this board? Your questions and comments indicate to me that you're in the process of learning some of the core concepts that we're working on in this forum. There is so much excellent content here on this board already, in the form of writing lessons, previous posts, and FAQs. You might benefit from mining some of those sources, so that you could frame your question in a targeted way. Asking board participants to explain grand concepts of writing like POV seems a bit of a waste of this excellent resource. If you have a question based on something you've read, or based on something you are writing, that's one thing, but a generic "explain POV to me" seems like you're looking for someone to deliver to you the knowledge and information about writing.
In my opinion, we writers need to seek that knowledge and information out, by reading books on craft, attending classes, workshops, by talking to other writers, and most importantly, by writing, writing, writing and reading, reading, reading.
posted
A minority of contemporary writers will use multiple points-of-view in a scene. Larry McMurty comes to mind, Lonesome Dove being his book I am most familiar with. But caution is advisable because even when handled by an expert like McMurty, it's easy to confuse a reader. If you examine his work it is not something he does willy-nilly, but rather a technique to tell the internal story of multiple people going through the same set of events. One thing I noticed is that once he leaves a POV within the scene, he will not return to it until a new scene/chapter. I don't read them, but people tell me that it is common in romance novels to jump back-and-forth (head-hopping) between the heroine and her love interest during the more, ahem, "romantic" scenes.
But as a reader I strongly prefer clear delineation of POV shifts. My favorite technique from published writers is that which GRR Martin uses in his Fire and Ice series. Each chapter is from a single POV, and his chapter titles are simply the name of the POV character. No ambiguity. I've found published short stories from more than one POV to be somewhat rare.
Once we have a story to tell, our job is to concisely and clearly communicate the story to the reader. Anything to further that goal should be considered seriously.
Regarding paragraph lengths, you can still find writiers that will sock you with paragraphs of even a page or more (Terry Goodkind is one), and the older technique of bundling up a conversation within a paragraph (most often it is when a conversation is recalled by a character, typically in summary, rather than a "live" conversation).
In general I believe the movement towards shorter paragraphs and faster pacing is an influence from film and television, and in general has the effect of making a written story more easily accessible. Again, as a reader, I groan inwardly whenever I come across a humongous paragraph, and almost always skim them.
[This message has been edited by dee_boncci (edited November 26, 2009).]
[This message has been edited by dee_boncci (edited November 26, 2009).]
posted
Adama, it's not that it's wrong to change POV during a scene, but it's just not done much these days. It is a style that has faded out. All forms of omniscient aren't popular, so if you wish to get published, writing in omniscient will only make it that much more difficult to get published. You would be working against yourself.
The problem with changing POV too often is that it can pull the reader out of the novel, especially if not done well. In the novel Dune, Frank Hebert handles limited omniscient very well. He can switch POVs ten times in a short scene without ever confusing me.
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