Finally free of the WIP...

I finally finished my WIP. I've been working on it since October, so it's taken me the better part of five months to write this thing. That's unusual for me. It's called Airborne at the moment and it involves a new cast of characters, a new universe, tackles new genres (for me) and wanted to be told from a new POV (for me).

Having said that, maybe five months isn't so bad after all.

"Omniscient" POV
I posted a sample scene from Airborne and got a little feedback on it. One of the aspects pointed out to me was that the POV is omniscient. The critiquer mentioned that omni needs to be done "really, really well" to work and didn't care for it in this sample.

OK, she didn't like my omni voice. That's fine. What nagged at me was that is has to be done "really, really well" -- for some reason, I've heard this un-useful bit of advice a thousand times -- and avoided like the plague otherwise.

How in the heck are you supposed to learn to write omniscient if you "can't" unless it's "really, really good"...? We all need to practice. We all need training wheels. And it's not like you have to sound like a 19th-century author if you're going to use an omniscient POV. What does 21st-century omniscience sound like anyways? (I'm willing to bet it sounds like social media.)

I have shelves of "how-to-write" books just like anyone else, though I'll admit I haven't cracked one open in years. The questions of what omniscient is and how it's done is sending be back to the shelves. Should I have done that before I wrote Airborne? No, I don't think so. Better to revise a shitty first draft than to analyze yourself into paralysis before writing it.

Misrepresentation?
The critiquer also pointed out that I billed Airborne as an "urban fantasy medical thriller" but there's nothing medical or thrilling going on in the scene. True. Guilty. But it is urban fantasy, at least. I'm fairly sure I got that part of the novel right though the rest is open to debate.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure where this scene should go in the story but it does need to be somewhere near the front.

Three elements of voice in POVs

I'm writing a romance, so that requires two characters -- well, at least two -- and the story is such that both characters need to be involved in the telling. I've been writing their POVs separately, and I'll shuffle them together later on.

Partly that's because plenty of significant events only happen to one of them. Partly because the contrast between them will let me frame their shared scenes in the most effective voice. The third "partly" is because Heathric and Adal are both "young" characters and their voices are still settling in. They need to differentiate themselves. Heathric's very sensitive to the people around him. Adal's a more action-oriented guy. This ought to be visible in how they narrate.

How can you tell one character's voice from another?

Photo reference for Adal, despite his
objections. (Zac Efron)

What they notice: A character walks into a party. What's the first thing they pick up on? Depending on which of my three Disciple characters it is, it might be: the top-ranking officers, the cute girls, or the familiar/friendly faces. Heathric would pick up on the room's mood. Adal would look for his shortlisted friends.

Other characters might notice what people are wearing, the decorations in the room, or be looking for a quiet corner to hide in. (That would be me.)

Level of detail: People pay more attention to the things that matter to them. Conversely, they'll spend less time on things that don't matter, or have difficulty addressing them. Some people are also more prone to long, complicated thoughts while others keep it terse and to-the-point.

Word choices: One's upbringing, personality, and formal training will also influence the vocabulary one uses. Since Heathric and Adal are both from low-tech, rural, agriculture-and-animal-husbandry cultures, their world is framed in terms of natural phenomena, animals, and a dash of superstition. In training, one is a shepherd and the other is a Ranger.

Add in their personalities and Heathric ends up with a vocabulary that leans towards animals, emotions, and a certain gentleness/acceptance/working with what he's given. Adal takes a more proactive tone, focusing on utility and seeing things in terms of hunting, pursuit, and discipline.

All of these are deeply entwined with character development and world-building, as you can see. What would you add to this list?

Remembrance of lessons past: POV

I spent a week, around Christmas, at my parents' and went through what parts of my early writings remain. I was glad to find one particular manuscript, disappointed that there's no sign of another. Much of my early writing was on 3.5" floppies, in ancient word processor formats. Some of it exists only on typewriter onionskin. There are stacks of notebooks, too.

I was hoping to find the how-to-write-genre-fic anthology that included Bradbury's "Run Fast, Stand Still," but I didn't. I did find, though, an anthology called Points of View (ISBN #0-451-62491-2, revised version available at Amazon) which I remember reading most of. It contains examples of stories told from various POVs: interior monologue, dramatic monologue, letter narration, subjective narration, various forms of anonymous narration, and more.

This book gave me much of the POV definitions I work from, though I've gotten muddied over the years by wading through confused online debates. You've seen them: attempts to classify stories as "close third person" or "distant third person," how "omniscient" or "limited" they are. Points of View organizes the POV continuum (that's what it is, really) from interior monologue to anonymous narration -- from very intimate first person to very distant third person, which is just one step away from a scholarly summary.

The stories presented offer quite readable examples along the continuum. And for me to say they're readable... bear in mind that I have no use for literary fiction, in general, and these are all lit fic. The closest it gets to genre is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." (Bless her, RIP, etc.) Oh, and there's one Poe story.

POV is one of those structural elements that underpins a story, and like a skeleton it has an invisible yet unavoidable impact on the appearance of the final creature. Looking at this anthology has gotten me thinking about the POV choices I made in Disciple, both consciously and on a gut level.

Disciple is written largely as an interior monologue, by this book's classification (aka first person narration,) with lots of gritty and intimate detail. I did that very much on purpose. I wanted that level of detail, to let Kate speak to the reader as to a close friend, to heighten the realism and immediacy.

The limitations of first person, as anyone who's written in it knows, had a huge impact on what parts of the story I could show the reader, though. In a few places, I had to bend things to get Kate a good reason to see things that had to be known, but on the whole she was a character in a good position to see and present the best parts of the story I wanted to tell.

What if I had written it from the POV of an anonymous narrator? An omniscient one? As a memoir that Kate wrote many years after the fact? It would completely change the voice of the story, the structure -- I dare say with an anonymous narrator the story would mushroom into a sprawling epic, like GRRM's massively multi-POV Game of Thrones.

But I didn't want that. I only wanted to tell Kate's story. One visceral slice of what was going on.

How do you choose your POVs?