Archon Panel: POV

POV: Keeping it All Straight 5 Oct 2024, Saturday — Nothing can mess your writing up quicker than muddled points of view. How do you chose one and how do you keep yourself from straying to another one?

I’m having some trouble seeing why this is a problem. I’m having to think about this. Both parts of this. And, as you have probably realized, writing stuff down is one way I think about things.

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — as Flannery O’Connor said, and quite right too. That, or something like it, was posted on the wall of a classroom when I was in high school, and as you see, it stuck with me. The version I actually remember is, “How can I know what I think until I read what I wrote and see what I said?” I don’t immediately find a source for that, and this quote by O’Connor is close enough.

So, about choosing a protagonist. What do I think about that?

A) How do you choose your pov character?

I have no idea. I just do it. I do not “choose” the pov character. I have the character in my mind and put that character in the first scene and move ahead with the story. I definitely do not think about any of this as “Hmm, who OUT OF THESE POSSIBLE CHARACTERS would make a great pov character?” I don’t have a set of possible characters and then choose one to carry the pov. I have the pov character first.

I guess that’s my starting point for this panel: I don’t choose the pov character, I just start writing the pov character.

B) But I can see this “choice thing,” actually.

There are times, just now and then, when I think it’s screamingly obvious that an author has chosen the wrong character to carry the pov. That is, the pov character is frankly boring compared to a much more interesting secondary character who has been shuffled off to the side and is being ignored. This is the sort of thing that can make me want to pull that secondary character into center stage, and then later I may base an important character on that one.

But, this does raise the question: Why did the author pick a boring character rather than an interesting character for their own book?

1) The author didn’t pick a boring character. Interest is in the eye of the beholder. They genuinely found the protagonist they chose more interesting than the characters they left to the side. Sometimes this is REALLY hard to believe, though.

2) The author can’t accurately judge interestingness. Is that a word? I mean, it is now. I don’t think there’s a great word for that. Appeal, potential for engagement. I really kind of mean “interestingness,” though. The author genuinely can’t tell when a character is bland and boring versus when a character is lively and interesting.

3) The author picked someone obvious to carry the pov and just didn’t think about whether that was a great choice. They’re a plot writer, maybe, and as long as the camera is sitting on someone’s shoulder so the reader can see the events unfolding, they don’t care who is carrying the camera.

4) The author just isn’t that great a writer. They just failed to infuse the protagonist with enough depth, complexity, or life. This a completely different problem, nothing to do with the choice of the protagonist.

C) So how should you choose the protagonist, if you’re actually making a choice?

Well, the standard advice is to let the protagonist be the person who is facing the biggest challenges or dealing with the biggest problems.

That’s not bad advice, as far as it goes. However, lots of times, a fair number of characters are facing big challenges and problems, and then once again you have to choose one of them. And once you’ve made that choice, you’ll be focused on that character, whose problems and challenges ought then to become primary. The author builds those problems and challenges up and keeps them there, surrounding the protagonist, until they’re surmounted, solved, overcome, reinterpreted, or whatever.

This basic idea is what leads to romance series where we start with a group of people and then each book follows one of those people as the protagonist (plus a love interest). They’re all interesting. Only the author’s focus changes. The failure to infuse interest into whatever pov character is central is just that: a failure.

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Separate question for this panel:

Once you’ve got a pov character, how do you keep from accidentally straying to some other pov?

Honestly … by just keeping track of whose pov you’re in?

Is there a different answer? Accidental head-hopping is just a failure of the author to stick to the proper pov. Isn’t it? What else could it be?

Here are some possibilities:

1) Poor phrasing of a specific sentence.

Sure, that happens to me about once per book. Proofreaders usually catch it. But if it’s only happening once per book, then it’s not a problem.

2) Clumsy omniscient.

If the author is that clumsy with omniscient, they should probably just consider sticking to limited third OR ELSE they should perhaps take a stab at writing something in omniscient specifically as an exercise to focus on this one problem and get it sorted out. Reading something good written in omniscient and paying attention to how that works might help. The two examples I usually think of are Sherwood Smith and Judith Merkle Riley. Jane Austen would also work great, however.

3) Trying to braid different points of view together in too complicated a structure.

I mean, just switch pov at the top of each chapter and boom, that takes care of that. Although you can switch scene by scene, chapter by chapter is so clear to both author and reader that I honestly think it’s much to be preferred, most of the time.

4) Failure to keep track of who knows what and who was present when.

With a large cast [Silver Circle, I’m looking at you], it’s easy to simply loose track of who was present in what scene, during what conversations, and therefore who knows what details or theories.

This is a genuine pain in the neck. My personal solution: just keep it all in my head AND ALSO repeatedly scroll up and down through chapters to confirm or disconfirm who was present when and who knows what. I am perfectly ready to grant that the need for scrolling up and down is not an ideal solution. Maybe some kind of checklist or table would have been handy. Too late now, since I have basically the whole thing written. Also, I’m not used to using anything other than my brain to keep track of this stuff. USUALLY it’s not difficult because MOST books don’t have as many pov characters engaged in so many different conversations.

The second everyone scatters, all this becomes a lot easier.

5) Failure to realize that every character has a unique viewpoint.

Close or intimate third is popular, and deservedly so. But the author had better realize that in close third, the pov character isn’t just holding a camera — that character is also filtering everything they see through their unique preconceptions, expectations, prejudices, emotional reactions, everything. The second the author starts to filter everything through the author’s own preconceptions, expectations, prejudices, and emotional reactions, every character blurs into Everycharacter. They either all become clones of each other or else they become clones of the author, or both.

Here’s a good post about this:

In close third person, a character should see and observe in a way that makes sense for them, not just as a way to inform the reader of what a room looks like or what is going on in a scene. A wealthy society matron or an interior decorator might walk into a well-appointed living room and recognize the rug as a French Aubusson, but most characters probably would not. …

if a male protagonist is speaking to another man, and they are the only characters in the scene, the second character should never be referred to as the other man. Doing so pulls the reader out of the protagonist’s head, out of the room, to a place hovering above the scene where they are aware of two people talking. The protagonist doesn’t think of the person he’s speaking to as the other man — he just thinks of him as Joe or Dad or whoever he is. These sorts of errors often come into play when writers are looking for a way to avoid using a name or a pronoun too often, but it’s much more important to maintain the established POV than to avoid using he or him a few times in a paragraph.

I remember having this exact problem, and revising to get rid of it. I mostly write a closer third now than I used to, and the closer third person gets, the less this is a problem — at least for me. I don’t know whether saying “Just get closer, use a more intimate third” would be helpful advice for other authors, but it’s something I might at least suggest, should anyone be having trouble keeping pov clear.

And, given that this is a panel topic, I guess that’s what I will wind up suggesting.

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