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I posted once before about how hard it was to change from the first person POV of the Throne of Amenkor series into the third person limited POVs that I'm using for the new series, but I just ran into a pitfall I had not imagined today.
I've hit a point in the novel where I'm not 100% certain of how the plot plays out. I mean, I know where I want it to GO, where things need to END UP, but I don't know how they get there. Not all the nitty-gritty details anyway. This doesn't typically bother me. I'm an organic writer, so I let things unfold on their own and they usually work out better than I could have ever expected (or planned). So today I wrote a little less than 1500 words of stuff that I need, and I figured out what happens next (meaning in the scene immediately following this one), and it sounds cool and interesting . . . but during all of this a good chunk of my brain was wondering how things were going to connect in the future. How does Colin get from point A to point B? How does he get these warring factions to come together? He has a connection to one of them, but not to the second at all, and the third has changed too much for him to claim any connection anymore at all. So how the hell is he going to get that connection? My plot outline says he runs across a battlefield (the one I mentioned in the last post) and saves the life of one of the head honchos from that faction. My current reaction to that is HOW LAME!!! I've got to come up with something better.
And then it hit me, the point of the post: in a third person limited story, the main character doesn't have to do everything himself! OMG! Colin doesn't have to be the solution to every problem, because I have other characters I can use! In a first person POV story, everything has to come back to the main character, because everything's being TOLD from that person's perspective. So the story DEPENDS on that character either seeing or doing everything. But not in a third person limited story. I can have other characters doing something! I realize now that I already knew this, because I used it earlier in the book, but the other character I used then was closely related to the main character, so the main character was more or less around. The revelation today was that I can have someone else doing something who isn't even close to the main character.
Such a stupid revelation, but one that highlights the fact that I've been living in the first person world for far too long. It does solve my current problem of how to do the connection though. Colin doesn't need to be the one with the connection, it can be someone else. And it helps define one of the other characters, gives what I want to have happen alot more impetus and believability.
All of this also highlights the fact that, as a writer, you never stop learning new things about writing.
I've hit a point in the novel where I'm not 100% certain of how the plot plays out. I mean, I know where I want it to GO, where things need to END UP, but I don't know how they get there. Not all the nitty-gritty details anyway. This doesn't typically bother me. I'm an organic writer, so I let things unfold on their own and they usually work out better than I could have ever expected (or planned). So today I wrote a little less than 1500 words of stuff that I need, and I figured out what happens next (meaning in the scene immediately following this one), and it sounds cool and interesting . . . but during all of this a good chunk of my brain was wondering how things were going to connect in the future. How does Colin get from point A to point B? How does he get these warring factions to come together? He has a connection to one of them, but not to the second at all, and the third has changed too much for him to claim any connection anymore at all. So how the hell is he going to get that connection? My plot outline says he runs across a battlefield (the one I mentioned in the last post) and saves the life of one of the head honchos from that faction. My current reaction to that is HOW LAME!!! I've got to come up with something better.
And then it hit me, the point of the post: in a third person limited story, the main character doesn't have to do everything himself! OMG! Colin doesn't have to be the solution to every problem, because I have other characters I can use! In a first person POV story, everything has to come back to the main character, because everything's being TOLD from that person's perspective. So the story DEPENDS on that character either seeing or doing everything. But not in a third person limited story. I can have other characters doing something! I realize now that I already knew this, because I used it earlier in the book, but the other character I used then was closely related to the main character, so the main character was more or less around. The revelation today was that I can have someone else doing something who isn't even close to the main character.
Such a stupid revelation, but one that highlights the fact that I've been living in the first person world for far too long. It does solve my current problem of how to do the connection though. Colin doesn't need to be the one with the connection, it can be someone else. And it helps define one of the other characters, gives what I want to have happen alot more impetus and believability.
All of this also highlights the fact that, as a writer, you never stop learning new things about writing.
