I got a crit reader comment on a draft I’m
Mar. 1st, 2016 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1OMrkHK:
I got a crit reader comment on a draft I’m writing a bit ago that seemed to assume that more than two POV characters in a work was too many.
At the time I wasn’t quite sure what they were getting at, but that’s what it seems to me. (They said something like “why am I on page x and this is the 3rd POV” and I answered with a reasoned explanation of which character had access to which different info. But I think that’s not why they were asking.)
I rely really heavily on tight POVs in my work. If I’m stalled, it’s almost always because I’m considering a scene from the wrong POV. I sometimes decide at the beginning of a work that I will avoid one character’s POV, or favor another’s– ex. Full Of Grace, where Bucky has no direct POV scenes, only videos. But I normally utilize three or four, in a longer work. There will often be a character who only gets one or two scenes, with outsider perspective– I try to keep this to a minimum but I do use it once or twice; in ensemble casts, I generally sort of try to alternate regularly among two or three.
Apparently this is wrong? What is the Acceptable Number of POVs in a novel-length work? Is there a formula or a solid number or what?
Or is this one of those things that’s different from fanfic to pro fic, like how every fandom’s Top Classic Defining Work is always present tense but if you workshop a present-tense work at a writing class they will eat you alive?
I got a crit reader comment on a draft I’m writing a bit ago that seemed to assume that more than two POV characters in a work was too many.
At the time I wasn’t quite sure what they were getting at, but that’s what it seems to me. (They said something like “why am I on page x and this is the 3rd POV” and I answered with a reasoned explanation of which character had access to which different info. But I think that’s not why they were asking.)
I rely really heavily on tight POVs in my work. If I’m stalled, it’s almost always because I’m considering a scene from the wrong POV. I sometimes decide at the beginning of a work that I will avoid one character’s POV, or favor another’s– ex. Full Of Grace, where Bucky has no direct POV scenes, only videos. But I normally utilize three or four, in a longer work. There will often be a character who only gets one or two scenes, with outsider perspective– I try to keep this to a minimum but I do use it once or twice; in ensemble casts, I generally sort of try to alternate regularly among two or three.
Apparently this is wrong? What is the Acceptable Number of POVs in a novel-length work? Is there a formula or a solid number or what?
Or is this one of those things that’s different from fanfic to pro fic, like how every fandom’s Top Classic Defining Work is always present tense but if you workshop a present-tense work at a writing class they will eat you alive?
