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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Novel and Point of View…

    I will have an update to the progress bar a little later today. Last night, I was up until midnight writing using a laptop while in bed, listening to music via an Ipod, while my wife slept next to me. Other then jacking up my back a little, I have to say I enjoy working late on the book. I didn't really want to go to sleep last night because I thought I was a hitting a stride, but I had the money paying job in the morning, and I didn't want to drag myself out of bed and suffer the rest of the day.

I'm curious if anyone has an opinion on how I'm changing points of view within the book. Most of the things I've written in the past, I've used third person. But with Whitaker's story, I wanted something more personal, so I chose first person to allow the reader a little more insight into the character. The only problem was that once I got into the writing the story, I really felt the need to show some other scenes that didn't involve Whitaker, scenes that I felt necessary to move the plot in the story. So I wrote those scenes in third person. The other thing I decided to do was show some flashbacks of Whitaker's youth and how he got to where he is now. I needed to delineate between flashback and current time line and I felt the best way to do that was again to change to third person. Over the last year or so I have read all of Jim Butcher's Dresden books and I really enjoy them. They are really quick reads written in first person. The one thing that drives me crazy about them is that I would really like to understand more of Harry Dresden's past. So it was the major impetus behind me deciding to add flashbacks.

    So I guess my question is whether or not switching from first person to third person is too harsh a transition?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The idea sounds interesting. And I will keep thinking if any of the books I have read have done this. I have no knowledge on the etiquette pertaining to this, so no help from me there. But good luck. Maybe google it. Or ask your mom...

Nick said...

I like the way you change the perspective, the only time I got a little confused was the transition between chapter 4 and 5. At first I thought it was Whitaker confronting his father but I realized it wasn't because of the dark tone of the conversation. That is the only part that threw me off for a sec, but i think the way you are writing really does accomplish what you wanted with it being more personal with Whitaker.

 
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