Writer's Weekly -POV & Rotation


Well, I had hoped that Writer's Weekly would become Writer's Wednesday...but life happens and sometimes I can't make the weekly Wednesday deadline. So, 'Writer's Weekly' it is.




This entry I will be talking about POV, and rotating the perspectives. If you've read Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin or Dagger and Coin by Daniel Abraham (among others), you'll know that each book focuses on a character for that chapter.

I'll use an example - George R.R. Martin's series. The first book, Game of Thrones, has a prologue. After that, there isn't 'Chapter 1' instead we get 'Bran', and get to read about things happening to and around him. After that, we get Catelyn. Daenerys. Eddard. Jon. You get the idea. All these characters are in different places in the Seven Kingdoms, and we get to meet them one a t a time, a chapter at a time. In later books, it may go 'Bran, Arya, jon Arya, Theon, Bran, Dany...' where the order changes slightly, and is not always 1-5, if you have 5 different characters.

With my book so far, I'm doing one character per chapter. I will have about 4-6, though that number might change, and I'm doing a first chapter for everyone. Then go back to the very first POV character I wrote for, and do chapter 2 and carry on.

Writing in this manner, a few challenges arise

The first, is who gets a POV chapter, and who doesn't? What and how much do they see and hear about?

The second one is probably more on the editing side of things, but in what order should the characters' chapters be placed? My series is going to be 'linear', have all the character sin each book, and will flow in a single line, rather than branching out too much. Each book will have an 'interlogue', which is an 'intermission' from all the characters to give a one-off random POV about something significant not to the book you're reading on it's own, but to the series as a whole.

It's similar to a puzzle, figuring out who goes where when. I look forward to writing some more, and figuring that out.


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