This, again, follows some things I have tweeted about. Writers everywhere debate about which POV to use. In my fraught discussions with various editors in the spring, there was this thing about "jumping heads" and rules to avoid omniscient third, which I find baffling. In general, I feel like fences around a difficult technique to avoid doing in general dumb down the writing community, rather than finding groups of people who can practice how to do them well, and I find the use of crutches (like this and others) to have a knee jerk response of leaning onto a badly fitting technique for the story you are telling, rather than discuss how to do anything hard well that the story might require, is an attitude I prefer to avoid in my creative space.
That said, I want to address a specific POV trend that falls into this category of knee-jerk suggestions that winds up being done badly, because the focus on technique over organic narrative that fits the story telling is a problem. The specific POV technique I mean is to force the narrative into more than one POV character and to alternate the storytelling between those characters, specifically to name each chapter to tell the reader (because we can't figure it out for ourselves, I guess) which character is going to tell that part of the story. I have read five consecutive books done this way, and all I can say to the editors, agents, and whoever else, who is forcing authors to cram their narrative into this structure is STOP IT.
Even the Daevabad Chronicles, which is quite good, was forced into this structure. Why is it wrong? Because it makes the narrative very disjointed and hard to follow. As the reader, I read those books by reading three or so chapters through the lense of one character and then going back and catching up on the chapters told by the other character. When I read Raybearer at the end of the summer, and the narrative was fluid and organic, it was so refreshing. Write books with narrative structure like Raybearer, not this badly done mechanical technique that is somehow popular by people so obessed with avoiding POV problems, they create a narrative that is done badly.
I have speculated that it is popuiar in the wake of George Martin, who wrote multiple close third POV, that everyone things that is the only way to write third POV now? He never named chapters after the character POV. It has been a whilte since I read them, but I do remember he followed one character for a significant part of the book before switching to a totally different POV. He did not write alternating chapters ping ponging back and forth the way I am seeing recently published books do.
My book does use scenes with omniscient third where you see the thoughts and reactions of more than one character in the scene, and I am thinking that's the way it needs to be done. What really got me was one of these websites offering expert services sent me an email using excerpts from Austen as examples of the points they wanted to make about writing and characterization. In that email, they use a scene from Mansfield, where you hear the thoughts of Fanny, AND two other characters in the same scene. However, the writing community seems happy to use scenes like this unironically for discussions about characterization, and ignore the multiple POV happening in the same scene, and that just feels hypocritical to me. I'm here to write well, and I don't appreciate being held back by people who's gut instinct is to avoid difficult things or talking about them, by creating rules that are ten steps away so you never get close to something difficult.
Where are the people who are not afraid of hard techniques and switching/ using the correct POV for a scene, even if it is not uniform throughout the whole book? If you can switch between close POV of two characters, why can't you switch between a close POV and an omniscent one, and use the one that tells the story in that scene the best? That is honestly the only conversation I am interested in having.
Since my grade school education was at the end of the 20th century, it meant that much of the literature I read in school was from the 20th century, and I did not like it very much. Particularly because in the 20th century literary schools were experimenting with deconstructionism. For this reason, when I studied literature, I went back to the start, and avoided the "how do we take it apart" phase of writing. However, on the other side of that, it seems that due to trying to dismantle and taking apart literary structures, we have lost the ability to write naturally and fixate too much on unnatural storytelling elements. I shared the email from Mansfield Park that mentions the thoughts of three characters in the same scenes. I do not recall anyone ever reading Austen and saying "the reader feels disconnected in this scene." I, for one, prefer to be in a "new school" and dialogue with people about my writing who are not afraid of forgotten literary forms that are just not practiced or done well because the 20th century decided they needed to be "modern" and throw away good practices.
UPDATE:
I did go look through early chapters of George Martin's writing, to see what kind of narrative structure he used in the Song of Ice and Fire series, because I recalled that the narrative flowed much more smoothly than books I have read more recently. For example, I recalled that he did not have Arya as a POV character until she wound up across the ocean. That seemed to be the case as I recalled. He told the narrative through different members of the different families.
However, it comes back to reading more recent books with a forced structure of two POV characters alternating chapters being much less organic in the flow of the narrative. Originally I had wondered if people were just trying to copy Martin's style. It has been confirmed it is a "trend" in publishing, but my previous points remain that the narrative should fit the story and fit the book rather than trying to force narratives into a forced structure.
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