Active voice in situations where the subject is unknown
In a situation where a POV character isn't lucid enough to see or interpret what's going on around them, I find myself constantly describing things either in passive voice, or by using the word 'something' or 'someone' in every other sentence.
An example in which someone is on the floor and an unknown entity is poking them can be written like:
Something poked her shoulder.
Or like:
She felt a poke in her shoulder.
Her shoulder was poked.
The former is better in short doses, but can you recommend a few other structures to spice up a scene where many of such descriptions are necessary?
Thank you.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27520. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
A character that is not lucid enough to see or interpret what is going on around them is not lucid enough to have a POV. If they are not lucid and you say:
Something poked her shoulder.
Then the reader is forced to assume that we are in omniscient narration. And if we are in omniscient narration, then you are free to say whatever you like about the thing doing the poking.
Alternately, if you want to stay in the character's point of view, then they are not going to have a POV until they are lucid enough see and recognize what is going on around them, at which point you can have them try to reconstruct what happened to them, and again you are free to say whatever you like about the thing doing the poking.
Remember this about POV: it is just a camera angle. The very early movies were filmed by bolting a camera to the aisle in a theatre and recording a stage play. But producers very quickly realized that the genius of the cinema is that you could move the camera. You could use different camera angles to tell the story. Prose has always had this privilege, that you can change the POV to suit the needs of the story.
Some people get the idea in their heads that they have to pick one POV and stick to it. They fear they will be accused of "head hopping" if they change their POV. But "head hopping" is not a universal condemnation of POV changes. It is a condemnation of a particular kind of clumsy POV change. Just because you should not do it badly does not mean you should not do it at all. The corrective here is to read a favorite book with particular attention to POV changes. Once you look, you will likely find lots of them. The ones that work don't call attention the themselves simply because they do what human beings naturally do for themselves when they are interested in something: shift their POV for a better look.
Indeed, there are few things more frustrating in life than to be unable to shift ones POV to get a better look at some interesting scene. The same is true in literature or film. The reader needs to shift POV to get an uninterrupted view of the scene and it is the writer or director's responsibility to make the POV shifts for them at the right time.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads