Question regarding narration and 1st - 3rd person swaps
I'm currently in the process of writing my first novel, and I'm a little unsure about one of the main features of my writing process.
To summarise quickly, what i intend to do is have a short section at the beginning of each chapter where the late husband of my protagonist describes parts of their lives, giving a little bit of insight into the upcoming chapter's story.
Looked around for other people's views on this but couldn't find any, and wondered how one would structure that, and how good of an idea it actually is.
Random example:
That's the Sam i knew, she always hated the dark
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It was dark, Sam hated it
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/28576. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
If it's really short — no more than a few paragraphs — set it off with italics. It should quickly become apparent from context who the first-person-italics character is.
If it's pages and pages, make the husband's parts interstitial bits between chapters of Sam's story, and label them as Sam and Dean or whatever. Labeling the chapter by the POV character when you have multiple POVs in a novel is very common and easy to follow.
Don't write four pages of italics. It's visually exhausting.
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How about introducing the 1st person narrations as excerpts from the narrator's diary? You could write something like "xxxxx's diary. 6/8/2017: ..." and then write the chapter in 3rd person narration
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28577. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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