How do I write POV with a hive mind character? [closed]

What you describe is not exactly a hive mind; a hive mind distributes the responsibility of "thinking" to multiple potential thinkers. for example, here on StackExchange you have more of a hive mind: anybody can answer your question, and anybody can vote on the questions, and the better answers rise to the top and become the "decision" of the StackExchange "mind". Likewise, any person can read the answers, formulate some synthesis of them, and offer it as a new answer that may get MORE votes than any of the "ingredients" that went into it.

What you describe is more like a corporation with a CEO, a point of central decision making.

The POV would simply be the vanilla POV of one person that is psychically linked (and that is how you spell it, btw) to their minions. So minions might warn them of something experienced, or they can command the minions to do something important.

Just like a corporation: The factory floor worker can experience a machine malfunction, and spontaneously reports to his boss (the CEO) what happened, and request a decision on what to do next. The CEO tells him to call a repairman, or switch to a different machine, or whatever.

That exchange could easily occur by email or text. Or by psychic thought transference. Little difference.

You write your story with the POV of an executive in charge of underlings that obey orders. Perhaps with the ability to occupy the mind of the underling and "become" her and use her body for a period of time, than return control to the drone (with any necessary orders for the drone) when she is done.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

3166 reputation 2 1399 614 37

The trouble with this is, it's difficult to write from many perspectives at a time. This witch is going to be receiving what for us would be a sensory overload. You can't show what one of her puppets was seeing during a time period in one chapter, and another in another in one POV, because there's one mind experiencing all that at once, and that's who the reader is reading.

In order to get what you're looking for, you need to implement some limitations, (which are generally a good thing anyway, Brandon Sanderson says that limitations are often more interesting than powers). Such as:

The witch can only control one person at a time

That's not to say the witch has to leave the body of the person that she's controlling, but that she has to lose full awareness (although she might retain some passive awareness) of the people she's not inhabiting.

The witch might leave them on 'standby', which might leave them as an empty husk, or sleeping, or performing some sort of repetitive task, or with some sort of backup personality that's somewhere between the victim's original personality and the witch's own.

This way, the reader only experiences one set of eyes at a time, and you just mention the transitions between puppets, maybe even mentioning that the witch felt a twinge of pain from Puppet A, and inadvertently switched.

You don't write it quite in POV, but do focus on the witch

This would involve either writing in third person, and revealing her actions using other puppets to the reader gradually, or having a character besides the witch actually narrate.

This could be a puppet's still imprisoned mind (you could even make puppets communicate across the telepathic link, and discuss what's happening somewhere else), a familiar, a travelling companion, or even someone scrying on the witch (it could turn out that it was this all along, even if not explicitly stated.

The witch doesn't have very many puppets

If there's only two or three puppets or something, writing as a character experiencing all of those sensory inputs at once is feasible. Particularly if you focus on one puppet for the most part, and when a situation requires more you switch which puppet the reader is seeing to follow the progression of a plan.

For example, the witch is plotting her dastardly scheme in her tower (may not be this kind of witch, is just an example) and she also has a puppet among a group of adventurers trying to stop her. The witch is mixing a potion, and realises she needs to put in the adventurer's favourite food. Cut to the puppet in the adventurer's camp.

"Man, this spaghetti's great. What's wrong? You don't look like you're enjoying it? ...This might sound weird, but what would you really rather be eating right now? I'd rather go for some really spicy food, do you like spicy food?"

Now, cut to the brewing puppet. The potion is bubbling intensely, and the witch lets out a powerful cackle. Cut back, and the other puppet lets out an involuntary smirk. "No, no! I wasn't laughing at you, I just remembered the time my cousin ate this chilly whole, and it turned out he was allergic. You allergic to anything?

The witch has only one dominant body, and the rest of the puppets are basically sources of information that she can control if she focuses

Basically self-explanatory. The witch's puppets are semi-autonomous, she has to manually check on them individually, and can modify their memories and personality.

The witch isn't quite a hivemind

Whenever the witch steals a body, that body will be replaced by the witch's own personality, memories, values, etc. etc.

However, the witch in Body A can't just control Body B from afar, but instead uses a telepathic link to send information between the two bodies. This will also mean that eventually their personalities will diverge, and it may be that Witch A decides Witch B needs reconverting after a while.

The bodies can't go too far apart

If the bodies are all experiencing a situation that is relatively the same, then it's not nearly as hard to write them as a whole, it just basically becomes a matter of viewing them as individual body parts, that perhaps use 'we' instead of 'I'.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Piomicron‭

40 reputation 6 1 5 0