Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

50%
+0 −0
Q&A The effect of different "narrative voices" in the same novel

The biggest risk is that you may lose the main characteristic of the narrator out of sight: to tell the reader what is important. There is nothing wrong with changing the point of view and paying...

posted 6y ago by Secespitus‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-12T23:01:21Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33836
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T08:09:59Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33836
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T08:09:59Z (over 4 years ago)
The biggest risk is that you may lose the main characteristic of the narrator out of sight: to tell the reader what is important.

There is nothing wrong with changing the point of view and paying attention to different kinds of details is certainly a nice way to illustrate the change, but if you lose yourself in endless descriptions of the surroundings to illustrate that your character is not one who speaks much, but one who observes, you might forget to describe what is _happening_. Just like focusing too much on the dialogue may make you forget to describe the room your character is currently in.

The easiest of the things you listed is to have one character describe something as beautiful and another to describe it as boring, maybe because he has seen the thing so often that he doesn't care about it anymore. In this case you are describing _the same thing_ from two very different points of view. That means you are doing the same thing in both perspectives, you just use different words and show different feelings. That way it won't happen that you forget to describe important stuff. In these cases you just have to remember that your reader will probably only want to read a description of the same beautiful/boring/normal/big/... thing so often. If you do this once or twice your reader will quickly understand the difference between your characters.

Your readers won't be confused by changing the narrative as long as you don't change it two or three times per page. For example changing the point of view every other chapter is normal in some books and your readers will have a mental break in that situation anyway. Quite the opposite: your readers will enjoy to have different points of view and to experience the story from different angles.

The biggest problem is to lose yourself in details just for the sake of showing a different point of view. After that comes the risk that some of your readers may prefer one point of view over the other - which is normal and shouldn't concern you too much as long as you don't explicitly try to make an obnoxious character. Changing the point of view suggests to a reader that there are different paths of a story that regularly converge and then split up again. They are part of something bigger, but leaving one out would leave the reader with only a part of the world explored and a part missing to fully understand what is going on. In mystery you might want that - in fantasy you often don't want that.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-02-27T12:36:27Z (about 6 years ago)
Original score: 12