Changing perspectives

An omniscient narrator can tell the whole story: sometimes the narrator's focus is on the MC, sometimes it's elsewhere.

However, if the narrator only rarely strays away from sitting on the MC's shoulder, as it where, the effect could be a bit confusing. When it's done a lot throughout the course of the novel, readers expect it. If you're only going to do this once or twice, you might want to consider the alternatives.

An alternative solution (not necessarily a better one, but one you can consider before discarding) is having another character tell your MC about the scene post factum, rather than the narrator telling it directly to the reader. Roger Zelazny makes use of this in The Amber Chronicles (narrated in first person throughout), and Tolkien has part of the Paths of the Dead episode, where none of the hobbits are present, recounted to the hobbits later. (This also works best with the order things are told, in this particular case - an event can be a surprise, to the readers and to the hobbits, whose POV the story mostly follows. Then comes the explanation of how it happened.)

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Galastel‭

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It depends to what degree you change perspective, if you're switching from one first person narrative to another you can do this smoothly enough. Switching from first person to third can be, and often is, disruptive or jarring to the narrative.

The only other thing I would note is that writing the whole story from a single first person perspective except for a couple of random scenes, that can be really hard going on the audience.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Ash‭

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