# Deciding POV



## Book Cook (Jan 31, 2017)

I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel. Do you go along with the times? Do you write character POV because it's been all the rage in the past couple of decades of emotionalism, or do you simply choose whatever is most likely to sell? 

Are you affected by all this 'show don't tell' advice coming out of the woodwork that you feel compelled to filter your narration through the emotions and vagaries of your main character? 

I've recently read The Hobbit, and noticed that it is third person omniscient and that a lot of telling is going on there. Tolkien even, if I remember correctly, mentions himself when he says that he doesn't know where Gollum came from, or something similar. It didn't break away from the narrative. And the third person omniscient seemed to work a lot better than character POV (third person limited) of recent years where it seems that all writers want to do is appeal to the readers' emotions, sacrificing the big picture. Yet Tolkien is still going strong, along with Pratchett. 

When did a character's emotions become more important than the story? I must admit that I fell for it and for some time have been writing character POV because, seeing all this show-don't-tell and reader-wants-to-relate-to-the-character advice (more like imperatives), I genuinely started to think that was what writing was about. Then I realised that I don't really care whether these snowflakes want a book where they can read about emotions portrayed in countless different ways so they can relate. The story suffers, and the story is the most important. Writers are storytellers, not character-tellers. Characters are part of a story, not the other way around.


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## JustRob (Jan 31, 2017)

I don't focus on one specific style of POV. In fact I wrote my only novel without really paying any attention to such ideas. Rather I examined my writing later to see how it related to the standard styles. I have always done that in life though. Tackle something the way that you best can, then find out how others do it afterwards. That way you avoid being conditioned to a particular way of thinking at the outset. Someone told me that my writing style reminded them of that of Jasper Fforde, so I immediately resolved not to read any of his work until after I had established my own style in case his should influence mine. 

I say that my style is primarily third person subjective, or whatever term anyone wants to use for that idea, but it varies a lot. I don't know exactly what "omniscient" implies. The text can only focus on the actions, speech and thoughts of one character at a time, so it is normally subjective in that respect. If movement of focus from one character to another suggests omniscience, then fine. In one scene in my novel I go round a table of characters waiting for a meeting to start and mention what they are thinking while they wait. What's that POV called? If my focus lingers on one of them for several paragraphs, does that make it something else? Usually in each chapter I mainly focus on one character to avoid confusing the reader, so any thoughts, opinions or assumptions within the narrative by default emanate from within that character's mind. To be omniscient I'd have to mention something beyond the scene of which my POV character was unaware, wouldn't I? I have written a scene where one character is watching a scene in another room via a security camera monitor, so he effectively becomes the omniscient viewer while also being the POV subject. The reader can only be aware of what he is even though it is happening elsewhere. Any remarks about the behaviour of the characters that he is watching must presumably originate from his perception even though they appear as plain narrative about events elsewhere. What's that POV called?

I have already in another thread questioned the concept of a truly omniscient POV when I asked whether it was legitimate to state in the narrative "They would never meet again," if they subsequently do in the next novel. Does omniscient actually mean to the end of time or just for the forseeable future in this novel? Even the author isn't that omniscient, at least not this one.

On the subject of showing and telling I am equally befuddled. In a book on breaking the rules of writing that I am currently reading the author, who is personally involved in the theatre rather than literature but tackles both, compares the theatre and other visual arts to the written word, observing that in the former it is easy to show but difficult to tell while in the latter the converse is true. She advises that in all of these arts the skill is in balancing the showing and telling, not eliminating one entirely. However, by default neither literature nor the visual arts can convey a character's thoughts directly except by telling. For example, how many words would it take to tell the reader by showing that "She wondered why he had said that," and what aspect of the art would be served by trying? For example, "Wondering why he said that, ... " is telling, so no solution. Wonderment is not a thing to convey outside of a description of thought itself. If she didn't tell him that she was wondering it then the author would have a hard time doing it some other way, so should we put words into our character's mouths unnecessarily to satisfy some convention? No. We just tell the story when it needs to be told and show things when they need to be shown.

That's my answer to your question. Go your own way and then review what you have achieved by it.


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## Book Cook (Jan 31, 2017)

JustRob said:


> I don't know exactly what "omniscient" implies.



It implies an all-knowing narrator. If the narrator says a character is stupid or whatnot, then it's a fact. Everything the narrator says about the characters and the world is factual within the confines of the novel.



JustRob said:


> Any remarks about the behaviour of the characters that he is watching must presumably originate from his perception even though they appear as plain narrative about events elsewhere. What's that POV called?



That's third person limited. The character is not omniscient. If he says that another character is stupid, he may be wrong.


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## The Fantastical (Jan 31, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I've recently read The Hobbit, and noticed that it is third person omniscient and that a lot of telling is going on there. Tolkien even, if I remember correctly, mentions himself when he says that he doesn't know where Gollum came from, or something similar. It didn't break away from the narrative. And the third person omniscient seemed to work a lot better than character POV (third person limited) of recent years where it seems that all writers want to do is appeal to the readers' emotions, sacrificing the big picture. Yet Tolkien is still going strong, along with Pratchett.
> 
> When did a character's emotions become more important than the story? I must admit that I fell for it and for some time have been writing character POV because, seeing all this show-don't-tell and reader-wants-to-relate-to-the-character advice (more like imperatives), I genuinely started to think that was what writing was about. Then I realised that I don't really care whether these snowflakes want a book where they can read about emotions portrayed in countless different ways so they can relate. The story suffers, and the story is the most important. Writers are storytellers, not character-tellers. Characters are part of a story, not the other way around.



I cannot say how much I agree with you. Sometimes it is about the story and frankly if you look at some of the greats like Tolkien, he TOLD a story, and he pulled us in just fine. He was the story teller around the campfire of out minds and we still love his work for that. I think that this, "Character comes first" thing in limiting great stories as not all tales can be told in this style and frankly I am not sure I want them to be. Sometimes a story is bigger than just a character or even a whole cast of characters. 

I like reading a good tale, I don't always enjoy reading about characters though. 

As to when it started.. I don't know. It seems to have crept up upon us along with "show don't tell" and that style of writing that Hemingway so strongly supported and is know toted around as "the way to write well"

http://www.copyblogger.com/ernest-hemingway-top-5-tips-for-writing-well/

Whatever happened to poetic prose? Whatever happened to the grand days where images where created in long sweeping stokes like paint on a canvas for the pure joy of creating something beautiful? 

Ah well... What can we do?


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## Terry D (Jan 31, 2017)

The truth is, LotR probably wouldn't be published today. It is a classic, of course, but most modern readers read it in spite of its style, rather than because of it. I write my novels in third limited because I like like seeing the story through the eyes of my characters. The emotional contact with them is only a part of why it works well for me. You seem to believe that creating an emotional link between your characters and your readers is somehow a bad thing. I believe your readers would tell you different. Emotions are never more important than story -- I've never seen anyone who suggests that they are. Story doesn't have to suffer because the narrator isn't omniscient. Why would it? Story and characterization are inextricably linked. Both suffer when either is ignored.


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## Book Cook (Jan 31, 2017)

Terry D said:


> You seem to believe that creating an emotional link between your characters and your readers is somehow a bad thing.



It's not bad as a part of the whole, but it being the whole is something I consider bad; at least when it comes to fantasy (maybe I should've specified the genre earlier). It restricts world-building. For example:

Third person limited
-He climbed to the top of the keep and looked through the window. There, beyond the walls, stood that obnoxious hill. A vein in his forehead bulged and he spat through the window. 

Third person omniscient
-He hated that hill. What it represented went against his ideals. The hill was a famous site for many. George, the hero of the people, had challenged the king to a duel more than a hundred years ago, and the craven king had chosen a champion, Joe, who fought George from dawn till dusk before George, after sustaining many injuries, finally fell. His death had been the drop which goaded the people into rebellion that was fought for ten years, resulting in the tyrant king's abdication from the throne. Today, on that very hill, stood a lofty monument commemorating George. Flowers of all colours grew about it, still maintained and nurtured by the townspeople.

In the first example, the character who doesn't like what the hill represents will not notice the flowers. He also might not know the details of what had happened there, or his knowledge may be false and skewed with hate. Therefore, the reader sees the hill as ugly, negative, hateful. The reader does not know what happened there. The second example gives all the necessary information. The hill is obviously beautiful. The reader gets the truth about it and he also gets a smidgen into the past (not into subjective history).



Terry D said:


> I believe your readers would tell you different.



Yes. That is because the readership, and the people in general, have changed. They started thinking with emotions. The Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games have all been successful because they tap into the emotions of a targeted readership. Are the stories of these novels good? I don't know. I'd say that they are not, and I've seen that many people share my opinion. The story here is secondary and emotion prevalent. The rules of their worlds are arbitrary and often inconsistent because they ultimately do not matter to the writer.


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## Sam (Jan 31, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel. Do you go along with the times? Do you write character POV because it's been all the rage in the past couple of decades of emotionalism, or do you simply choose whatever is most likely to sell?



I predominantly write in third omniscient, but it depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is genre. 



> Are you affected by all this 'show don't tell' advice coming out of the woodwork that you feel compelled to filter your narration through the emotions and vagaries of your main character?



No.  



> When did a character's emotions become more important than the story? I must admit that I fell for it and for some time have been writing character POV because, seeing all this show-don't-tell and reader-wants-to-relate-to-the-character advice (more like imperatives), I genuinely started to think that was what writing was about. Then I realised that I don't really care whether these snowflakes want a book where they can read about emotions portrayed in countless different ways so they can relate. The story suffers, and the story is the most important. Writers are storytellers, not character-tellers. Characters are part of a story, not the other way around.



Some would argue that characters aren't part of the story -- they _are _the story. 

It doesn't fly, for me at least. I like creating characters that a reader will learn to love or hate, but I've always been a proponent of the story being more important than any characters. That's why if a character needs to die to advance the story, I will kill off that character. Most times, I will do so without any regret. Sometimes it upsets me; not because they're dead, but because I wasn't finished with that particular character's arc. 

But the story comes first. Of course, that isn't to say that a character's death won't evoke an emotional response from my reader. I hope it does, but they were sacrificed because the story required it. 

Some people might be shaking their heads and thinking, "What do you mean the _story _required it? Don't you mean _you _required it?" 

No, I mean the story. Anyone who has written a couple of novel-sized works will understand what I'm getting at.


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## ArrowInTheBowOfTheLord (Jan 31, 2017)

Of the two examples you presented, I liked the first one better. This isn't to say that third person limited is better than third person omniscient (as the name would imply, it has its serious limits), what I am saying is that both can be done well or badly. It's not as if one is inherently better than the other. Personally, I prefer books written in omniscient, because then you're not locked inside one person's head. The plus of limited, of course, is that certain effects of irony and suspense can be attained that can't be attained in omniscient (think of the unreliable narrator). For my own writing I tend to write in a sort of mix of the two, sometimes drawing back, sometimes dipping into a character's head for a dramatic moment.

As for the argument about whether characters or story are more important, I would agree with Terry. Without a story, the characters wouldn't even exist, and without characters, the story wouldn't exist. They are indivisible, so there's no point in trying to figure out which one is better than the other.


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## The Fantastical (Jan 31, 2017)

Personally I like third person omniscient as the standard fantasy novel POV. It lets the world and the story live far more than third person limited or whatever othe POV people write in these days. There is only so much of Jack looked and Jack did and Jack did this or Jack did that that one person can take. What jack thought for me isn't plot. Story isn't just about what _a_ character feels it is about the history, the context, the manipulations of fate behind the events. You just don't get the kind of scope when you are wonder around Jacks head and what he had for breakfast.


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## EmmaSohan (Jan 31, 2017)

Part of the story is what happens inside the characters' heads. How much? Depends, right? My advice to others deciding on PoV is to use first person if the story is mostly in the main character's head. My stories are almost always that way, so I use first person present tense. (Some exceptions.) Really, someone sitting in a chair trying to make a decision can have conflict, suspense, surprise, humor, and resolution. In addition to emotions.

The careful construction of a beautiful scene is alive and thriving. It's called a movie. I know that's snarky, but you have to live with that reality. The kiss scene in The Fault in Our Stars was criticized -- in the movie. The book has one of the best kiss scenes I know. Not too surprising, that difference, because the amazing part is her thoughts.


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## Jay Greenstein (Jan 31, 2017)

> When did a character's emotions become more important than the story?


That appears to be a flawed premise, because I've never seen anyone advance that idea. It's the emotion we induce in the reader that matters, because facts only inform, while emotion entertains. "Show, don't tell has nothing to do with the character's emotions, it's about making the reader feel those emotions as they live the story in real time, with the protagonist as their avatar. Telling is the author, whose voice and performance the reader can neither hear or see, talking about the events—telling the story from the outside in.

Place the reader into the scene, in the protagonist's moment of now, and there's uncertainty because the future—the result of their action or decision has intent but not certainty. Make the story flow in real-time and we make the reader experience the events as the protagonist does, from the inside out. Supply an essay on what happened, in overview and you have a detailed history, immutable and distant, one fact following the other, and as exciting as any report. And as for story, it comes in a distant second to writing that catches and holds the reader. We buy a book because we like the first few pages, and damn little story has taken place. And halfway through we don't know how the story will come out, but we're still reading. Why? Story, or writing?

If your goal is to entertain the reader through the beauty of phrase, through allegory and poetic language—literary writing, in other words—then viewpoint is of far less importance, and telling vs showing is irrelevant because the goal has changed.

Can you "tell" a story without a strong character viewpoint? I'd say "yes but," to that, in that you have to replace the missing emotional content of emotional involvement with the protagonist with something equally entertaining. Peter Beagle's, The Last Unicorn is a beautiful example of that. Look at a single paragraph to see what I mean.

One day it happened that two men with long bows rode through her forest, hunting for deer. The unicorn followed them, moving so warily that not even the horses knew she was near. The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror. She never let one see her if she could help it, but she liked to watch them ride by and hear them talking.

It would seem that this is a passage of pure telling, but look what happens when I take the role of the reader:
- - - - - - -
One day it happened that two men with long bows rode through her forest, hunting for deer.

Really... what happened?

The unicorn followed them, moving so warily that not even the horses knew she was near.

Ahh. but why did she need to hide? Afraid?

The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror.

Really? That's odd, but interesting. Tell me more. (any “tell me more,” situation, is a hook)

She never let one see her if she could help it, but she liked to watch them ride by and hear them talking.

Ahh... so she understands? Or is she just fascinated by the voices?  etc...
- - - - - - -
To me who is always the last to get the message, learning this was an epiphany. There is an art to providing exposition that I never consciously realized existed.

My forehead was bruised from whacking the heel of my hand on it while shouting, “You idiot! How in the hell did you miss that one? It’s Dwight Swain’s motivation/response units applied to exposition!”  Duhhhh.

There is an advantage to a strong character viewpoint (which is what I see as showing). We cannot know our reader. So when we, as storytellers, explain the action as an observer our vocabulary can't quite match that of the reader. Word meaning changes by location, gender, age and interests. So what the reader gets won't be quite what we intend. But if we place everyone into the same age group, gender, location and interests, by making the reader view the scene as the protagonist does, with the same driving needs and resources, everyone takes the same meaning, no matter their own.

Sorry for rattling on the way I did, but this is an issue I feel strongly about because the vast majority of hopeful writers come to writing believing that viewpoint is a matter of which personal pronouns we use, and have never had itexplained. And the manuscripts I've seen pretty well reflect that fact.


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## JustRob (Feb 1, 2017)

Jay Greenstein said:


> It's the emotion we induce in the reader that matters, because facts only inform, while emotion entertains.



"An Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman walked into a Welsh pub ... "

I've no idea what their emotional states were but the story was very entertaining. Maybe stories have to be padded out with emotional content to reach novel length if the writer can't imagine a pure story that long, but that doesn't mean that that's what all readers want. Emotional content may not be a substantial part of stories such as LotR or crime novels such as those by Agatha Christie, but they are both validly entertaining genres. 



> ... it's about making the reader feel those emotions as they live the story in real time, with the protagonist as their avatar.



Readers often form their own emotions rather than feeling those of the characters. A woman reading a thriller involving macho men being aggressive will most likely have a woman's feelings about men putting themselves and others at risk rather than feeling the testosterone drive that the characters feel. In such a situation she has no avatar any more than she does when watching scenes of atrocities on the news. She is just as likely to wonder why these dim-witted testosterone junkies insist on playing such pointless dangerous games and may only read this type of story for the satisfaction of seeing them come to their senses in the end. It is useless in the end to discuss such matters as writers; only as readers talking with other readers can we determine what readers want, which is why there is now a forum for such discussions. Each writer has, or should have, their own target readers in mind, so their views are bound to be biased. 

The Beta Readers Open Discussions forum was recently envisaged as a place to pose such questions where readers, even if they also happen to be writers, can express their points of view about what they expect to see in what they read. This is distinctly different from writers discussing what they think they ought to give readers. Here in this thread the POV is third person with us saying that "they" want such and such, but there it is first person with each reader saying that "I" want it. If beta readers are of any value whatsoever then they presumably are before we start to write, not just after we think that we have finished. Readers may not understand how a writer achieves the magic but a writer may equally not understand how a reader perceives it. We should not just be learning how to be writers but also how to entertain _our _readers and they are just as varied a bunch of people as we are. So, for a different POV, which was what the OP asked about, perhaps we should try posing and answering such questions in that other forum.

I have more than once made reference to an incident told to me by an expert in _reading_ English literature about someone who consulted a famous author about the accuracy of a paper written about his works. He was reprimanded for doing this, not because it was in any way cheating but because, being "just the author", that famous man would know nothing about how readers saw his works. The moral is apparently not to consult authors about how readers may see works written by authors. What do they know about it?


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## Book Cook (Feb 1, 2017)

EmmaSohan said:


> Part of the story is what happens inside the characters' heads. How much? Depends, right? My advice to others deciding on PoV is to use first person if the story is mostly in the main character's head. My stories are almost always that way, so I use first person present tense. (Some exceptions.) Really, someone sitting in a chair trying to make a decision can have conflict, suspense, surprise, humor, and resolution. In addition to emotions.
> 
> The careful construction of a beautiful scene is alive and thriving. It's called a movie. I know that's snarky, but you have to live with that reality. The kiss scene in The Fault in Our Stars was criticized -- in the movie. The book has one of the best kiss scenes I know. Not too surprising, that difference, because the amazing part is her thoughts.



I haven't read the Fault in Our Stars, so I don't know how the kiss or the character's thoughts went on. But here is my ideal description of a kiss: "They kissed." That's it. Move on. Tell me what happened next. Did they get married? Did they have children? Give me the next string of events. I don't want to read a page or more about a kiss. I know what a kiss is. What I don't know is what happens next. 

Now imagine that when you were a kid you went with your grandfather into the woods and you stumbled on a bear and your grandfather fought the bear. Many years later, you're sitting with a friend and you decide to tell him about this episode in your life. 

Imagine the impatience you'd create in your friend if you went on like this: "My grandfather stood there with a hatchet in his hand while I watched from atop a tree." (your friend is at the edge of his seat, eagerly awaiting for you to tell him what happened next, and you go on) "My heart was racing. My head throbbed from the onslaught of adrenaline. My hands and legs were shaking, and I thought I'd lose either my footing or my hold of the branch. My grandfather was similarly affected. His breathing quickened, sweat broke out on his forehead, and I swear I saw his knees shaking." 

By now your friend wants to punch you; he doesn't care how you felt and only wants to know what happened. He wants to hear:

"When the bear charged, my grandfather threw himself to the side. The bear turned on him and reared on its hind legs. Grandpa jumped back on his feet, swung the hatchet with all his might and buried it in the bear's neck. The bear swatted grandpa in the face and its claw tore his cheek open. Then it ran away. Grandpa never saw that hatchet again."

Then your friend might ask if you were scared, or say something like "you must've been terrified". And you respond with, "Yeah, I was scared." No need for all the knee-shaking, heart-pounding, sweat-pouring drama.


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## bdcharles (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I haven't read the Fault in Our Stars, so I don't know how the kiss or the character's thoughts went on. But here is my ideal description of a kiss: "They kissed." That's it. Move on. Tell me what happened next.



Oh, you and I so disagree on this!  Don't tell me what happened next. Don't even show me. Make it happen, using words and magic, because we're not just shooting the breeze round a campfire here and I have all the time in the world.

Particularly if it's the bit that happens between kissing and marriage hehe


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## bdcharles (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel. Do you go along with the times? Do you write character POV because it's been all the rage in the past couple of decades of emotionalism, or do you simply choose whatever is most likely to sell?
> 
> Are you affected by all this 'show don't tell' advice coming out of the woodwork that you feel compelled to filter your narration through the emotions and vagaries of your main character?



To answer your original question, I write from characters first. My first writings tended to have lots of well-realised people standing about being very well-realised but not doing a whole lot else. Plot and story didn't really come naturally to me - in fact the way I came up with my first WIP (got two on the go, see?) was to take little set-pieces and moments and lines and phrases I had imagined and try and see what connects them; how I could conceivably go from one to the other. As it happens my first plotline is, I guess, compelling but it's not super original - plucky upstart takes on the big bad ... Empire ... and after taking a considerable beating, manages to stay alive after a fashion et cetera. I envy people that bash out weird and wonderful storylines. So I do show, because in that moment I am that character, or at least I am hanging out with them. 

But, oh, God, overfiltration. I notice that it's all the rage. I toss my hair and ruminate about how it pins us relentlessly to the head of someone we may not even get along with. I turn, wince, grimace, scratch myself, and deliver oration about the time that I remembered when I nearly managed to not quite shut up about doing something tedious. Yeah, that's not good. 

I suppose I was always an imaginary friend sort of person who figured all these creations better start earning their keep


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## The Fantastical (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I haven't read the Fault in Our Stars, so I don't know how the kiss or the character's thoughts went on. But here is my ideal description of a kiss: "They kissed." That's it. Move on. Tell me what happened next. Did they get married? Did they have children? Give me the next string of events. I don't want to read a page or more about a kiss. I know what a kiss is. What I don't know is what happens next.
> 
> Now imagine that when you were a kid you went with your grandfather into the woods and you stumbled on a bear and your grandfather fought the bear. Many years later, you're sitting with a friend and you decide to tell him about this episode in your life.
> 
> ...




Exactly!


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## Book Cook (Feb 1, 2017)

bdcharles said:


> Oh, you and I so disagree on this!  Don't tell me what happened next. Don't even show me. Make it happen, using words and magic, because we're not just shooting the breeze round a campfire here and I have all the time in the world.



'Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.'
'No!' said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. 'You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!'
Boromir smiled. 
'Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?' said Aragorn.
But Boromir did not speak again.

-The Two Towers


There is no description whatsoever of the kiss Aragorn gave Boromir, yet it carries so much emotion. And the line "but Boromir did not speak again" also evokes a lot of emotion. No need for "Aragorn placed a hand on Boromir's chest and didn't feel anything moving inside. He touched his lips and they were cold. He put a piece of glass under his nose and the glass didn't fog."

The reader is aware of emotions and can easily, and even subconsciously, figure out which situation requires which emotion without the writer telling him.


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## bdcharles (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> 'Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.'
> 'No!' said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. 'You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!'
> Boromir smiled.
> 'Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?' said Aragorn.
> ...



Okay but there's plenty of pertinent emotion in the dialogue. Extra bumpf about the kiss is not needed as it's not the main thing of this scene but a supporting action. Add to that the fact that LoTR is largely 3rd person omni, quite monologue-heavy and, with all the characters it contains plus the epic scope and the vast setting, the characters are quite secondary. Compare and contrast it to the Hobbit though; don't you feel you know Bilbo more personally than Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn and the gang? The Hobbit feels smaller, cuter. It depends what you are going for, and what you want to do.


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## Book Cook (Feb 1, 2017)

bdcharles said:


> It depends what you are going for, and what you want to do.



Yes, it does. But, see, I've read Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley, for example. Admittedly, he's not the best writer out there; he uses a lot of 'he felt, she felt/saw/noticed etc.' But then there is also exposition about the past, the people, the world and so on. And while reading reviews of his work, I noticed that people were critical of his telling and not showing. But you can't filter an unknown world solely through characters. That way, all exposition would take place through stories told to the POV characters, or if a character stumbled upon a book and read from it, or walked into a tomb and read epitaphs and so on and so forth. Why are people critical of narration which simply tells you that there was this hero or that hero a long time ago, or that this race was created in this manner, or what significant history is tied to a particular stronghold? If writing has changed direction, it doesn't mean that this kind of writing is bad, does it?


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## The Fantastical (Feb 1, 2017)

bdcharles said:


> Okay but there's plenty of pertinent emotion in the dialogue. Extra bumpf about the kiss is not needed as it's not the main thing of this scene but a supporting action. Add to that the fact that LoTR is largely 3rd person omni, quite monologue-heavy and, with all the characters it contains plus the epic scope and the vast setting, the characters are quite secondary. Compare and contrast it to the Hobbit though; don't you feel you know Bilbo more personally than Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn and the gang? The Hobbit feels smaller, cuter. It depends what you are going for, and what you want to do.



I would have to vastly disagree with that. The Hobbit was a small fireside tale. Told mostly (like LOTR) in third person omnipresent and you are carried along on a tale that is all about what happens rather about to whom it happens. 

Look at the events. It is all about what will happen next, not about how the characters will feel about what happens next. This I think is the biggest difference between Character driven storys and plot driven plots.


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## Tettsuo (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel. Do you go along with the times? Do you write character POV because it's been all the rage in the past couple of decades of emotionalism, or do you simply choose whatever is most likely to sell?


I chose my POVs based on what I thought would best unveil my themes.  Since the core of my stories are about the main characters coming to understand that their logic is flawed and therefore must come to a new understanding, I wrote them in 1st present.  Everything else in the story is simple a vehicle to get to them to that shift in their paradigm.

In regards to you noting that "emotionalism" is all the rage... I'm not sure what you're talking about.  Humans are emotional.  Books are generally about humans.  So, books will be emotional.



> Are you affected by all this 'show don't tell' advice coming out of the woodwork that you feel compelled to filter your narration through the emotions and vagaries of your main character?


Huh?  I don't think you fully understand "show don't tell" if you believe in order to do this the book must be filtered through emotions and vagaries.  Show don't tell is about action.  Show us what's happening, don't simply tell us what's happening.



> I've recently read The Hobbit, and noticed that it is third person omniscient and that a lot of telling is going on there. Tolkien even, if I remember correctly, mentions himself when he says that he doesn't know where Gollum came from, or something similar. It didn't break away from the narrative. And the third person omniscient seemed to work a lot better than character POV (third person limited) of recent years where it seems that all writers want to do is appeal to the readers' emotions, sacrificing the big picture. Yet Tolkien is still going strong, along with Pratchett.
> 
> When did a character's emotions become more important than the story? I must admit that I fell for it and for some time have been writing character POV because, seeing all this show-don't-tell and reader-wants-to-relate-to-the-character advice (more like imperatives), I genuinely started to think that was what writing was about. Then I realised that I don't really care whether these snowflakes want a book where they can read about emotions portrayed in countless different ways so they can relate. The story suffers, and the story is the most important. Writers are storytellers, not character-tellers. Characters are part of a story, not the other way around.


Stories are about people (generally).  People are emotional beings.  Telling a story with no emotion is boring as hell.

Tolkien expressed tons of emotion in his characters, Pratchett did as well.  I don't know what you're talking about if you think neither did exactly that.


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## Tettsuo (Feb 1, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> 'Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.'
> 'No!' said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. 'You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!'
> Boromir smiled.
> 'Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?' said Aragorn.
> ...


You just yanked a scene out of a huge book.  There are many other scenes that built the emotional impact and provided the infrastructure that provided the scene all of the emotion it required to be effective.


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## bdcharles (Feb 1, 2017)

The Fantastical said:


> I would have to vastly disagree with that. The Hobbit was a small fireside tale. Told mostly (like LOTR) in third person omnipresent and you are carried along on a tale that is all about what happens rather about to whom it happens.
> 
> Look at the events. It is all about what will happen next, not about how the characters will feel about what happens next. This I think is the biggest difference between Character driven storys and plot driven plots.



Yes but the Hobbit comes alot from the characters' POV, as they experience things happening to them - Bilbo, Gollum, whoever else. It's what gives it that childlike quality. Read the bit where Bilbo finds the ring and you'll see that what happens next and what the character feels about it are very tightly intertwined. It's not just a series of pre-planned events (well, it is, being a book, but it doesn't read that way) - it's make or break decision time where what happens next depends very much on the character's emotional state, like in real life. The main LOTR seems, to me, to have this weight of history and destiny forcing things along, rather than a single individual. Which is great, it's not an issue, but it does have, to me, a different feel, and shows that both work to different effect. 

I think ultimately - and certainly what I wanted to achieve in my book - the ideal is a mix, a real balance of plot and character (underpinned with other things like quality of writing, voice and so on), where fantastic things happen to real people (or hobbits) so enabling readers to completely buy into the book's premise and execution without any doubts.


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## Jay Greenstein (Feb 2, 2017)

> I've no idea what their emotional states were but the story was very entertaining.


No, the punch line was entertaining. We put up with the setup in a joke because the payoff comes at the end. But more than that, everyone knows the old, "Some people can't tell a joke." So performance and timing counts for a lot. And certainly, you can't equate a few hundred words of a joke and a novel and claim they relate. 





> Readers often form their own emotions rather than feeling those of the characters.


I'm certain you believe that, but what does "often" mean? And if they "form their own emotions" why do they need you? Any writer would be as good as another. But clearly, that's not true. Our job is to entertain the reader. And you can't do that until you know what readers respond to and why. You can't create a scene that an acquiring editor will see as something that'll sell unless you know what a scene on the page is, and how it differs from one in film or on stage.





> A woman reading a thriller involving macho men being aggressive will most likely have a woman's feelings


Most likely? Want to explain what "a woman's feelings" are, and how universal they are to the gender?





> In such a situation she has no avatar any more than she does when watching scenes of atrocities on the news.


 i don't want to start an argument, so let me quote someone who knows. Here's a small chunk by Dwight Swain on how the reader that relates to your focus character:

_The focal character: your reader’s compass:_

How do you make readers care about what happens in your story?

—They _must_ care, you know. Otherwise, they won’t read! So, how do you make them care?

You give them a stake in what happens. You put them in a position where they stand to win or lose, emotionally.

To that end, you center your story on a character who stands to win or lose also, so that your readers can feel for him or against him.

A story recounts events. But those events can’t or won’t stand alone. They need to be explained, interpreted, evaluated, made meaningful.

Above all, they must be translated into feeling.

What that means is that a story is essentially subjective, not objective. Consequently, it needs to be as strongly oriented as a person.

What is orientation?

Originally, _to orient_ meant to cause to face the east, as in building a church so that its altar stood at the east end. Later, the term was broadened to include any activity which made clear to somebody what his proper relationship was to a given situation.

Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction. In story, that somebody is the reader.

“To give the reader an experience is only a part, not the whole, of the writer’s function,” observes critic Edmund Fuller. “It is giving us evaluated experience that distinguishes the great or the good writer, whether the evaluation be spelled out specifically, or whether it is tacit in the total context of characters, actions, and conditions that he sets before us to represent his world. (It is always the writer’s world that we enter in art—never the objective world.)”

But though this evaluation of experience is the writer’s task, and though it is the writer’s world the reader enters, there are all sorts of opportunities for confusion. Too often, the writer falls into the trap of writing about things-about sex, about violence, about scenery, about war, about domestic bliss or discord. Historical fact or clinical detail overwhelm him. The implications and evaluations, tacit in his thinking, never quite reach the reader.

In brief, although his work may on the face of it be cast rigidly in story form, it isn’t actually fiction. For a story is never really about anything. Always it concerns, instead, someone’s reactions to what happens: his feelings; his emotions; his impulses; his dreams; his ambitions; his clashing drives and inner conflicts. The external serves only to bring them into focus.

Or, as the old rule-of-thumb has it, “Every story is somebody’s story.”

So, enter an individual who, for our purposes, shall be termed the _focal character._

This figure is precisely what his title indicates: the person on whom the spotlight focuses; the center of attention; the man whose reactions dominate the screen.

The focal character has three main functions:



a. To provide continuity.

b. To give meaning.

c. To create feeling.

Notice that he keeps returning to the same goal. creating feelings within your reader. He's not talking generally, he means that you, the writer, are creating specific feelings in your reader, no matter their gender. That's very different from "often" and "most likely."





> where readers, even if they also happen to be writers, can express their  points of view about what they expect to see in what they read.


“Readers don’t notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.”
~ Sol Stein

Believing that because someone writes they're a writer is a false equivalency, because the profession is Writing. We cannot give equal weight to the opinion of someone who said, "I'm going to write a story," and a people who make their living through their writing.

Fiction writing is a field that has been under development for centuries. It's a complex, difficult, and demanding field as hard to master as any other profession. And though we aren't aware of it we are precisely as well prepared to write fiction for the page when we leave school as to write a screenplay or perform appendectomy. And while I mean no disrespect to the people in the Beta Readers forum, if the views they express are counter to those of the publishing industry—which mirror the tastes of the reading public—they are not going to get a yes for a submission.





> If beta readers are of any value whatsoever then they presumably are before we start to write,


Beta reader aren't used to tell a writer what doesn't work (see the Sol Stein quote above). Their purpose is to _react_ to the writing, primarily with "I like it," or I didn't." In fact, writers make poor beta readers because they apply their own standards of how to write to your work. Advice given by any writer tends to be, "Here's how I would approach this part." That might be great if you're in a critique group with a famous author. But if you write with more skill than the beta their advice will be sincerely offered but not accurate.


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## GiveAManAFish (Feb 5, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel. Do you go along with the times? Do you write character POV because it's been all the rage in the past couple of decades of emotionalism, or do you simply choose whatever is most likely to sell?



For me, point of view has always been about how to best tell the story in a way that compliments the story. First person perspective gives the reader a limited narrator, which limits their observations of the world to the perspective and lens of the protagonist, which builds a more personal approach to the happenings. Everything that happens is filtered thoroughly through the expectations and assumptions of the protagonist.

If a story can thrive under the protagonist's view, and makes the world more interesting by virtue of the protagonist's gaze, then I like writing in first person.

Third person, usually limited third, I use primarily to tell a story that's better experienced between multiple viewpoints. If a single protagonist experiences too little of the world to tell the fuller story, I'll default to third.

I almost never do Omniscient Third, in part because having a disconnected narrator is a difficult headspace to occupy well enough to do the language justice.


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## J Anfinson (Feb 5, 2017)

Book Cook said:


> I was wondering how do you, fellow members, decide in which POV you're going to write your novel.



Start writing the opening to the story. Experiment with a paragraph or so of each POV. Now which one feels natural for the story? There's my method.


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