His mother, the Lady Jennifer, thought, my son has discovered that he hates sand. Peter gazed at the expanse of the desert and thought, there’s a lot of sand here. One approach is to move from character to character without changing scenes, otherwise known as head-hopping.
Doing that is best accomplished when the writer understands how to get inside. Not merely the action-movie bits of those lives, but an honest entry into someone else’s experience. Getting into the psyches of the characters? Ain’t nobody got time for that.Įxcept for people who enjoy exploring other lives in fiction. Dress the story up in fancy language and get Tom Hanks to sign a movie deal, and you can be the next Dan Brown with that style of writing. We all narrate events that way in ordinary conversation, getting our start in doing that when we strung events together with endless ands: Billy did this and Sally did that and I didn’t like it so I went to play with Mark and Bob…. The omniscient point of view - the view of the author - is easy to understand. Yes, there has to be a plot - things have to happen - and that happening should take place in a time and place - the setting - but if we are going to inhabit the world for the duration, we need characters to live in, and the nature of those characters is what ought to drive the tale. Point of View (POV) characters are the story. Image courtesy of Rebecca Kennison via Wikimedia Commons