P.O.V. Mania: Exercising Discussion

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[font=tahoma][size=3][b]THE Importance of [i]slide[/i]-ing.[/b][/size]

He walks from the bar, beer in hand. He chooses a table at the center of the room and sits in a chair. He looks up. The room bathes in the dry light of fluorescent bulbs. A warmth to the air and breathing is filtered through the smell of too many bodies.

Melissa appears as a flash at the entrance, and they must have caught eyes because she heads directly toward him. He doesn't stand. She touches his arm.

William, what're you doin here?

He offers no answer and she asks what he wants to do tonight.

I don't care, Melissa. He leers at her chest and chews his bottom lip. As long as I end up sucking on you, I really don't care how we get there.

Her pink lips thin, widened into a smile, she stares at him, her eyes like grey diamonds in the light. She looks down at his zipper, says it's time to leave. When they were kids, their father taught them how to care for their own. A woman's fine and important, he'd say, but there's nothing quite like kin. Their father was all about safety and understanding. She adores having an older brother, but on some days, a lover is just more important.[/font]

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3rd person omniscient, or telling a story through two or more characters ?

[font=arial]SORRY for the O'Henry-esque punch at the end. I hope no one took crazy offense, but I needed to find a way to finish this with a memorial POV (point of view) slide, because that is what this thread is about: POV tosses, or as Karen Novak coined it, POV Mania

Though they are rare, what most often alludes me, most especially in my own work, is WHEN they're okay, and more so, WHEN they’re necessay..

During the Chris Baer intensive, we worked on POV sliding (his textbook was Franny and Zooey by Salinger, a book Meerkah had been after me about reading for near several months), which was the first time i ever saw with detail the hidden logic of how stories are put together, or, more appropriately, [i]conveyed[/i]. That you should maintain a focus, a center to the piece, and filter the story through that focus. We’ve all heard it before: show don’t tell, maintain your camera angle, all that.. knowing everything does not mean you [i]understand[/i] anything--especially when it comes to me.. With first person narration, this seems the easiest to master. Your narrator can only tell you what he knows and experiences, but this won’t tell a story in and of itself without a great deal of craft. To give your reader the full experience, in a first person POV, your character has to have a sense of the action, but he can’t know what Kim and Dave are thinking; the story is easier to follow if your character is sober and sane; in other words, he/she cannot possess any foreign knowledge beyond the five senses and his/her own memory and logic. Your reader should relate to your character because your character has flaws and also the same limitations as most everyone else--no ESP, non-clairvoyant, et cetera. Your Adam can't know that Gwen is looking at the bottles behind the bar from across the room unless she mentions it. Marcus cannot know that Jonah is yawning at the front door if he is using the pisser unless Marcus happens to be psychic. Well, the same goes for first person POV, because the story filters through a main character, or one main character at a time.

The reason for keeping in narration, or the reason as it appears to me, is control, controlling the focus of the scene and the actions of the characters in a way that everything is easily followed

[b]The Importance of Slide-ing[/b]

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This particular flash fiction piece was crafted on a whim, but I don’t think the narration adheres to the distinction of a sliding POV:

At the base core, an Omniscient narrative tells the story through multiple characters, usually two or three, but with that case, it’s not sliding: filtering a story through more than one character is its function. Sliding is done in a more limited environment: a Limited Third Person, and the slide occurs between the characters. Very hard to do well.

My above sketch I don’t think applies. The story filters through William at the start and maintains that until “She looks down at his zipper”, which only she could know--he’s still looking up at her glittering gray eyes and can’t know she’s looking particularly at his zipper. This is when the POV change occurs, similar to a slide, but I [u]think[/u] not distinctly as reading over this now, this story reads with all of the guidelines to an Omniscient Third Person narrative.

What do you guys/gals think ?

Hey, Vig, am I messing a lotta things up in all of this, based on the same Jauss essay on POV ?

As for sliding.. I guess, a best most productive answer for me would be a voice to distinguish if Franny and Zooey is a Limited Third or a Third Omniscient. That would explain volumes.

-kabol[/font]

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