Dec
14th
2013
Shared point of view · 2:10am Dec 14th, 2013
There are more options for point-of-view than just omniscient, limited, and objective. Another interesting thing about The Comfort of Strangers, a novel by Ian McEwan, is that it uses a shared point of view. We are in the minds of the two protagonists, and you could say it's switching back and forth like in a romance novel, but it feels to me like an omniscient viewpoint that can only see into the minds of certain characters, or like a single mind spread out between two bodies. Is there a word for that?
I can imagine using it on a gang, or an army squad, or possibly the Mane 6, although it probably works best when you're emphasizing similarity rather than differences between characters.
I've been thinking hard about perspective issues lately. I can see this working on a theoretical level, though it would seem to have the effect of depersonalizing the individual characters, so they become a gestalt in the reader's mind rather than real people.
I suppose 'gestalt' POV is the word you're looking for, though I've never heard it used before.
This has exactly nothing to do with ponyfiction, but the one story that absolutely should have been in (as CiG puts it) "gestalt" PoV was the Fireborn tie-in novel Embers of Atlantis.
The conceit of the Fireborn RPG is that the PCs are all members of a brood of dragons who have reincarnated in the modern age. One of the minor and easily overlookable game mechanics that makes a striking difference to the flow of gameplay is that the PCs all share a permanent mental link. I ran a year-long game of Fireborn that was the single most epic RPG I've ever participated in — and aside from the unprecedented engagement of every character being involved any time even a single one of them was on the scene, you should have seen the amazing uses they put that allegedly minor power to.
Alas, the novel was unexceptional urban fantasy schlock that … got the basics of the source material right but none of its flavor, and Fireborn itself is so obscure that finding fanfic of it is an exercise in laughable futility. I'll have to file gestalt POV under "concepts to keep an eye out for". I wonder if Comfort of Strangers is even of the right genre to do anything daring with it.
My default POV is the unorthodox and quite possible entirely feeble-minded "easily distracted" POV. That's when there are characters the narration technically follows but the POV gets distracted easily and can slip into other characters for brief side-flashes. I think I stole the idea from Pratchett, but, honestly, I'm not sure.
But a true multiple-POV story with all POVs in one narrative thread... it's tricky, but, wow, I'd love to see it done.
I absolutely love what Haruki Murakami did with "We" in After Dark.
1604255 What did he do?
1604364
See for yourself.
I do shared-POV pretty much constantly, at least in stories where there's more than one principal character whose thoughts are currently relevant to the story. I didn't even realize there was a term for it.
One thing I tried in my HiE/crossover fic is, I would have a shared-POV between all the human characters, but not the ponies... then in the next scene, have a shared-POV of the ponies but not the humans. So it's basically what you said about highlighting similarities but not differences, with the scenes altering between "teams" rather than characters.
I know what you mean, I think. Sometimes when I'm writing, the perspective character slides back and forth with a lot of fluidity. Sometimes, that gets really weird--the line between a characters' thoughts and the narration is very, very fuzzy when I write something like Snit, so when it goes sliding back and forth, it can get interesting.
I do a lot of thinking in shots and scenes in a cinema sort of way while I'm writing--it ends up being a bit like the camera rapidly panning between views over each character's shoulder. Bit confusing to use in actual cinema, but it can work in text for the right story.
Perspective is one of the writing skills I find most challenging, because I'm just so inculcated to 3rd Limited. I've spent a few comments and a blog post talking about how I write characters again over the last couple days, and I just find it so natural to slip inside one individual's perspective that Omniscient or the herein mentioned Gestalt (props to CiG) seem like they'd be very difficult to me. How do you describe a scene when you don't have a perspective to view it from?
I'd definitely be interested to read some gestalt ponyfic. Certainly, I think you could craft a couple interesting story premises around its use, and it'd be instructive to see it, if it were done well.
I like to slip POV's back and forth, particularly in what romance stuff I write, because not knowing what the characters are thinking takes about 50% of the experience away. Generally on other kinds of fics, I try to avoid it, because EqD will stamp it "Head-hopping" and I'll have to edit around it. One alternative that I've used to great effect in "Diplomacy by Other Means" is to write a section as one POV, then go back in time and write the same section from another POV only with differing start and end points. Chapter 3-4 are the best example. Once you exceed 2 POVs, it gets iffy except in very short bits (Chapter 11). I tried to do it in Monster in the Twilight to fair effect, but in the end I had something like 20 characters, so I limited myself to about 6 total and 3 "main" ones.