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Amanda Beth wrote:Rewriting it in 3rd person is a long process. Not only changing the POV(pronouns, verbs, entire sentences), but I can add things I couldn't before--like the ability to let the reader know what the other characters were thinking/feeling. That was a road block I constantly found myself hitting was it was in 1st person--that person can only ASSUME what the other characters think or feel.
First person worked in Twilight so well because every girl WANTS to be in Bella's shoes. They want their prince charming and true love. It's the reason SM made Bella so generic--so every girl could put herself in the story. Not only do you lose the ability to really introduce the rest of the characters (because you have to go by the narrators opinion of them), there are only select scenarios where the reader would WANT a single persons thoughts. My story is about a war, and the thoughts and feelings of the other characters, even though they are supporting, are much more important than I originally thought. And the main character is a debbie downer a lot, and I thought who wants to be in a negative person's head the entire time? That IS a reason some people didn't like Bella -- they felt she was too whiney in Twilight.
We cheat in fanfic by doing different POVs. SR does 3rd person so well in UofEM, but its one of the few written like that bc we're all so used to being in Bella (and Jake's in BD, and Edward's in MS) head it's naturally how we want to write it.
Your reasoning is just another to write in 3rd person if a story has more than one major player, but mine doesn't. Maybe "thoughts" wasn't what I was trying to say. In my story, there are things I don't want to be dialogue. For example: the main character's romantic interest has a lot that he's gone through that I know and I want the readers to know. And because it's a war and there's a lot of different people taking it different ways, and I realized I needed to share that.VirginiaMay wrote:Personally, the reason I change from one POV to another is because there is something I want to share that cannot be accomplished inside the head of my main character. (In the case of What Drives Her, that would be Edward) I do not flip-flop viewpoints because I want the reader to know what everybody is thinking all of time, which seems like overkill to me, and I do not change it up just to drag out the story and double up on chapters. I do it when I can't figure out how else to tell what I want to tell, and only if it's important to the story.
Here's another thought... I often wonder if not being able to accomplish the storytelling inside of a single viewpoint is a sign of my limits as a writer, or is it a sign that the tale should be told from a third person narrative? How do you decide what voice to tell your story in? And at what point in the writing/brainstorming process should the decision be made?
(On that note, I guess I wonder if it's common for writers to do as Amanda Beth is doing and re-write something to change the narrative voice?)[/color]
Well, the first half of this statement is not necessarily a bad thing. If you're writing in first person, everything is going to be filtered/colored by that character's persona. Think of it this way: if the narrator assumed that someone felt a certain way and was wrong about it, why did he/she make that assumption? Was it a logical one to make at the time, given what the character knew at the time? This can help you better understand how your character thinks.Amanda Beth wrote:A lot of people write their books that way since thats how we naturally think but they fall into the same problems I was including writing in another character's emotions by assumption of the main character which gets REALLY redundant. You also can't describe your main character, because who goes and talks and thinks about themselves? And if he or she does does, its with their own skewed image of his/herself (re: Bella).
