First of all, thanks to those of you who have joined in on the conversation on the last post. If you haven't checked it out yet, please do. There are some great comments from a variety of interesting authors, and I would love to hear more from others of you.
Secondly, it's time for another overhaul in Real Stakes, one of the two novels I'm juggling right now (click on the tag for background on it). The short life history of Real Stakes looks like this:
- Began as a short flash fiction (at flashyfiction.blogspot.com).
- Expanded into a story.
- Expanded to a novel-length concept, multiple third person intimate POV.
- Completely overhauled ~10K words (if I remember right) to a first person intimate POV in order to better communicate the psychology of the story.
It was a fun challenge to try and communicate the same plot points that had once covered at least three characters in three different locations with limited interaction, but I pretty much pulled it off and the novel is sitting at ~25K words in that format.
Unfortunately, as I was looking at my outline and recalling some of the things that I wanted to accomplish, I realized that while I was getting the plot-points of the other characters across pretty well, I was not getting their psychology in the same way.
The conversation about evil and violence in writing and entertainment was making me a little extra conscious about what people were going to walk away from the book with. As I considered it, I realized that as it stood Real Stakes would be a good psychological suspense novel, but that I would be missing the entire point of the book, which is a bit more significant and meaningful.
Oops.
So now I'm looking at the option of juggling multiple first person POV's as a compromise. It might only be two of the characters. There is some value in the third of the original viewpoints, but I want to minimize confusion and I think the theme can be managed by two.
Thing is, I'm not sure how well I can keep up the pace of a psychological suspense novel with this literary device. I know the multiple first person POV technique can work, but I've usually seen it in much more deliberately paced literary works. I've had a few recommendations, but if anyone else has any thoughts or ideas, please let me know!
.Nevets.
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