I have a problem.
My friend Tam Ames recently asked us to name our worst bad writing habit as a band name.
I came uo with this: “Too Many People in This Damned Book.”
I love writing multiple point of views. I mean, like throw it down on the bed and make crazy love to it love.
When I’ve tried to write from just one, which is most often the case for a short story, I feel confined. I love to bounce a situation between two characters, and see how they handle it from each of their POV’s.
I blame J.R.R. Tolkien, and later Robert Jordan. In fact, I blame the entire genre of Epic Fantasy, which is notorious for sticking five or ten or fifteen viewpoint characters into a single volume, with the result often being that it runs to 1200 pages.
“Hi there. My name is Scott, and I use too many POV’s.”
I’m struggling a little with this in my latest tale, The Rising Tide, in part because I am pulling in characters from “The Stark Divide”, the first book, along with new ones, and it’s a challenge to decide which characters I need and which I don’t to tell the tale I wanna tell.
Each book seems to teach me a new lesson, and for this one, it’s how to thin the herd.
So to my fellow writing friends… how do you manage your POV’s? Are you a POV abuser, like I am? If so, what have you done about it?
I mainly write short stories and have experimented a couple of times with multiple viewpoints. I do have a novel-in-progress which (out of necessity) has several viewpoint characters. I’m stacked-up with short story deadlines or I’d have that darn novel halfway done by now!