Black Gate

This is part 7 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

There are multiple variations of 3rd Person Omniscient that don’t appear to have industry-wide agreed-upon names. They’re generally just lumped together under “Mixed Viewpoints.” But used effectively, they’re not just a hodgepodge. They have rules, too, that if learned, can help you focus your story and make it the most powerful piece of writing possible.

I’ve broken several of them out and given them descriptive names to make their uses, purposes, limitations, and parameters easier to understand. All of these are, at base, 3rd Person Omniscient. They use a multiple point of view technique that will leap from one character to another and sometimes beyond, to objects, weather fronts, animals, houses, and non-corporeal entities from ghosts to Justice to Death.

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(This article is a follow up to my blog post “Story In Its Many Forms“)

In a previous blog (linked above), I talked about my Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing class and how they’re required to try their hands at forms beyond the basic short story: including poetry, blues songs, plays or radio plays, comic books, and mock journalism (any of the print or broadcast forms). For other weeks, they can choose yet a different form, but they can’t work in the exact same form twice.

They adapt to some forms fairly easily, because they see the parallels and similarities to the form they’re most comfortable with. And though different parallels and similarities exist between any two forms, they just can’t see them sometimes.

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This is part 6 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

Continuing in our exploration of 8 distinct POVs, we come to:

#5.  Serial: 1st,  2nd, Tight Limited 3rd, Limited 3^rd, or Blended

The Serial POV is a common variation of Mixed View Points in genre fiction.

It’s sort of like serial monogamy. You use more than one character’s viewpoint, but you don’t go hopping around in multiple heads in the same sentence, paragraph, or scene, often not even in the same chapter. This can be done with a series of alternating 1st Person, alternating 2nd Person (Very unusual!), alternating Tight Limited 3rd, alternating Limited 3rd Person, or an alternating blend of some or all of the above.

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The incredibly addictive TVTropes.org website has this to say about the trope :

Merriam-Webster defines trope as a ‘figure of speech.’ For creative writer types, tropes are more about conveying a concept to the audience without needing to spell out all the details.

Wikipedia uses a lot more words to say basically the same thing.

It’s important to understand that this doesn’t make the trope a cliché, but rather a sort of shorthand for writers to convey an image or concept or character to the reader in as few words as possible.

The poor old trope had had a lot of bad press in recent years. A lot of people seem to want to deconstruct the little critter, or subvert it or discredit it. Basically people seem to want to hunt the trope to extinction, and I think that’s unfortunate.

Now I agree some members of the trope herd have got a bit long in the tooth and are probably due for culling. No one really needs to read another fantasy novel where a simple farmboy turns out to be the Chosen One / Long Lost Heir who is foretold by prophecy and destined to save the world, do they? No, so the “Farmboy” trope is probably due to meet the huntsman, and I think the “Damsel in Distress” has probably had her day too.

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