When working on my book recently I hammered away over several days thinking Wow, this thing is moving! only to discover I had morphed into default Radio-TV narrator copy…again. It was interesting but lifeless and didn’t encourage readers to continue. Additionally, I was having difficulty with point-of-view.
On the web I found several articles on narrative voice and POV which were helpful. One of the most interesting for me was a November, 2017 post by Rae Elliott. In it, Elliot provides definitions, examples, and advice on various points of view: 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person both omniscient and limited. Elliot’s advice was to consider each character in the story and examine how framing the story from that character’s viewpoint would affect the narrative.
My own work-in-progress has several compelling candidates for POV and as I consider which character or characters to focus the story on, I thought to read some compelling narratives and see what I could learn.
And, while realizing I was not reading nearly enough books, I picked up From Russia With Love (Ian Fleming, Glidrose Productions, Ltd. 1957). It is a great example of Limited Third Person Narrator.
The first three chapters flesh out the book’s primary evil character from the viewpoint of: a masseuse, a flashback to the character’s transformation into a brutal unfeeling teenager, and the impressions of him by a Russian security officer all while carrying the story forward.
After reading the early chapters I realized I must read more books. So, today I have begun to establish a schedule for reading and writing and other activities. Feel free to ask me how I’m doing on this in the coming weeks. Writing is a process, not an event.
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