Perspective problem in history?
Hello, I've been wanting to write a novel for a while, but I'm having a big problem deciding which perspective to write from. This book features a variety of characters, each with their own storylines and threads, so I'd like to switch between them. In such a scenario, it would be a good idea to tell the whole thing from an authoritative perspective, i.e., from a third-person perspective, which tells the story about the characters.
However, it is actually important to me to write in the first person, as I find this much better, as I believe it allows you to better portray the different emotions and work more with character deception, i.e. how a character thinks for themselves and reveals their inner thoughts.
However, it would be very difficult and confusing to switch between characters who might be in different locations in the first person every time. This would be particularly impossible to implement if two characters meet and you want to show both of their thoughts simultaneously. I'm really unsure what to do. I've read various books that do something similar, like "A Song of Ice and Fire," where each chapter is told from a different perspective. However, that wouldn't be ideal for my work either, since, as I said, the perspectives often switch quickly, and the thought processes of both parties need to be presented almost simultaneously for the story.
Maybe someone understands my problem and could help me with how I can best implement it and whether there is another method that I have not mentioned here.
Thank you for all answers
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Hi, so first of all, I know your problem more than well and have not yet found the perfect solution. I’m still trying to help.
So, as RabbitMarie has written, you should write in the chapter headings about who it is when you want to write in the I perspective. The chapters can also be rather short so you can write from several perspectives during a conversation or other scene. With too many people it can still be confusing even if the name is in the chapter.
You could think about the third person again. There are two different types to write from the third person. On the one hand, there would be the variant where only one person is in the foreground, from which one knows the thoughts and feelings and one knows as a reading just what this person knows. So it’s just like the me perspective written in third person. As I said, you can also respond well to the feelings and thoughts of the person, but just one at once.
The difference to the me perspective is that you can change this person within a chapter by simply doing a paragraph and then it’s about the other person. So you can tell all the perspectives but don’t have to make new chapters for it all the time.
In this case, I could recommend the omniscient narrator. He is, as the name says, omniscient and he knows the thoughts and feelings of all people and has everything in mind. With this narrative type, you could switch well between the thoughts of the individual people within a scene and also show several thoughts at the same time.
Advantage of the omniscient narrator: you can really show several thoughts at the same time
Advantage in the third perspective: It’s similar to me perspective for writing, but you can change faster and easier between the individual perspectives, which is why it’s more practical
You can think about what you’re saying.
I hope I could help a bit and I wish you a lot of success in writing 🙂
There are books where the name of the Charackters, which is just “counted” under the chapter. When I encountered, I would make it so that from half it is changed.
LG and much fun writing!
You can immerse yourself in the inner life of your protagonists with a narrator who leads through history, just like the “me perspective”. Instead of limiting itself to the perception of a single hero, the narrator can describe the entire world of history in more detail. The representation is not coloured by the subjective view of a character, but can offer a balanced view of events.
If you write from a particular person’s point of view, it has serious disadvantages. You can’t let this person do anything bad anymore, because you have to explain why the hero suddenly becomes a pig. The explanation, however, relativizes the bad deed and unravels it. Suddenly the bad is only half as bad and the tension is fussy.
The narrator can disclose information that the characters do not know, thereby building tension or creating irony. The reader is therefore always a little in the advantage of the hero. He thinks he’ll know what’s going to happen. But then it’s completely different.
In the form of the narrator you can throw the characters into the most impossible situations. You can make one who was a “good” at the beginning to be evil in the course of history and vice versa.
In addition, the narrator can switch between different locations and time levels without being bound to the physical presence of a figure. So the advantages of the narrator are obvious. In addition, very few authors can tell a story really well in the “me perspective”. Because this is really difficult to build tension.
It is difficult to describe several characters in the me-form. If, then it would definitely have to be clear who just writes. However, this is not particularly trustworthy to the reader who now knows that it comes from a feather and here an author attracts various feathers. I don’t like it. Well, I don’t like most of the I-counts. But that’s because they’re usually badly written.
Somehow I have the feeling that almost every book that I have read so far from the I-person was written so I almost only know that.
Yes, but this is more a new phenomenon, since everyone wants to write “a book” at once, and this can also be thanks to Wattpad and Co.
My Opinion: If it is not your own story, then leave it with the me perspective.