TRAVERSING Z

POV

omni vs. head-hopping

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cover of Still Life by Louise Penny

I’ve been reading Louise Penny’s Gamache series with a kind of fascination – not for the mystery element, which is fine, but for the POV.

It reads to me as omni, though I know plenty of other folks call it head-hopping, and they’re not exactly wrong. The image that I couldn’t get out of my head all through Still Life was of rocks being skipped across the water – just these brief, rapid dips into people’s heads. At times it’s poignant, at other times distracting – until you start to see how all these little insights are adding up.

It does, however, solve one problem of multiple POV, which is that it spares Penny from having to fully inhabit the characters, or make difficult decisions about balancing plot and pacing with creating a fully-fleshed worldview. I have no doubt that Penny knows her inspector inside and out, as she does Clara and perhaps a couple others; but for some characters it’s enough to give a few pithy inner reactions and move on. It can be a useful way to bridge moments without having to elevate yet another person to a full player in the story.

The rule of omni, as I was always taught it, is that the story is being told by an all-seeing narrator. And I think Penny’s work just slides over the line. While there isn’t a dominant Author Voice, there is a sense of containment throughout, of information being doled out very carefully.

I’m reminded too of the longago end to St. Elsewhere – perhaps that snow globe is a better fit than the skipping rocks?

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photo

over on the tumblr site, i did some posts about making this chart, which shows the basic plot of all three books.

it seemed time, and yet it was a little sad.  there was a long stretch of this project that felt purely self-indulgent—following every little scene to its absolute end, letting conversations go on for the sheer pleasure of listening to these people talk, of flexing dialogue muscles i didn’t know i had.  but that time is over now, and i can’t revise talassio without knowing, roughly, how everyone turns out, lest i write myself into a corner that i can’t undo two volumes later.

the rows are characters, both major and minor, and a few rows at the bottom are for relevant incidents in the various locations.  the columns are months/stretches of time.  the point was to get all the major events down: all the transits, who goes where and what might be happening to provoke them, the really big emotional shifts.

the x’d boxes are when a character is static, or hasn’t yet come on stage.

the small, dark, upright crosses are major deaths.

it’s not all to be written out, mind you; a lot of what’s up there is downright dull, and no one wants to read, say, about three months’ worth of verbal negotiations in england while **** is hitting the fan in paris.  but it tells me who is where at any given moment, what fragment of the story they’re experiencing, what they know and don’t know and how they act accordingly . . . it also tells me that to focus solely on elisabeth would culminate in some kind of mystery-style confession at the end, when everyone tells her what’s really been going on, for the reader’s benefit.  i need another POV throughout, another character or just a narrator, to hint at this larger structure and distribute reveals as it goes along.

a tricky thing—but that was part of why i started this mess in the first place: i do love tricky writing, and thinking about structure, and the pleasures of building such a clockwork mechanism, all the desires and ambitions and failings and foibles of people and how they inadvertently mesh together and make things happen.

https://traversingz.com/1290/

a busy week.

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no writing.  i can feel it in my head.

(addendum: and then, by some lovely twist of fate, i found myself with a blissful two hours tonight.  1800 words of this month’s write 1 sub 1, and i finally found the voice.

i think.

well, it’s working so far.  though: after months of all the short fiction coming out in first person, we are back to third.  almost like a cycle, yet the story should determine the voice . . . unless the cycle is determining the story?)