One-tone characters and matters of perspective

Be careful to not go too hardcore into their negative traits. There's a point where most people will consider the character irredeemable.

 

If it's a one-off encounter, the MC may not have the opportunity to see more than one side of the character. Consider a waiter at a fancy restaurant--if she encounters a rude customer, she may not have an impression of him beyond "pushy and demanding."

With that said, the dimensions of the character will affect what you can convincingly do with him. If he's just a tool (so to speak), then he won't feel appropriately representative for a moral or a message like "Look at how awful this person is being! Don't be like this person!" This would be easier to handle through how the more complicated MC is affected by him. How does she react to his behavior, and what does that say about her?

 

This is a very interesting question that may not have an easy or singular answer.

I'm a fan of the video game Half Life 1 and 2, and I have been spending a lot of time lately contemplating the reasons why it won 50 game of the year awards and how those specifics could be translated into a manuscript's potential success.

One of the enigmatic and one-dimensional characters that Gordon Freeman encounters is a guy known as the G-Man.

I think the G-Man is a perfect example of how to make an antagonist lack depth yet still come off as relevant and interesting.

If you have 20 minutes to spend on creative development for your writing, go to YouTube and search for the 'treesicle review, with the title: Gordon Freeman (Half-Life): The Story You Never Knew.

Even if you know nothing about the game or hate gaming in general, it is worth the time to watch and is very amusing and insightful.

 

I think the way to redeem a character who is acting like a prick is to give them a reasonable motive for doing so, one the reader can understand.

That at least removes them from the category of cliche.

 

You can have as many POV as you need to tell the story, just not all in the same scene.

A single scene is comprised of setting + characters + time. When one element changes, the scene has changed.

It is best if you stay within the perspective of only one character during a scene rather than bouncing back and forth between the private perspective of first one character then a second then back to the first. THIS is “head hopping” because you are hopping from head to head to head.

Exception: most editors/readers will allow one switch during a single scene as long as you stay within that second perspective to the end of the scene. If you return to the first perspective you have head hopped.

Which character do you choose to lead a scene? Choose the perspective of the character who has the most to lose from the actions of that scene. Give the reader the highest level of tension every scene can give. Let us share in the losing side.

 

I can't say that I've read Don Quixote or Les Mis (I've seen the movies; that's about it) or Shogun, but I did try reading ASOIAF. Personally, I did not enjoy the vast number of perspectives. Some of them were necessary, because they're main characters, like Dany and Jon Snow and Arya and Tyrion. But as the series progressed, more and more character PoVs were added to the story, and it became nearly impossible to keep them all in track.

My own WiP does have changing point of views (three, to be exact). Now, as the author of the book, I obviously can't say that I know it works, not without bias. But I think it does, because it's what my book needed. I've got two main protagonists, and I gave each of them their own chapters in the story. The antagonist, I also gave a point of view chapters, but I did it in third person and I gave him a fewer number of chapters. I wouldn't have given him any chapters at all, except there were certain actions he took that I needed to tell the readers about, and my two main characters (obviously) couldn't know about it. Giving him chapters was my best option for keeping my readers informed while simultaneously keeping my protagonists oblivious.

I think that if your story needs more than one character viewpoint, then that's what you need to give it. You don't have to give both characters equal amounts of chapters.

As for what to watch out for, the biggest thing is to make sure your potential readers know that a change in perspective is happening. After reading Legend (by Marie Lu; it's sci-fi but I think it still works), I decided to mimic Lu in a certain regard: the color of the text in each chapter depends entirely on who's narrating it. Which can be very useful when you have two first-person PoVs, as both Lu and I now have. For example. Any time my MC 1 is narrating, I make the text blue. Any time MC 2 is narrating, I make the text orange(ish). And when the antagonist is narrating, I leave the text black. Also, labeling the point of view for each chapter is useful as well. Example: Chapter 1 - {insert character name}.

I can't claim to be an expert, but that's just my take on things.

 

My biggest pet peeve with PoV is head hopping. I find it very difficult to read a book when a PoV shift happens without a scene break indicator. I've seen books with shifting PoV in the middle of a paragraph, and this is very disorienting to me.

 

My novel has two first person PoVs. I'm not sure if I made that clear, before, but does that change your opinion on the font color? I'm not really sure yet who gets to decide the format of the actual books, whether it's the publisher or the author, and if my future publisher suggests we go about it a different way, naturally I'd listen to them. But with my protagonists both having their own first person PoVs, I feel like using the two different colors helps the reader remember who is actually talking. I could be wrong. What's your opinion?

 

I'd advise against using font colors to differentiate between characters. It comes off as gimmicky. The only book I've heard of that used colors for anything was House of Leaves, and that one is straight-up surreal. It used way more than just colors to get its plot across.

 

Hmm. I hadn't realized it made it look gimmicky. Thanks Ireth! I'll take that into consideration.

 

*nod* I think you might have leeway with different font formats, like the way Terry Pratchett's Death speaks in all caps or small caps, but color is a step too far, IMO. You'd have to discuss it with your agent/editor/publisher anyway.

 

I'd also recommend not using different colors.

Robin Hobb's latest series in her Farseer world also uses two 1st-person POV characters, and you can check it out maybe to see how she does it.

The simplest way to describe her very clever, yet subtle, transitions: The POVs are relegated to a whole chapter–i.e., she doesn't switch between 1st-person POV within a chapter–and she begins each chapter by letting us know rather quickly the location/milieu or some key character trait or mental focus, so that we know we've moved from one character to the other. This works especially easily when the two POV characters are separated geographically; but even when they are not, we are left in no doubt about who is narrating.

(I'd recommend reading the first two trilogies before jumping into this trilogy, however.)

 

Head hopping is a real risky venture. Two first person POV's is also tough.

The best attempt to take on the challenge of two first person POVs I have ever read is Robert Sawyer's Mindscan, a top notch SF book that was masterful in handling what in the case to that story seemed to be an insurmountable POV problem. I highly recommend you give it a read (and not just because I did some research and editing on it )

I also find Lee Child does a nice job of head hopping while keeping things clear.