Steeping narration in point of view

This comment was left by Anonymous on the First walk on the Moon post:

Hello! I really enjoyed this excerpt and am excited to read more. As I was reading I wanted to feel Ames' emotion sooner. That's what I kept thinking about as I read through the first three paragraphs. I know this is only a small portion of the scene but I thought I'd get your feedback on how you balanced explaining description of the new scenery and describing the emotional side of the characters.

First of all, thanks for your feedback.

The short answer is, you're right, this is just a snippet of a much longer scene, and you're getting a strong dose of scenery up front. I would argue though that the first and third paragraph do contain character thoughts/emotions, as Ames is running like a boy in the first paragraph, and in the third paragraph Ames begins to consider his new world as one that has yet to be discovered, giving him something in common with pre-modern man. In the latter case, those are his thoughts directing the narrative. The main thrust of this scene opening is that you're experiencing walking on the Moon for the first time from Ames's perspective.

A big challenge in creating a "voice" in any story is first answering to what degree the narration is steeped in character point of view. "Tom walked through the door holding a gun" is fine for a detached narrator. But if the scene is from, say, Jim's point of view, you would say: "The door creaked. Jim looked up, and there in the open doorway stood Tom with a scary-looking gun." Some scenes by necessity are more detached from the characters than others. If there's a scale with totally detached on one end, and totally immersed on the other end, I would put this excerpt near the middle.

There are some scenes in Tendrils to the Moon that are very emotionally immersed, usually from Sheridan's point of view. I call these my Stephen King scenes because the character's guts are spilled all over the page. There's more to say about that, but I think I'll leave it for another blog post.

Finally, this excerpt was taken from the very beginning of chapter 6. At this point, the reader has slogged through about 45,000 words of a book with the word "Moon" in the title and hasn't gotten to the Moon yet! If there's a big scene transition, I like to set up the setting first, then the characters, then the plot. Part of the reason I chose this as an excerpt is it gives away none of the plot. You don't have to focus on one at the exclusion of the other, though. This excerpt combines character and description. It literally describes from Ames's perspective how much bigger his hand seems than a 400-tonne spaceship.

Originally I had another paragraph of description, but cut it out because it felt clunky to me.

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