After reading several books, blogs, and online articles on the elusively challenging art that is called writing, I felt prepared enough to actually start writing my first novel. The ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for three years took on a substantive form – characters, dialogue, even a rough overview of the plot.
It’s a fantasy novel featuring Kenji, a young man recently cast out of a monastic school and finding his way in a world recently turned upside. It was going to be set in a semi-historical Japan shortly after the Onin War, but I ended up placing it in Runes of Gallidon, a user-generated collaborative online fantasy world I co-founded/created last year.
Months after starting the novel, I am still struggling with some fundamentals about how, exactly, to tell this story.
One of my early struggles was point of view. I initially settled on a close third person, single POV, and I wrote a few chapters in this format, focusing on the protagonist, Kenji.
Soon, however, I realized the limitations of this approach. Information shared with the reader must be limited to what the protagonist knows or experiences. Fine for certain types of works and stories but not a style that worked well for me as the story developed and deepened.
New characters sprang up, and I found myself wanting to write from their POV. Coming at a topic from multiple POV’s was very appealing, not least because it allowed characters to comment (perhaps silently) on each other.
Eventually, I switched from a single POV to a multiple POV. Suddenly, I went from trying to figure out what happened next to trying to figure out how to scope back the story so it could be told in under 100,000 words.
It’s amazing how much more easily the plotlines and other characters developed simply by changing the POV. It’s a bit more work, but the work is easier. And easier, in this case, means more fun.