Monday 28 July 2014

Problems with Grandma

I'm having problems with the character of Debby, the POV character I am using. Part of the reason is that she is one of a set of characters who are all of equal importance but using her as the POV gives her weight over the others and this is not helping the structure of the story which depends on the interaction between them and the different skills and personality traits each contributes.
Originally I wrote in omniscient but changed to one POV after someone told me this is the latest trend and that omniscient isn't acceptable any more. Maybe I misunderstood that but it doesn't matter. Looking over Grandma's shoulder isn't working.
My alternatives are to rewrite the whole thing in omniscient or, as one person has suggested, write each chapter from a different character's POV.
Either would be a massive task given the current partly completed draft is around 80,000 words. Still, may be better to rewrite now than to wait until I have a draft of 100,000 plus.
Another part of the problem is that I am finding being this close to a character is uncomfortable. I need her to take various actions but find it distracting if I have to justify why she is doing it. As soon as I write this I begin wondering if this is not a serious flaw in my writing, Perhaps I do not get inside my characters enough but use them as pawns or cyphers to tell my story or get my own views across. If so, I need to do some hard thinking about what I am writing and why I am doing it. It could explain why I have been successful with short stories, where there is less time for character development, and not with novels where the reader wants character development often at the expense of plot development.
A lot to think about.

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