Day 2: Changing POVs

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events and things. It’s still a little slow going.

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=4278]

One thing to note, however, was that I changed the point of view of my story in the middle of writing it. Since this is a memoir, I’ve been writing it in first-person perspective. Unfortunately, a few problems came up, namely:

  • limited knowledge; or, inability to provide a bigger perspective of each scene, and
  • it increasingly felt a little too close for comfort.

The second issue is due largely to the fact that I am writing about a certain time in my life: it’s currently a bit too “close” to me. Since the point of this exercise is also to do some post-processing of that situation, I decided a more objective, distant voice would better suit this scenario.

Hence, now I am writing in third-person omniscient, and I have a chunk of text greyed out in my text that needs to be converted over to that POV in time, as well as expanded. I kept it in since it’s really part of the story, I just need to do a rewrite.

The Wikipedia entry for Point of View actually has the exact same scenario that I am using (although it’s an advantage in my case):

The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story. A variation is where the narrator is a character in the story; a small amount of the story might be told in first person.

I kept the first part of the memoir in first-person; the introduction/prologue, if you will. I will probably expand this in time, but for now it will have to do — I don’t want to go in and edit it since that might bog me down.

2 comments

  • Wow, you’re quite far ahead! :D

    Gosh, I know what you mean with the urges to do other things. This morning I was trying to decide if I’d spend the morning fixing my desk and shelves. D:

    (And obviously I’m just surfing at the moment. Woe! LOL)

  • Wonderful! I’m doing Nanowrimo this year too, and though all day today I was distracted by the unbeatable urge to reorganize my bookshelves, I’m settled around 5,000 words at the moment. It’s exciting to be a little bit ahead of things.

    Good luck!

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