20 October 2003
Birthday
My name is Kate Mosse, creator and writer in residence of www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk. I'm writing a novel - Labyrinth - an adventure story set in the medieval past and the present day …
… and it's nearly my birthday.
Obviously I intend to celebrate my birthday by pressing on with writing my book …
At the moment I am editing and rejigging scenes in the medieval part of my novel. There are questions of point-of-view – or POV – that require deep thought and much coffee in the early hours of the morning.
When you follow an eponymous narrator – Jane Eyre, Harry Potter – in the first person, the question of POV doesn't arise. It is always Jane's or Tristram's POV. As soon as you introduce a narrative voice – that is an author's voice, outside the head of your characters – it becomes an issue.
One facet of popular fiction – I'm talking about novels only as in short stories the text isn't usually long enough for it to create a strain – is the author's brilliant control of POV.
In popular fiction, the reader is encouraged to identify with a particular perspective on the action. That tight focus means that the reader becomes involved in the action. If you switch from one character's POV to another, you can lose your reader's attention and dilute that feeling of identification.
Much literary fiction is a lot more careless of POV. The authorial presence is so important in some literary fiction that it completely takes the place of action and development of character. Maybe that is an issue in Tristram Shandy ...
While I drank some pre-birthday wine this morning, I amused myself reading A A Gill's TV column. (I interviewed him once for BBC4's Readers and Writers Roadshow. He was very entertaining and – perhaps surprisingly – serious.) By a happy chance his column was about a particularly tricky element of POV – the use of accent.
I guess if you're reading this installment of my home page diary, you're au fait enough with the net to find Gill's article. It published today - 19 October 2003.
Did I mention it's the day before my birthday?
You can still enjoy birthdays in the Labyrinth.
