POV change in middle of a chapter

OK, I'd be the first to admit I'm terrible at POV and have no idea what I'm doing. I've settled on 3rd-person limited and try to focus on seeing the story through the lens of the MC. In chapters away from him, I pick one character, mostly the bad guy, and do the same. In each case, to avoid confusion, I pick one person and stick with him or her through the entire chapter.

In one part of the story, however, I'm running into a bit of trouble. The antagonist is the main vampire in the novel and the chapter goes into great detail setting the stage for his character development. I do a pretty good job of focusing on his thoughts so that the reader gets to know him a bit. However, at one point he captures a helpless woman in his gaze and begins to torture her psychologically. Mid-scene the POV switches boom, just like that, to her and I take the reader down the rabbit hole with her. Then, it turns into a total mess because the woman is forced to stand and watch scenes from her life from years ago while she suffered through domestic abuse from her ahole ex-husband (that's the way the vampire chooses to torture her [sorry i know that's sick, eek sorry ladies!]). So, in a sense, the reader is still technically with the antagonist since you can hear him cackling in the background, but it focuses on the woman's horror as she watches herself suffer way back when. Uuughh!! Maybe it's head hopping, but you're kind of in all three people's head at the same time. At the end of the scene, once she snaps mentally, it goes right back to him in the next section (where he's even worse, hehe).

I know I'm breaking the rules and I know the editor and betas are going to have chest pain over it, but i felt like when the woman gets dragged into the gaze attack, the reader would naturally want to go with her through it. I feel dirty for doing a naughty POV shift, however (haha).

Scream!! Help, what do I do?? Helpppp!

 

The way I've seen it done is to transition out of one POV though a couple of sentences before dropping into the other one. I've written about it a bit, let me dig up the links:

• Transitioning from one POV to another within a scene
• Switching between close and distant 3rd

The second link is similar but not quite the same thing, but it does go into some detail about how to do such a transition. Be sure to look at the comments under the entries as well, there's some good info in there.

 

The easy solution is to just use scene breaks to denote the shift in POV. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see head-hopping in your description of the story. The chapter just goes:

• Vampire Scene #1
• Victim Scene #1
• Vampire Scene #2

Hearing the antagonist in the background doesn’t mean it’s from his POV if the reader is experiencing the story through the victim.

 

This is how I tried to go about it. They meet eyes, boom there's a flash, she goes through some trippy visual hallucinations, he attacks her, and then, suddenly, she's standing in the kitchen of her apartment from many years ago and the emotional horror begins. I *hope* the reader would naturally follow her into the ordeal. At first, I wrote the whole thing from her POV, but then it became kind of fluff material that was fun but didn't move the story forward. By tying it to the bad guy, i get the dual benefit of character development and I can show why it's important to the story. Plus it's a little creepier.

 

It sounds like it should work that way, that's actually way more of a transition than in those examples I posted. You might want to use one of those scene break symbols Homer posted above at the beginning and end of that part, unless it ends at a chapter break.

 

That's a good idea. I'll try the double space thing he mentioned when i look at it later tonight.

 

"Head hopping" is just a pejorative for people playing POV checkers, instead of POV chess. If someone uses that, what they really mean is "I'm confused." So, you're correct in focusing on clarity.

In my debut novel, I had characters who were—some of all of which at the same time, and often in the same scene, mind you—i) hearing voices from a mental illness, ii) hearing voices from other characters, iii) prognosticating voices that others were about to say in the future in real time, iv) of course, also thinking their own thoughts. So, third-person limited wasn't the right choice. Picture a poker game where you truly wanted to let the reader in on all the subterfuge that was happening. 3POV doesn't quite get you there. So, I say your instincts are right about that, too.

For me OPOV was the answer. Some chapters I simply designated as "Omniscient POV" (defined as inside more than one head within the same scene) and I would use breaks "###" to delineate when the scene was being relayed to the reader from this character or that. I think others here have suggested that and I agree: it can work quite well.

Note that OPOV has other modalities, too.
√ Some people use that moniker to describe narrative techniques wherein the author describes far away places and facts that no character in the story could possibly relate.
√ Some SFF authors, of course, use it with in-story characters that are truly omniscient.
there are other variations, too...

But, I believe the kind you are describing is what I first mentioned. Brandon Sanderson calls it "Power Omniscient" and it is just being able to be inside more than one head 'at a time' (within the story). You're also correct that there is currently a strong industry bias against omniscient. But you know best how to tell your story. Experiment. See what happens.

Good luck!

 

Not at all the same thing, but you reminded me of a story I attempted years ago where one character was drunk and another was on opium. The POV was the guy on opium, all mellowed out, and he had to try to follow his drunk and very angry friend around town one night and prevent him from destroying too many places in the city. So I was trying to write it all through an altered state of consciousness, and that character was trying to anticipate and understand this friend, whose consciousness was altered in a very different way. It was exceedingly difficult, and I never finished it. Fun to try though.

It was part of a series of stories about a couple of stoner dudes who met an alien who was a drug dealer (and a living bong, who was at his best for a while right after someone had done a hit out of him—Dox, from the planet Para) and would bring them all kinds of weird space drugs. Each story was basically about their experiences on these imaginary drugs, and often at the end the idea was "Did it actually happen, or was it all just a weird trip?"

In another of their stories (Skunkweed) they were drawn irresistably by a strong and enticing (but at the same time repugnant) smell to a clearing in the woods where a bunch of guys were lying passed out in a circle around a huge bong, "with a party bowl you could eat cereal out of," that stood like a mysterious monolith at the center, still smoking. They each took a big hit, and each entered a totally different state of consciousness that only lasted until they passed out (a few minutes), during which point they would try to accomplish something through the extreme difficulty of how stoned they were and in what way. So a series of very different states of consciousness. And each time one would wake up, he'd find himself in a totally new situation and have to try to puzzle out what had happened to get them here, and what to do next. Fun, but again, way too difficult. Oh, and the guys they saw passed out, each one would also wake up and do the same thing. It was like a lotus-eater thing, your only thought each time was to get control over the bong briefly and try to remove it so others can't take it back, and then take another hit. There was only one guy 'awake' at any given time (at least in the part I wrote). Lol, I guess you could call it a sort of Munchie Games, long before there was a Hunger Games.

 

That does sound like a challenge.

My main character had (accurately portrayed) schizophrenia and, the story didn't really start working until I conceded that I could never really do true first-person POV with them. In everything I've ever read, including award-winning stuff, unreliable (due to mental illness) narration has never really worked. Same with other-wordly geniuses like Sherlock Holmes, right? Watson is the narrator for a reason.

To try to do it either makes it overly confusing for the reader, or a crutch for the author to introduce any kind of plot-zaniness they want and then write it off to: 'Oh-HO! Well, look at that! It was all just in their mind!"

One strong story, which is an exception to that (and that your example reminded me of) was Emma Bull's Bone Dance, from 1991. There are entire chapters of that novella that are basically just trippy—but it works imo.

 

I hope this isn't too off-topic, if it is maybe it can be split off into its own thread. I think it does have some relevance, in a kind of roundabout way.

To some degree every narrator is unreliable. Or, to word it better, reliability is not an either/or prospect. Absolute reliability and unreliability would be the extreme ends of the spectrum, and they're both really just abstract ideals, not possible for an actual human being. Most stories take place somewhere between the extremes. Let me quote Gene Wolfe:

"my experience is that subjects and methods are always interacting in our daily lives. That's realism, that's the way things really are. It's the other thing—the matter of fact assumption found in most fiction that the author and characters perceive everything around them clearly and objectively—that is unreal... Fiction that doesn't acknowledge these sorts of interactions simply isn't "realistic" in any sense I'd use that term."

From On Encompassing the Entire Universe: An Interview with Gene Wolfe
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But of course, as he said, most books seem to be written from the assumption that, at least most of the time, our perceptions are perfectly accurate and they we don't have anything distorting our understanding of the world around us. And that's doubtless the way they should be written, it's a nice comforting illusion that we don't want to see through often. But it is an illusion.

When I was in my early 30's I kept trying to write a poem about the difficulties of real communication between people. I ended up with something very different, but I wrote a bunch of stuff about how we send out our words, even though they don't always fit precisely with our original ideas, and we hope the other person can and will—

• Be paying attention
• Be clearly able to hear us
• Not misundersatnad any or the words or meanings
• Have enough common ground to understand what we mean
• Not have any biases or issues that distort or block them from understanding, or make them simply refuse to listen or comprehend properly or to even believe the same things we believe

And of course we ourselves have certain biases and issues that might cause us to misunderstand or refuse to believe things they say as well. When you take all of this together (and I may have fogotten a few things) it's almost a miracle if we can engage in true clear communication. I don't mean when it comes to small talk or anything, but on the big powerful issues, the things that mean the most to us. Sometimes all you can do is shake your head (perhaps metaphorically) and think. "Well, that's a shame, I think that person and I could get along really well if not for this problem we keep running into."

And then there's Pinter:

"Instead of proceeding logically Pinter's dialogue follows a line of associative thinking in which sound regularly prevails over sense. Yet Pinter denies that he is trying to present a case for man's inability to communicate with his fellows. 'I feel' he once said 'that instead of any inability to communicate there is a deliberate evasion of communication. Communication itself between people is so frightening that rather than do that there is continual cross-talk, a continual talking about other things, rather than what is at the root of their relationship. - People talking to fill the empty spaces between them."

From Martin Esslin's book Theatre of the Absurd

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Plus, I want to say that the unreliable narrator can work in a wild postmodernist comedy. And also in more serious stories, but it's a lot more difficult to do well. Oh, and also (about your statement that unreliable narrators don't work):

 

I also want to say it worked pretty well in The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and I'm sure there are more. It doesn't work well when dreams are considered to be no more than meaningless noise, but when coupled with an understanding of the power of the unconscious and how dreams can be unraveled through interpretation and be found to have incredible depths of meaning (an understanding inherent in both stories I mentioned), they are in some ways more truthful than mere physical reality—this meaningless objective world we find ourselves meandering through. The inner world of thoughts, feelings, memories, ideas, dreams fantasies etc is much closer to us (it is us). But I realize most people don't see it that way in this highly materialist age, and in some sense I guess that's just like, my opinion, man. I do acknowldege however that only a small audience exists who would understand the power of the unconscious, and you ain't gonna make no blockbuster movies or bestselling novels about it.

No movie studio would take on A Nightmare on Elm Street when Wes Craven was peddling it, until he finally discovered the little upstart studio called New Line Cinema. Over and over he heard—"What, it's all just a dream? Well that isn't real, nobody can get hurt in a dream—who cares?" That's the standard materialist idea of dreams, but Craven had set it up so what happens in the dream happens for real, in waking life too. Somehow even when he told them that they scoffed and waved it off. He based it on newspaper articles about young men in Asia who had nightmares and then died in real life, and one of them had a coffeemaker hidden in his closet so he could stay awake. Dreams are often revealing inner issues in disguase as characters or monsters. We ignore them at our peril. Many of our ancestors understood well the reality of the dream world, and apparently were very good at understanding the symbols. But we've lost that, except for a few small and mostly unknown/discredited branches of psychology.

 

1,000%. This makes for the most immersive points of view in my opinion.

 

looks like some of the links dropped.

 

Yeah, the whole site's long gone now. It disappeared some time not long after I wrote that, unfortunately.