The beasts have breached the sanctity of the bed! It's adorable, but it's also slightly short on sleep. Still. They have a hard time working out that bed means sleep. This picture to the contrary notwithstanding. They seem to only want to sleep in the bed when the humans aren't in it. If the humans are in the bed, then it's a playground. Oh. And the elder girls are horrified by this development.
All righty. Why were we here? Oh yes! POV. You've had definitions. You've seen arguments regarding which POV goes with which genre. Some of us have expressed our preferences regarding which POVs we prefer either to read or to write.
Here's my slightly out on the fringe rant about Point of View.
It's an invitation. Point of view is my engraved invitation to you to enter into an emotional journey. How I word that invitation dictates how you'll experience the emotional arc of the story and the characters. First person asks you to step into the roll of main character. Third person puts you at a slight remove from that, but it allows you to slip on the masks of multiple characters rather than just the protagonist's. It's my job to decide how deeply I want to immerse you into the feelz of a book. If I'm writing Women's Fiction, deep emotion is the expectation and first person is going to make it easy for me to pull you in. Not to say that Women's Fiction can't be third person. It can and often is. It's just that deep POV in third person is harder work.
Summary on that: POV is a tool that dictates how readers will experience emotion in a story. Know your story, your genre expectations, the limits of your toolset and then go forth and break all the damn rules about POV and story just to see if you can make it work.
Why do I say that? I have distinct opinions about what POVs I prefer. Distinct. Opinions. And every single time I voice them, someone comes along and writes a POV I profess to hate. They do it so skillfully that I end up loving it. So maybe I am finally learning to say, 'hey, with enough vision, skill and drive, you can make anything work.'
Another note on POV - I draft in first person and then (if the story calls for it) rewrite to third person. It's a tip an editor gave me back at the dawn of time. It was one of those things I shrugged figured I'd try once and discard, but it stuck. It forces me to really immerse into a character and connect with what's going on in a story. Does it make rewrites a pain in the kazoo? Absolutely. And yet if I try to skip it and write straight to third person, my beta readers throw things at me because half of the emotion is missing. So there you are. I write weird, I guess.
I'm sorry I don't have great golden wisdom to impart about point of view and how to pick which one is best. Emotion governs the decision for me - not mine. The reader's. Once I know what and how much I want readers to feel, I can make a POV choice. And like Jeffe said. No one wants to notice POV. They just want that invitation slipped into their hands so they can edge into the story and lose themselves in it.
In keeping with the incredible shit storm that has been today, I'll tell you that I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for super early this morning. No problems right? Imagine my surprise when I check in on the blog tonight and my post is nowhere. Uhm. Blogger? Oh look. My SFF Seven THEMED post went live on some other random blog site. Nice. I'm comfortable certain those people think I am out of my damned mind. They may well be right.
