Comments on: JWAM reader request no. 1: Choosing povs

By: Justine

Justine — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:19:36 +0000

David: I’m Aussie girl. Can’t have to many syllies. Gotta be “omni”.

How conscious are you of the personality of your omni voice?

It definitely has one. But, oddly, not a gender. I think of omni as “it”. I guess that makes sense given the God-like perspective. Currenly it is my favourite voice.

By: David Moles

David Moles — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:52:25 +0000

I already liked omniscient POV, but somehow calling it ‘omni’ makes it at least 50% cooler.

How conscious are you of the personality of your omni voice?

By: Justine

Justine — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:08:53 +0000

If I weren’t on an exclusive diet of 1930s books I’d check out the Stross. It sounds fascinating and I am a fan of second person done well. Black Idol by Lisa Saint Aubin de Teran is one of my favourite books. It’s told entirely in second person from the point of view of someone lying on a couch dying.

Actually, my novel that comes out in September, the liar book, has some chunks of second person. The direct address to the reader is part of the protag trying to convince us that she’s not lying. Yet, second person is the most common pov used in advertising . . . which as everyone knows is pretty much all lies.

By: Nicholas Waller

Nicholas Waller — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:55:37 +0000

re Second Person – Charles Stross’s novel Halting State is all in second person and from the POV of three different people, who each get their own chapters. Partly, he said somewhere, this was because it seemed to match the subject matter, a thriller about shenanigans in and out of multiple-player online games (where players use avatars).

I tried second person in an unpublished effort about a character who had been brainwashed/dehumanised and re-engineered as a semi-involuntary human suicide bomb who dies at the end. Second person seemed there to give a sense of someone being told what to do, as if being manipulated. Obviously first person doesn’t work where the POV character dies (well, unless there’s a post-death commentary as in Sunset Boulevard).

In the Stross book second person gave the sense of a character’s thinking brain being a little detached from his or her body, pushing it along to do stuff and go through motions while aware he or she didn’t fully understand what was going on in the great “game” they were all caught up in.