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Characters. Partially Inside a Character’s Head: OUTSIDE AND INSIDE POV How deeply does a story take the reader into the head of a character.
Many discussions of point of view skim over the idea that POV can related to how close a reader is to a reader. But David Jauss says there are two points of view that allow narrators to be both inside and outside a character: omniscience and indirect interior monologue. This is part 2 of a 3-part series on Point of View: Techniques for Getting Inside a Character’s Head. Here are links to parts 1 and 3. Omniscience. I love Jauss’s comment: “I don’t believe dividing omniscience into ‘limited’ and regular’ tells us anything remotely useful. He spends time proving that regular omniscience never enters into the heart and mind of every character in a novel. Rather, Jauss says the difference that matters here is that the omniscient POV uses the narrator’s language.
Indirect Interior Monologue They are all waiting for the train. “Bob slips under Not-Tag. 3 Types of Character Arcs: Choose the Best for Your Novel. How Does Your Character Change?
You know your character must change somehow over the course of your novel. But how? And more than that, how do you sync the changes with the external plot? The middle of a novel can suffer from the dreaded “sagging middle” and it’s mainly because you don’t have a firm handle on the character’s inner arc and how it meshes with external events. I’ve found three approaches to the inner arc, each trying to laying out how the character changes. Hero’s Journey: Quest for Inner Change In the Hero’s Journey, laid out so well in Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, a character receives a Call to Adventure that takes him/her out of the normal and ordinary world into a world where they must quest for something. Melanie as an Example So, we’ve got Melanie who wants more than anything else to get her mother’s approval, but can’t because her mom’s a chef and Melanie can’t cook worth a flip. Iron Sharpens Iron – Friendships Back to Melanie: Flawed Way of Coping.
CHARACTER ARC « Creative Tips For Writers. Character Arc A DYNAMIC character changes and grows – he or she moves through a character arc.
Dynamic characters are impacted by the plot. They learn, change, respond and grow in how they see and react to their world. Q: What about my background characters that don’t have a character arc? A: These are the STATIC characters that essentially do not travel through a character arc and do not change. Role of a Character Arc: Serves as the route to internal change that the hero goes through in her journey. 3 Types of Arcs A character can have three types of arcs: positive, negative or no change. Positive Arc: Character goes from bad place to good place in life = a Happy Ending Negative Arc: Character goes from good to bad, neutral to bad or bad to worse = Tragic Ending No Change: The Character remains the same throughout.
A Word about “No Change” Characters: Characters who remain essentially the same from beginning to end are fatally flawed. A Character Arc Cheat Sheet: “good place” to end the arc.