taking on a new perspective

To follow up from last week, we really enjoyed The Desolation of Smaug. I certainly have a few bones to pick with parts of it [mainly, I feel like the small changes and additions they made to the first movie started getting out of hand a bit here] but by and large it was a really fun experience. There was a little boy sitting behind us for both films and while he and his father spent the majority of the first up and about, it was super adorable to hear him asking his dad questions about the characters and the story. Happily, Tim survived work the next day. Surprisingly, he often does better on less than 6 hours of sleep than with 6 or more. Weird.

Some major brainstorming happened with my story yesterday and I am so stoked for the new ideas that have come into play. I have the tendency to get stuck when I write. Something isn't coming out on the page like I wanted it to, things feel disjointed and I'm not sure how to fix it, big questions are looming and I don't know how to answer them, etc. I've been dealing with all of these the last few weeks but last night, thanks to a fabulous friend and a wonderful husband, I think I made some breakthroughs.

I had decided on the general arc of the story, the main conflicts, etc. but I was running into difficulties because I want my characters to all be complex but I was clinging to my desire to write the story from one person's point of view. Now, it is very hard to convey the complexity of several characters if you're only seeing things through one person's eyes. This problem had left me at a standstill, grabbing at straws to try and invent ways to make each character's struggles more apparent and compelling. Every time someone asked me if I would be writing from multiple perspectives I would respond with a quick and definitive no that may or may not have made some people feel like they'd offended me at the suggestion. Tim told me something last night, though, that made me more open to considering an alternative.

Tim kept coming back and back to why I wanted to keep the perspective with one person. He told me that in all the big, acclaimed fantasy books, the story is never told from one person's perspective exclusively [yes, I'm sure there are some exceptions]. Very gently, he admitted that when I first explained my intentions to restrict my POV for the story, it immediately became an unimpressive YA fantasy novel in his head. While that admission stung just a little bit, it made me think. I have never strictly billed this story as a fantasy, but it does have a lot of things in common with that genre and the complexity of each character is one of those elements. I'm relatively new to the fantasy genre as a reader so I hadn't realized the perceived difference between stories written from one or multiple perspectives and, believe me, the last thing anyone sets out to do when they start to write is to create mediocre stories.

I had dug myself so far into my determination to have the story told by one character that I had never considered adding other perspectives as a means of solving many of my problems. But the more I'm thinking about it, the more things are clicking into place. By adding perspectives from three other characters, gaps that I was having difficulty filling are already being written in my head. The complexity of these characters will be visible and the intricacy that I'm trying to build into the plot will be more integrated now.

Guys. I'm seriously stoked about this.

So, moral of the story this week? If you're running into road blocks with your writing, try looking at things from different angles, even ones you never thought you'd use before. Try out different POVs, from different characters. Sometimes this may feel like it's adding a lot of work for you, and it does take time and you may not use all of what you write, but by exploring options you may keep yourself from asking "what if"s down the road. And if your experimenting reveals something that just makes everything click better, won't you be better off than if you tried forging ahead with something that didn't feel like it was working?

Writing is work - anyone who tells you differently is lying. But it should also be fun, a time and place where we can play with out imaginations. So have fun with it :)