Point of View/ View Point

Sarah's post on VP got me thinking.

I read an awesome chapter on VP in Ursula Le Guin's 'Steering the Craft'. She wrote the one scene from several different points of view and I don't mean simply first person, third person and omniscient. I came away feeling I had really grasped the nuances of VP.

I thoroughly enjoyed George RR Martin's Fire and Ice, even though there were so many narrative threads that the story spread out like a carpet and the momentum slowed down to a crawl. As I remember, he kept it simple sticking to third person POV for each short chapter.

Completely different, but also enjoyable, was Jim Butcher's 'Storm Front', written from the first person VP of a wizard detective.

There was one fantasy book I read which used a mix of first person narrative and third person. All scenes from one certain character's VP were told in first person. Looking back, I could not see why the author had done this. Why not use two third person VPs or two first person VPs? Neither of these would have worried me. But why use intimate first person VP with one narrative and deep third person with the other?

Currently I'm writing my King Rolen's Kin fantasies for Solaris. I've deliberately kept it simple with only three narrative VPs, and no change of VP within a scene. But I like to embed assumptions in the narrative while in a particular POV, so that only later the reader realises that the character has misinterpreted something.

I suspect all writers are frustrated actors, immersing themselves in a character, then filtering events in their invented world through that character.

Cheers, R.