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Thursday’s Writing Tip – From a professional editor

June 30, 2011 by Nicole 11 Comments

A fantastic post I came across on a site I think many of you may really like! Meredith at Fiction Workbench discusses POV’s and using first and third person. In. The. Same. Story.
Here’s the snippet as well as a link to the whole article and Meredith’s fabulous site.
‘First of all, there’s no problem at all with mixing first person and third person POV in a single story or across a collection of stories like you are planning. Writers do it all the time. It’s probably best to establish a pattern–so when you are *in* Derke or Shylocke’s POV, use first person for them every time. Don’t have one scene/story in Derke’s POV written in first, and then another in third. Be consistent. If you want Granish to be in third person, use third person for all of his POV scenes or stories. But as long as you maintain that sort of consistency, it’s okay even to write a novel that has some POV characters in first person and others in third.

And if a first-person character appears in a different story or scene that is NOT their own POV, of course it’s okay to have them in third person. You just can’t go into their head because they are not the POV character. But they can be in the scene in third person, no problem.
The important thing to remember is to stay in one POV for the entire scene. If you are going to change POV, make sure that it’s logical to do so and that there is a clean, natural break into a new scene so the transition is clear. Try to establish the POV as early in the scene as you can, and give each POV character a strong, unique voice. Ideally, we should be able to tell whose POV we are in just by the voice of the narration, even without the character being identified. Do that, and you can use any combination of POVs that you wish.’ 
Take care all!

Nic
 The Arrival, on Amazon or UK Amazon or Smashwords 
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