One of the things I’m doing with In Shining Armor that has me both worried and excited is how I’m handling the narration (warning to casual readers: I’m about to go “Inside Baseball” writer geeky here). The point of view in this story is a little tricky.
Here’s the thing. For those of you that have already read Chapter One, you know that Chris, Mike’s best friend, is the first person narrator. The story is very much Chris telling you what happened. However, at the end of the first chapter, Chris decides that he doesn’t care if he never sees Mike again just as Mike is horribly crippled in a car wreck.
It gets weirder. Chris keeps telling the story, even though from the beginning of Chapter Two on he’s not personally around to see any of it. In fact, Chris doesn’t re-enter this story as a character until about three quarters of the way through, what I expect to be about 70,000-80,000 words in. At that point Mike catches him up on what has happened to him (thus giving Chris the background he needs from some further point in the future to tell us; needless to say this is first person past tense, present tense would be completely crazy), and then Chris resumes a more traditional first person narrative from there.
Has anyone ever seen this before? I’ve seen similar things, and notably Stephen King did a third of the otherwise first person narrated Christine in third person, but the first person narrator wasn’t the narrator for the third person segment.
Essentially, I have Chris go from being a first person narrator to being a third person narrator for stuff he didn’t actually see and then back to first person when he re-enters the story. I think it will work, and it adds a nice personal touch to the story, making Chris ultimately Watson to Mike’s Holmes.
The question is whether I can do it, as in will such narrative artifice be accepted from a “first time” author. Agatha Christie once wrote an entire mystery from the first person perspective of the murderer, but she got away with it because she was a well-established author by that time. In Shining Armor is my fourth novel, but very few people have ever heard of Between Heaven and Hell or Do Over!. I’m not sure it improves my chances with agents or publishers by doing something “weird”.
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Give it a try. The worst that will happen is that it won’t work and you’ll have to change it. I have a friend whose (still unpublished) first novel is seen through the POV of three different characters. Each character gets their own chapter, in sequence, and each character has their own POV — first person, third person limited, third person unlimited. The story is of how a series of murders affects these characters (a veteran patrol cop, a rookie school resource officer, and a veteran detective). Each “set” of three chapters are more-or-less concurrent in time, so you see events and their effects from three separate points of view. It sounds more complicated than it is, and I think it works quite well.
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