POV and voice

The writing continues, and I have started to relax already about the process, realizing this is a first draft and it has no obligation to appear anything like the way I envision the final draft appearing. My plan is still to show only human POVs in the final draft, to have the “spirit beings are among us” thing be a discovery the reader makes along with the human characters, however, in terms of POV in the first draft, I am all over the place. Writing from everyone’s POV. Because, for me, it’s the only way to understand how that character ought to behave. I need to be in their head. I can change the POV later.

But there has to be a POV in my writing. The objective/omniscient POV (as opposed to a third-person subjective) is antithetical to my “writing voice,” which always takes on a specific character voice. Doesn’t matter which one; but I need to talk in a character’s voice, keep things limited to each individual’s knowledge and assumptions, because that is part of what I explore in fiction–in real life, there is no “omniscient narrator”; point of view is an inextricable, and to me, fascinating, part of experiencing life, and therefore, of my story-telling.

I am less nervous now as well about briefly adopting the POV of a character that isn’t really part of the story per se, or is a small part of it, just to relay some events in which there are no regular POV characters present.

Another thing I am relaxing on is the way I am pulling prose blurbs into this draft not only from those written in the last year (which pleases me), but from the story I started writing ten years ago which I have referred to elsewhere as “the 1999 story.” I brought this story up before because as I was trying to envision my new story, many bits and pieces I came up with to put in the new story were very, very similar to the old ’99 one and I wanted to “think outside the box” of that story, which I had given up on because it contained too many elements I just didn’t find interesting once I’d started writing.

But I guess there is something in that story that I just need to write, because many of its elements *did* beg to reappear in this new story, and as I write it now, and think “Okay, what can happen next?” I find myself digging up those old blurbs. I do rewrite them to fit the circumstances of the “new” story, but they aren’t being altered drastically. *And* I find myself digging up blurbs that cover characters or story lines from that ’99 story that I rejected when I was envisioning the “new” story in the past year.

I have been in writing mode for a month now, and the word count as of today is 10,997. Not exactly a Nano month, but not bad, either.