After finishing The White Queen on Starz, a show I really enjoyed, I picked up the novel by Philippa Gregory on which the show’s based. The Starz series stayed true to the novel, The White Queen, with a few significant exceptions, namely a very real difference in the stories’ narrative points of view. The cover of my edition Having read the novel…
A while back, I was doing research on Vikings for my next novel, which will be the sequel to Enoch’s Device. In the course of that research, I spent some time on Norse mythology, since many a tenth-century Viking would have clung to the worship of Thor or Odin instead of embracing the Christian faith…
A year ago today I published my first blog post titled What is Fresh-scraped Vellum? It analogized the medieval art of bookmaking to the task of writing a publishable novel in today’s world. It also promised book reviews and commentary on both classic and recent fiction in the historical and fantasy genres, along with posts…
I didn’t plan on a fifth post in my series on Narrative Viewpoint: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly until I read an article on The Passive Voice about why some believe The Hunger Games movie was better than Suzanne Collins’ novel, in part because of narrative viewpoint (note, the Passive Guy was reporting…
In the final installment of my series on Narrative Viewpoint: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, I’d like to talk about the “viewpoint” that annoys me the most. In fact, I question whether it’s even a legitimate narrative point-of-view at all. It’s what I call “third-person ugly”—not quite third-person limited or third-person omniscient, but…
In the third post in my series on Narrative Viewpoint: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly, I’m focusing on the good for a change, the viewpoint that I think works best for most stories: third-person limited. A great example of this viewpoint is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Each…
Once upon a time the most common narrative viewpoint was called third-person omniscient. The story was told through the point-of-view of an all-knowing storyteller who played no actual role in the novel except to relay story events. This was the rave back in the nineteenth century and in much of the twentieth century too, used by…
Lately I’ve been reading a mix of vintage and more recent novels in the historical and fantasy fiction genres, and I’ve come to realize I can get quite annoyed with narrative viewpoint. Even damn near curmudgeonly about it. Although there are several different types of narrative points-of-view, there are only two I really like, and…