{"id":5515,"date":"2014-09-05T13:28:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T21:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5515"},"modified":"2015-01-11T12:30:03","modified_gmt":"2015-01-11T20:30:03","slug":"endless-road-trip-4th-dimension-authors-pov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/05\/endless-road-trip-4th-dimension-authors-pov\/","title":{"rendered":"“Endless Road Trip.” “4th D.” Author’s POV."},"content":{"rendered":"

So I finished that painting I was talking about in my last blog post. Before getting into the details, I want to mention that I just started a big sale on my paintings, with the sale lasting till October 15, 2014. If you’re curious about that, check my online Paintings<\/a> page.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s that new painting. I did quite a few revisions on it. As I’ve said before, the way to tell when your painting is done is when it stops bothering you. I like how it ended up. The paint is nice and thick, with a rich glow of colors. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cEndless Road Trip\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, Sept, 2014, 30\u201d\u009d x 24\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Endless Road Trip <\/em>shows my alien characters Flook and Yampa, driving their hover car across the unending plains of the unfurled \u201cWacker World\u201d\u009d Earth that I’m hoping to write a novel about. (I may call the novel Endless Road Trip or, to make it easier on myself, I might make it Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. Not as far!) <\/p>\n

Anyway, Fook and Yampa are admiring a capybara and some<\/em> squirrel monkeys. My heroes Willy and Alma are along for the ride, but you don\u2019t see them in the picture, partly because I didn\u2019t feel like struggling with the human form\u2014I just went for some expressionist zigzag aliens. <\/p>\n

This place where they\u2019ve stopped\u2014way, way <\/em>west of California\u2014was going to be called the Land of the Ants, but then I got into a capybara-and-squirrel-monkey routine, so that\u2019s what\u2019s in the painting.<\/p>\n

I like how the guy Flook on the left looks, he\u2019s like a cartoon-character tough guy with a whiskery jaw, and the round thing on top of his head might be a derby. And Yampa on his right, she\u2019s looking at the squirrel monkeys and the capybara and saying, in a screechy discordant voice, \u201cAww, aren\u2019t they cute<\/em>!\u201d\u009d Maybe her voice is so horrible that one or more of the animals dies in some weird way. Turns into dark energy or some such.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a nice new reprint of my nonfiction book The Fourth Dimension<\/em>, from Dover Books. The subtitle is “Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality. There was also an edition where I used a different subtitle, “And How To Get There” \u2014 but these are the same books. The Fourth Dimension<\/em> is probably my all-time best-seller, maybe a quarter million of them out there. Over the years, scores of people have written me to tell me that this book changed their lives. It\u2019s one of my main works.<\/p>\n

I’m happy to see it reissued by Dover, as I got my start studying Dover’s inexpensive reprints back in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.<\/p>\n

The Fourth Dimension <\/em>in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Go git it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Back to the new novel I\u2019m trying to start. Wacker World. Today I\u2019ll share some semi-technical thoughts on writing. When starting a novel I always have to decide about what point of view or POV to use. I always use either first-person (1POV) or third person (3POV).<\/p>\n

Writing first person or 1POV is probably the easiest style. I used it in Jim and the Flims<\/em>, and in The Big Aha<\/em>. A no-brainer, like falling off a log. If you get the right narrator voice going, it works very well.<\/p>\n

This said, the first-person point of view carries some risks.<\/p>\n

(Risk 1) In that 1POV filters everything through narrator\u2019s attitudes and language skills\u2014and this can be an irritating feature if it\u2019s done wrong. I don\u2019t to see page upon page of gushing, slobbering, emoting\u2014what I call repetitious wheenk<\/em>. The first-person narrator can suck all the air out of the room.<\/p>\n

(Risk 2) When using 1POV, there\u2019s a sense that you need to impose the narrator\u2019s linguistic limitations and quirks on the text. This can be okay if the author makes the viewpoint character fairly interesting, rounded, and non-generic. But it\u2019s very risky to try and narrate a 1POV story in dialect. Unless you\u2019re Mark Twain writing Huckleberry Finn<\/em>. Although, come to think of it, I did something like this in my shot at a great American SF novel, The Hollow Earth<\/em>, which is 1POV from a boy from Killeville, Virginia.<\/p>\n

(Risk 3) Another issue with 1POV, is that the author may feel it necessary to have a frame-tale explanation of how and why and when the character is telling us about his or her adventures. You say that the narrator is reminiscing about the events afterwards, or documenting them for the record, or narrating them to a rapt audience, like that. But you don\u2019t have to do the frame-tale, and, if done wrong, it can be of corny and obtrusive. Sometimes it\u2019s better to just have the reader be in the narrator\u2019s head with no explanation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A final point to make about 1POV is that, if you want a reportage feel, you can have several characters telling the story from their points of view, or even interrupting each other, as if doing a joint interview. This could be fun. (Cat calls, loud farting sounds, sarcastic laughter<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Regarding third person point of view or 3POV, here\u2019s a link to a nice little essay <\/a>by a writer called Michael Neff, he talks about the levels of 3POV, distinguishing 1POV, far 3POV, and close 3POV, which we can abbreviate as C3POV.<\/p>\n

I like the C3POV, where my viewpoint is closely focused on one single character at a time. I\u2019m following one character and seeing his or her thoughts. The C3POV is also called \u201cthird person limited point of view\u201d\u009d or \u201cdeep\u201d\u009d third-person. It\u2019s like following a movie actor with a camera.<\/p>\n

If you do C3POV instead of 1POV, you\u2019re free to use a more literate style than the character would\u2014I think of John Updike\u2019s magisterial Rabbit <\/em>tetralogy, of the tints and shades of feeling that are assigned to the everyman-type Rabbit Angstrom.<\/p>\n

Note also that you\u2019re free to adjust the \u201ccloseness\u201d\u009d of the C3POV over the course of a scene, at times getting in so close that it\u2019s as intimate and telepathic as 1POV.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve come to enjoy using what I might call rotating close third person point of view, or RC3POV. The idea is that I shift the close third person POV from character to character. I don\u2019t do the shifts within a scene, I cycle from one character to another from chapter to by chapter. I did that in Realware, Postsingular<\/em>, and Hylozoic<\/em>. I plan to use RC3POV in my upcoming Wacker World, <\/em>that is, I\u2019ll have close third-person C3POV on my character Willy in some chapters, and have the camera on my co-starring character Alma in other chaps. <\/p>\n

Thinking back to Postsingular<\/em>, I rotated the C3POV focus from section to section within the chapters, using seven different points of view in all. And in one single section I went kaleidoscopic on the reader\u2019s ass, hopping one head to the next without even signalling the changes with section breaks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s risky to do head-hoppping, or \u201cwandering POV,\u201d\u009d although Thomas Pynchon and Phil Dick often do. Pynchon can do it because he\u2019s a supreme and god-like master, and Phil, well, you never know. Phil wrote really fast and he might not even have noticed he was doing it. But getting Phil\u2019s reckless downhill-racer thing going is a skill in itself.<\/p>\n

Through the dancing sunlight, and into oblivion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I finished that painting I was talking about in my last blog post. Before getting into the details, I want to mention that I just started a big sale on my paintings, with the sale lasting till October 15, 2014. If you’re curious about that, check my online Paintings page. Anyway, here’s that new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-million-mile-road-trip","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5515"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5734,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions\/5734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}