Quote:
Originally Posted by sportourer1
What is wrong with switching POV? Is this another example of dumbing down?
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I read this as "I wrote my story the way I liked it, and readers wanted it
their way. Someone please tell the readers they're embracing stupidity, or just plain wrong."
It depends on what you read and what you write. Personally, my taste in books being what it is (including a strong tendency to exclude anything recent) I don't like it. I get whiplash. I'm one of those people who likes to mentally put myself in the place of the main character, and I can't do that if I'm being whipsawed between one viewpoint and another and five more, so I'm lucky if I even know which character is thinking at any given moment. With the modern preference for tomes instead of novels, which can only be done by replaying every moment multiple times from multiple viewpoints, there's no avoiding the whiplash; that's probably why I tend to dislike them.
What it comes down to, really, is value: what value are you getting out of switching points of view when and how you are, and is it enough to make up for what you give up in exchange, such as identification with a character and a possibly unreliable narrator? Which do you need? How would it be a different story if you handled POV differently?
I don't think anyone likes a POV shift between sentences, though. Luke's example of how not to do it is excellent. After a while, people don't think it's worth making up a scorecard to tell the players apart, and just find a better book.