Point of View

You will remember Save the Cat by the late Blake Snyder and Story Physics by Larry Brooks. I think that screenwriting has done a lot for writing writing. It introduced the idea of structure and it helped people focus. With the idea of structure came the idea of the Hero's Journey. Goodness knows I like Joseph Campbell and his grandfather Carl Jung, but I also think these things are overdone.

When I look back at the books I like, I think of books like The Glastonbury Romance by Cowper Powys and the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic and they certainly don't have the structure that now all film-makers and increasingly all writers espouse. Yet they're still good. I'm not sure that the greats of literature follow the three act structure slavishly either. Increasingly, movies become boring because they block out the same pattern. Books too.

One of my observations is Point of View. I've been involved in writing groups before and the PoV has become a shibboleth. You have to stick in one guy/girl's head. You have to. You must.

This is the third person limited. You can only see out of one person's eyes in a film, so by extension if we base all writing on film scripts, we can only have the third person limited. Yet, when I read older works, they absolutely don't keep to this. Most are written in the third person omniscient and dib and dab in everyone's head revealing their feelings and thoughts. So, I think the third person limited is an artefact of novel writing being dominated by screenplay writing as everything is now filmic. It's not a rule that you have to keep to one PoV. Readers don't care as much as fiction writers who have read writing manuals based on screen writing.

Just saying.