It turned out that the critiquer knew what omniscient POV was. She just wanted to make sure that was actually what I was writing in before she informed me that that POV style is archaic and unwanted these days.
I had a hard time believing her at first. I could think of many books off hand that were written in the omniscient POV. But I quickly noticed a pattern: all of these books were at least 40 years old. And none of them were YA.
My next challenge was deciding in whose POV should the novel be. That meant I had to pick a main character. Or, at first, several main characters.
Then I realized that most readers/publishers frown on having more than four POVs in one novel.
Or so I thought. After all of these theories and realizations were carefully ingrained in my head, I then started reading YA novels that had up to 8 different PoVs. One novel started out in the POV of a character that was killed two pages later, never to be heard from again in the rest of the series. Another novel stayed between three different POVs, except for four pages in the middle of the book, where it jumped to another character's POV. The character stayed, but we never, ever got his POV again.
Now wait a minute. I thought that wasn't okay. I thought readers/publishers saw that as 'author manipulation' or what not.
I took a chapter out of Perilous because it was a different POV than the rest of the novel. For only one chapter.
Why can some authors do it and no one notices? Or do we notice and say nothing? I didn't think these authors handled it any better or differently than any other author I know. It was just a POV, juxtaposed against the flow of the novel. Honestly, I thought the novel would have been better without all ten POVs. And it's not because I couldn't keep track.
What do you prefer?
