Fixing POV

I may have written about this before, but it's becoming more and more relevant as I get through my current edit. You see, in my first go through (I won't say draft, because it had been written a few times over by this point) the story very much focused on multiple points of view. Jonathan, being the main character, of course had a lot of time, but so did Reagan, Giz, and a few others. There were plenty of scenes where Jonathan wasn't present and the narrative was completely focused on what these other characters were doing.

Things are slightly different now. I've rewritten, basically, the entire first half of the novel to give more time to Jonathan and cut out a lot of the slower parts. There were entire chapters where nothing of importance happened, so I needed to trim the fat. In the end, I've opened up Jonathan's character a bit more. This makes sense, because when I started writing I didn't really know who Jonathan was. He was watching most of the plot unfold around him. My next draft got him more involved in his own fate and helped me get a feel for who he was as a person, but he was still pretty passive in the beginning. 

That's been rectified, but the unforeseen consequence has been that we don't see from the point of view of another character until almost the halfway point of the novel. I suppose that can be justified, but I still find it problematic. I'm running it by some beta readers to see if the shift is too jarring right now and, if it is, I'll have to do more rewrites. 

I considered just removing these extra point of views and telling everything from Jonathan's perspective, but he's new to the world of paladins. He doesn't understand what's going on and a lot is being hidden from him. I feel it's not only important, but necessary for other character to handle some of this burden.

So that's where I sit right now. It's still a big game of connect the dots, but I'm constantly erasing old dots and drawing in new ones. Hopefully that picture of the cat on the cover doesn't end up looking like a deformed mushroom.

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