Saturday, May 6, 2017

Youth on the Edge



After several weeks off, I am back to work on Book III of the Legacy Trilogy. The Edgewater Legacy follows elder son Christopher to Los Angeles in the 1980s where he pursues his passion for music by landing a job in the music industry as a chart researcher for Silver Bullet Records. He is on the edge of adulthood and struggling to find his moral compass in life. It is a story of greed, graft, and gullibility.

When a naïve young singer overdoses on drugs during a corporate party, Chris and his beautiful co-worker embark on a dangerous journey to expose a blockbuster mentality that deflates artists' careers and gouges consumers with artificially inflated prices. In the process, old enemies resurface and old scars are reopened.

In this new book, I am experimenting with a slight adjustment to the point of view from my earlier work. The point of view in fiction determines whose eyes the reader experiences the story through. In Windborne, I used the third person omniscient or "god" point of view. This assumes that the narrator is all-knowing. The thoughts, feelings, and actions from all the characters may be related to the reader (or they may be withheld). I believe this was a successful approach for Windborne given the scope of the work and the shifting focus of each woman's story.

I continued this approach in The Stone House Legacy and The Steel Canyon Legacy, but I don't believe it was as effective.  Therefore, I have decided to limit the point of view in The Edgewater Legacy. This limits the narrator to seeing into the heart and mind of only one character - in this case, Christopher. This point of view is actually the "default" in fiction. It is the most common because it can be used the most effectively in the majority of situations.

Narrative voice and tone will also be impacted by this point of view. The narrator may take on the manner of speaking, word choice, or dialect of the main character. The tone may reflect the narrator's attitudes and events through the actions and speech of the character, thus affecting the reader's perceptions of the work.

This change in point of view is relatively minor and will probably go unnoticed by most readers. However, it should eliminate some of the confusion around shifting points of view that plagued the first two books in the series.

The Edgewater Legacy is the culminating look at a family impacted by the changing attitudes and mores of the world they live in. Watch for its release in 2018.

Wanda DeHaven Pyle is the author of Windborne and the Legacy Trilogy available now on Amazon and Kindle.

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