Seeing Both Sides

After examining the revision work from the early chapters, then moving on to later chapters, I've caught up with an interesting situation. The earliest chapters are written in "limited-omniscient" narration. That means I focus on only one character most of the time. His or her thoughts and experiences are made accessible to the reader, but only those thoughts and experiences.

Somewhere in the middle, the limit is dropped for "omniscient" narration. The story skips between characters and exposes their thoughts.

Toward the end, the limit is enforced again for "limited-omniscient" narration. The story returns to the original "main character" and only focuses his or her thoughts and experiences.

This may jolt the reader to encounter something like this, but I am going to flag that problem as "handle later" in the interest of producing a manuscript. I will "post-revise" after the whole thing is typed, backed-up, and printed. The easier solution to this mess might be to open up to omniscient narration throughout, or to slowly expand which characters the reader is allowed to fully access.

Once I see the pattern in the chapters, and how much work is involved (and how much the story loses by losing the other perspectives) I will decide how to handle this recent development.

I'll get to see where this leads also.