All right, we're back for the post-NaNo wrap-up. I didn't mean to wait quite this long, but here we are. So… oh boy, where do I begin?
I guess I'll start with point of view, because that's what I
talked about at the beginning of November. I did keep up the system of
alternating between the two siblings (with a couple exceptions, I'll get to
that in a bit). It was interesting to decide which point of view a scene should
be told from. Some were obvious, because only one or the other was present, but
some had both characters present, so it was not so clear. I did find that
ending the chapter and switching POV in the middle of those scenes worked
pretty well to give both perspective on whatever was going on.
But then there were a couple of scenes that really needed to be from a third POV, so there are also two short chapters that break the alternating pattern. They are from the POV of a character who can see the future. Which brings me to the next thing: tense. Now, I'd say the majority of fiction is written in past tense ("She baked a cake"). There are also books written in present tense ("She bakes a cake"), often Young Adult fiction. But you never really see things written in future tense ("She will bake a cake"). And what better time to try out future tense than in a chapter in the POV of a precognitive character? It was fun. I would definitely never write a whole book like that. But it was a very interesting thing to try. Especially as the future comes to them in a big jumble, and not necessarily in any order. It works fine for a short chapter, but would be infuriating (to both reader and writer) in a longer work.