HTSW Point of View Analysis
How to Stop Wildfire and the subsequent books are based on a non-omniscient third-person point of view. Certain characters get to color the narration. And some, the titular 'Trinity and the One,' have an accessible thought process. A stream of consciousness. I like to think of the POV as like a microphone that the Trinity and the One characters seize from each other. That is why POV can change within a page. It is a fluid prospect.
But for the majority of How to Stop Wildfire these POV characters are not operating within the same space. They are separated. So in HTSW there are some chapters with only one point of view. I did a quick analysis and created this chart:
A pretty even distribution, if I do say so myself.
Yet chapters have a variety of different lengths. So I did a word-count breakdown of those chapters by point of view. So all the Hequera chapter's words would be lumped into one and so on.
The main problem with this chart is that I placed the chapter 'Rebound' into mixed: the vast, VAST, majority of it is King Fla'neiel's POV. There is this one small part with Cyclone's POV. So technically it is mixed, but I felt like it was somehow wrong to put it in mixed.
So I made another chart.
And this looks a lot more like what the book's breakdown really is.
I don't really know what this all means or anything, I just found it to be interesting and I was bored at the time of constructing the Excel spreadsheet.
Related/Recent Posts
How to Stop Wildfire Ninth Anniversary
Nine years gone. I’m at the precipice of a decade since How to Stop Wildfire. I feel like I’ve done enough yet haven’t done enough for it. The ten year mark coming up feels like a big milestone that deserves more to show for, but I don’t think there’s any amount of things where I’d think I’d done enough for it. So I’m just going to keep carrying on and doing what feels right. That’s all I can really do...
How to Stop Wildfire Eighth Anniversary
I find myself here, eight years on, without too much to say or reflect on in anything particular. Over this year, I’ve written things outside my domain and written more in it (including finishing The Lost). I’ve felt free to explore other ideas and random projects. Not much has come from it, realistically, but it has felt good and fun. I wonder if part of me is avoiding focusing too much on book 11—because it’s starting a big new part...