For the past week or so I’ve been at an impasse. Everytime I turned to my WIP, I simply couldn’t get any traction. It seemed to be stalled. It didn’t feel like a block. I was still writing on other things. The story just didn’t seem to want to go anywhere.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been engaged with a reading group on books about writing. We read Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.” In addition, since it was available for free, I read Jeff Goins “You Are a Writer, So Act Like One” and several other such books on my Kindle. Maybe all the outside advice sparked something in my subconscious.
As I enjoyed the cool morning air while sitting on the back patio with a cup of tea, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be looking at the story from the wrong POV. 
The main theme of the story centers around a mother/daughter relationship. I started out looking at it from the daughter’s point of view. She was born during WWII, just like me and I wanted to use her to show how much society had changed since then. Not only the technology, but the attitudes and expectations of people. At the time, the mother was secondary.
In one of my writing workshops, the other members of the class questioned the authenticity of something the mother had done that played a key role in the circumstances of the daughters life. I realized that these young people (and my probable audience) needed more background to grasp the world the mother came from that made her reaction, as I had written the story, a possibility. So I started building more background for her. Somewhere along the way, her back story started to take over.
I am now thinking that I should start with the mother’s circumstances, then move to how it affects the daughter and causes difficulties in their relationship. However, they will be separated for much of the story and she will not be fully aware of her effect on the daughter’s life until later. For the idea to work, I will need to break the book into sections and switch POV along the way. My writing professors advised against doing this. I know a lot of writers do so, some more successfully than others. Quite frankly, it scares me. I don’t want to be one of the less successful ones. Reading that sort of book annoys and confuses me. I’m not sure I can handle this. I understand the mechanics of it, but it will make the whole project much more difficult.
The new version of the story would need to start 20 or so years earlier. I was already wondering if I could succeed in covering the amount of time that will pass without creating an epic novel. I might need to think about it as a trilogy: The Mother, The Daughter, and finally, Their Resolution of Differences. This would avoid switching POV in the first two sections. I may not live long enough to need to deal with deciding about the POV in the third one. 
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