CHAPTER 4
POINT OF VIEW: THE COMPLETE MENU
By Valerie Vogrin
Point of view (also referred to as POV) is equally influential in fiction writing.
More than anything else, the point of view you choose for you story or novel will affect the way readers respond emotionally to your characters and their actions. Your choice of POV will also influence other elements of your piece, such as tone and theme.
POV deals with the following issues:
- Who is speaking: a narrator or a character?
- Whose eyes are seeing the events of the story unfold?
- Whose thoughts does the reader have access to?
- From what distance are the events being viewed?
This is one reason why some writers just shrug and point to something on the menu that looks familiar.
FIRST PERSON
A story told from the first-person POV is narrated by a character in the story, usually the story's protagonist. The narrator tells the story of what I did. The narrator is the story's eyewitness, the reader's means of perception. When writing in the first person, you are also writing in the voice‒the words and tone‒of the character.
The first-person narrator may even use the reader as a confidante, perhaps addressing the reader directly. Sometimes a narrator addresses a specific someone.
You might find it helpful in choosing your narrator's words if you imagine what kind of person the narrator is speaking to.
The main advantage of first person is intimacy. The writer can eliminate almost all distance between the reader and the story by placing the reader into the narrator's skin. Also the narrator's voice can reveal a lot to the reader about the kind of person he is.
But the first-person POV does offer some challenges The writer is stuck in the narrator's skin, along with the reader. You're not free to wander anywhere, physically or mentally, unless your narrator comes along. You're also limited by the intelligence and vocabulary of the first-person narrator.
YOUR TURN:
Get inside someone's skin. Write a passage from the first-person POV of a person walking to a mailbox to send a difficult letter‒breaking up with someone, confessing something unpleasant...Then pick another character also walking to a mailbox to deliver a difficult letter and write from that character's first-person POV. These characters can be anyone you like, but make them the opposite sex from each other and quite different in age. Remember, this is first person, so you should inhabit these characters and tell things the way they would.
FIRST PERSON: MULTIPLE VISION
Most often first person uses just one first-person narrator, but occasionally there are multiple narrators. A short story writer is confined by space, and more than one narrator will usually play havoc with the writer's ability to create a tight, coherent story. But a novelist, working with plenty of elbow room, may decide that a story will be strongest if more than one witness describes the story's events.
One variation on the multiple first-person narrator POV uses the epistolary technique‒the story is presented as a series of letters exchanged between characters.
On rare occasions, you'll see the first-person plural, where we is used instead of I even though one person is usually speaking for the we.
One of the chief strengths of first-person multiple-vision POV is the reader's intellectual involvement in the story. The reader must piece things together for himself. You might choose this point of view for your own novel if your characters have strikingly different perspectives and you want readers to hear each character's voice directly and not to draw their own conclusions.
FIRST PERSON: PERIPHERAL
Although the first-person narrator is usually the protagonist, you may choose to have your first-person narrator be another character in the story.
The peripheral point of view is effective when the story's protagonist is blind to his or her own actions and when that blindness or its consequences are significant enough to strongly affect someone who stands outside the action.
But there's a real challenge with this POV as the narrator must report on the protagonist while stuck in the body of a bystander.
THE UNRELIABLE FIRST PERSON
In a sense, all first-person narrators are somewhat unreliable. Even the most scrupulous characters may, unconsciously perhaps, shade the truth or emphasize one fact over another to make themselves look slightly better.
However, if the answer to the question who is speaking, for example, is an autistic person, a very young child, a psychopath, a cat, a jealous lover, or a habitual liar, the reader understands that the ordinary skepticism does not apply. This narrator has extraordinary limitations and her version of the facts is not to be trusted.
The unreliable narrator emphasizes the philosophical view that there is no such thing as a single, static, knowable reality. Using an unreliable narrator forces the writer to create two versions of the truth, a steep challenge.
YOUR TURN:
Write a passage from the POV of an unreliable narrator who skews the facts, intentionally or unintentionally. Whomever you pick, see if you can make a reader understand the narrator's unreliability.
THIRD PERSON: SINGLE VISION
With the third-person point of view the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator is a voice created by the author to tell the story. Third person has numerous variations with unwieldy names.
Third-person single vision...Narrator only has access to one character's mind. Thus, single vision refers to the way the narrator views a story's events‒through the eyes of a single character. The entire story is filtered through the point-of-view character's consciousness.
With many advantages of the first person employing an "outside" narrator allows the writer to craft the language in ways that may be implausible coming from the mouth of a first-person narrator. Als is your narrator is a fictionalized version of yourself, allowing the third-person narrator to tell the story avoids the appearance of self-indulgence.
The third person singular vision is an excellent POV if your point-of-view character is someone with limited intellectual powers or verbal skills.
The disadvantage of this POV‒perhaps the only one‒is that the -of-view character must be present for everything that takes place in the story, just as with a first-person narrator.
YOUR TURN:
Imagine an incident in a department store in which a salesperson and a customer clash over something‒shoplifting, rudeness, racial misunderstanding...Using the third-person single-vision POV, write a passage detailing this clash through the eyes of a customer. As is customary with third-person single vision, include the character's thoughts.
THIRD PERSON: MULTIPLE VISION
A writer using third-person POV may decide that two or more heads are better than one. The multiple-vision POV allows the writer to show a story's events from different angles. This point of view is most often used in longer pieces of fiction‒novellas and novels.
As a general rule you should make distinct transitions between point-of-view characters. You do not want your reader to be unsure of whose eyes are witnessing the events of the story. Novelists often make this switch at the chapter break; that is, each chapter belongs to a single point-of-view character.
No matter what variation or twist you choose, if you elect to use more than one point-of-view character make sure you have good reason. As with first-person multiple-vision stories, much of the interest is generated by the disparities and similarities that emerge between the points of view.
Third person multiple vision also provides a wider view, often creating an effect like a collage.
In a third-person multiple-vision POV, each character's experience is interesting, but the writer highlights what's most interesting by juxtaposing the various viewpoints.
As occurs with first person, the flexibility you gain with multiple viewpoints costs you focus. The reader's attention and concern are spread more thinly.
Multiple-vision points of view can add the desirable kind of complexity to a story, the kind that honors the way our lives are entwined and our sympathies are divide.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the previous exercise, the one with the clash at the department store. Write a passage about the exact same incident through the POV of the salesperson. Then write again about the same incident, this time from the POV of an innocent bystander. You will then have viewed this department-store clash through the eyes of three different characters. Who has the most interesting point of view on this incident?
THIRD PERSON: OMNISCIENT
Think "gods-eye view." Omniscient means all knowing, and thus the writer is always omniscient; the writer should always know everything there is to know about each character and the setting, and every event related to the story, past, present, and future. What distinguishes the omniscient point of view is that the write who employs it is free to share directly some, or all, of this vast amount of information with the reader.
The story’s information is filtered through the narrator’s all-knowing consciousness. Enter the mind of any or all of the characters, interpret the story’s events, describe incidents unobserved by any of the story’s characters, provide historical context for the story, and inform the reader of future events.
Once enough writers traded in omniscience for more limited points of view, this kind of omniscience seemed old-fashioned and fell out of favor.
Instead of being limited by intelligence and maturity and sanity of your characters, omniscience provides you with a way to take charge, to make sense of your characters’ bizarre behavior or the customs of your planet you just invented. You can use omniscience to create suspense by supplying the reader with information unknown to the characters.
Omniscience usually calls attention to the presence of the writer‒an undesirable thing for writers who want their readers to suspend their disbelief willingly. Omniscience may seem impersonal to the reader, who is used to being asked to care for a particular character or characters. Omniscience is not for the faint of hear; most writers find it’s easier to manage POV when they’re limited to revealing the thoughts of just one or two characters. Too much freedom makes them dizzy, like riding a unicycle across the high wire without a net.
YOUR TURN:
Using the omniscient POV, write a scene in which something gets broken at a wedding reception. A gift, a bottle of champagne, somebody’s heart...Demonstrate at least three of the five omniscient powers‒entering the mind of any character, interpreting events, describing unobserved incidents, providing historical context, revealing future events. There is plenty of opportunity here, as there are bound to many people in attendance. Relish your godlike ability to see and know everything.
THIRD PERSON: OBJECTIVE
The narrator in the third-person objective point of view is denied access to even a single character’s mind. The writer must reveal everything about the story through dialogue and action. The effect is a bit like reading a journalist's account of events, getting only the hard facts.
The primary strength of the objective point of view is that it offers a sense of integrity and impartiality. Objective POV prevents a writer from overexplaining because the writer can’t really explain anything at all.
One of fiction’s major attractions is that we, as readers, are allowed insight into the murky minds of others‒unlike in real life, where we are left guessing at what’s behind a boss’s costly dentistry, a child’s smirk, a lover’s raised eyebrow. A story told in objective POV is like a flower minus its scent and vivid colors, a vaguely interesting oddity perhaps, but not likely to attract much attention.
YOUR TURN:
Take the wedding reception passage from your omniscient POV exercise, and revise it using the objective POV. Employ your powers of observation and describe what takes place, as though you are a journalist writing a news account. Remember, this time you can’t enter anyone’s head. But, what does the behavior of the characters reveal about their thoughts?
SECOND PERSON
As with the third-person POV, second-person POV stories are told in the voice of a narrator. In second person, however, the narrator tells what you did or said.
Second person has possibilities and it’s quite fun to use, but if their goal is publication, it’s up to other writers to make it their own‒to make it fresh‒but using it to create a different effect.
If you can find a compelling way to use the second-person POV, go forth and conquer. Otherwise, proceed with caution.
DISTANCE
From what distance are the events being viewed?
EMOTIONAL DISTANCE
This is the distance that we sense between the narrator and the characters, a distance that affects how close the reader feels to the characters.
Long shot: The man hurried through the cold night.
Medium shot: The man hurried through the night, squinting against the cold.
Close-up: As the man hurried through the night, he felt the bitter cold air on his lips.
If the narrator is close enough to feel the cold on the character’s lips, we presume the narrator’s empathy for the character‒very little emotional distance. Often a writer will pick a camera distance, so to speak, and stick with it for the entire story. But sometimes the camera distance will change during the course of the story.
TIME DISTANCE
If it isn’t specified, we normally presume that the events in the stories we read occurred relatively recently. Though the story is written in past tense (as most are) a writer often creates the effect of immediacy‒of the story occurring just now.
Writers occasionally try to narrow this time distance by telling the story in the present tense. But because past tense has been a convention of fiction for so long, most readers now find its use invisible. Formerly quite unusual, present tense doesn’t upset many soup bowls anymore.
Sometimes a writer specifies that the event of the story took place long ago, creating a substantial time distance.
In an instance like this, when the reader is ware that the story’s events occurred long ago, the emotional urgency and suspense of the story may be diminished. But this kind of time distance allows the narrator to tell the story with an interesting perspective often fusing emotions of both the past and present.
THE POV CONTRACT
What you must never forget is that the point of view establishes a contract with the reader. Break this contract and you risk losing the reader’s trust in you.
Novice writers sometimes break the POV contract with a careless lip.
As a safeguard against POV abuses, you might write down your point-of-view rules regarding omniscience, reliability, and distance. When you finish a draft you can check every paragraph against these rules.
But as many a recording artist knows, contracts are made to be broken‒by a very daring writer.
HOW TO CHOOSE
As I warned you, the POV menu is complicated, but I hope you’re beginning to feel comfortable with it. Your choice of POV is one of the biggest choices you will make with a piece of fiction. It affects everything.
Ask yourself:
Whose story is this?
What kinds of stories do I like to read?
You can’t be confident you’re found the best POV for your story when it’s just an abstract idea. You need to taste that POV. You may be able to learn all you need with only a page or two of a draft.
Writing is all about trial and error. It’s a writer’s duty to fully exercise the enormous power of point of view.
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