101 TIWIK #24: POV, A Primer

Point of view tends to be defined in absolutes by writing guides and teachers, but actually, it works more like a spectrum. Think of a camera filming a movie. It is not limited to close-up and wide-shot, but can actually be placed at any distance from, and any angle to, the action. When you think of POV in your writing in the same way, it frees you from absolutes and allows you to choose the POV necessary to tell your story.

However, writers reveal a story with words, not through a camera lense, and so instead of thinking in terms of where a camera is positioned, we must think in terms of who is speaking.

1. The author can speak in 3rd person, with either omniscience or limited omniscience. These intimidating terms merely denote how much the author is allowed to reveal to the reader. In an Omniscient Narrative, the author knows and tells all. They can report objectively, and they move the camera freely anywhere in space and time during a scene. They can enter not just one, but any character’s mind. They also can make interpretations and pass judgements upon the characters that the characters cannot do for themselves.

In a narrative of limited omniscience, the author has some freedom to relate facts beyond a single character’s knowledge, but not unlimited freedom. For example, they may see into one character’s mind, but not another character’s. They may take a wide angle view to establish a scene, but then will narrow down to one character’s thoughts and feelings. Unlike an omniscient narrator, they do not reflect independently of the character upon that character’s thoughts, but simply go along for the ride. They don’t have much more knowledge than the character herself.

Third person means that all characters in your story will be referred to as she, he, or they.

2. The Author can speak in 2nd person, where one of the characters becomes “you.” The effect of second person is to put the reader directly into the story. However, this immediacy can be wearying, and an entire novel told using second person can be exhausting to read. It can, however, be fun to experiment with, and it can make for a powerful short story. Second person narrative is limited to the thoughts and experiences of the “you” character.

3. Finally, a character in the story can speak in 1st person (I, me, we), with a central narrator or peripheral narrator. A central narrator is telling his or her own tale. A peripheral narrator is speaking in first person but about another character, telling the story of that other character. Whether your narrator is central or peripheral, they can never be omniscient. By choosing first person, you must limit the narration to what your narrator would know, see, and experience.

Since the story is being told, another crucial piece of POV is the question, to whom? There are three possible answers: A story can be told to the reader, which is probably the most common form, but also to another character, or to the self. Examples of these would be a novel written in the form of letters between characters, or entries in a diary. An interior monolog or stream of consciousness is another example of the story told to self.

Another question that arises when determining POV is one of distance. Just as a close up on an actor’s face can plunge the viewer deeper into their emotions, authorial distance can determine the degree of intimacy and identification with the characters in a story. Mastering control of this distance can make a difference between ok writing and great writing. Leaf through your favorite books and look for the distance in the narration. Do you feel like a detached observer, reading the story? Or do you feel like you are the main character, feeling her feelings and experiences along with her? Distance, whether it is complete identification or complete detachment or something between them on the spectrum, can be affected in any POV. However, first person tends to get the reader closer to the character than third person, and second person is closest of all.

Distance is crucial because distance determines how the reader will feel about the characters. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, first you have to understand your characters, and then you have to convey them to the reader so that the reader also understands them. If you keep the emotions of the characters at a distance when you write, how will you be able to convey those emotions to your readers? Use sensory details, thoughts and feelings to show the actor in a close-up, and the readers will feel them so closely that they will become the characters, for the moments while they are reading your story.

Temporal distance and spacial distance can assist in the management of emotional distance between readers and characters. Events told in the past tense are further away from the reader than immediate events told in present tense. Events that happened centuries ago are less encompassing than events that happened yesterday, even when both are told in past tense. And returning to the metaphor of the movie camera, think about its placement and distance from the character in your scene. Are you showing an entire planet? A city? A room? A face? Are we watching the characters on a stage, or gazing into their eyes? Or is the reader looking out from the character’s eyes? All of these changes in the spacial distance from the reader to the character affect the emotional experience of the reader.

In most stories, we trust the author or character telling the story to guide us with an attitude with which we can identify. But this is not always the case, and when the narrator is so different from the reader that the reader can’t look through their eyes to see the same story they are telling, they are called an unreliable narrator. Examples are stories told by a bigot, a madman, a liar, a child, an animal, a swindler. In all of these cases, the author has to somehow convey to the reader that the story is not to be trusted. Again, there is a spectrum; a story can be wholly untrue, or parts of it can be true while parts are twisted, or the facts can be correct but the narrator’s judgement so skewed from our own as to be unreliable. An example of the last would be a story told by a slave owner in the plantation south. Their account of a slave auction might be factually true, but it will not resonate an emotional truth with us, because our experience of it will be so different from theirs. As an example of the second, an insane narrator might be sometimes coherent and at other times, ramble nonsense.

Thanks for bearing with this lengthy primer of POV. For years I’ve struggled with all of these fancy words, omniscient and unreliable and distance and person and peripheral narrator etc. It’s taken me a long time to boil them down to what they really are, which is simply toggles and dials, methods for controlling the emotional experience of the reader as they interact with the characters. I hope this summary is helpful to others.

In writing this post, I used Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway as a resource. It’s an excellent, practical book about the nuts and bolts, and I highly recommend it.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how to pick and choose these tools for best effect in your writing with 101 TIWIK #25: POV II, Choosing It

This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.

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