Sherwood's Writing Riffs

Some Thoughts on Point-of-View

Point-of-View, or POV.

First Person

The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room...

The benefit of first person is its immediacy. You are really inside the head of the person telling the story. This is good for character stories, but not as good for certain kinds of tension stories. You can therefore say that first person's focus might not be on what happens so much as how it happens. In other words, we know a first person protagonist lives; we just don't know what that means.

A first person narrator can therefore be what is called an Unreliable Narrator. This means that what the person says about a situation, character, or action, might not be true. Readers can sometimes enjoy discovering that the narrator is unreliable--discovering, for example, that in spite of the fervent dislike of the narrator for character, the reader comes to the conclusion that he's really not the bad guy.

More notes on First Person under Omniscient-- sometimes these distinctions are not as easy as they look.

Second Person

This one is fairly easy to describe, and you rarely see it, except maybe in very short horror tales, and in more experimental stories:

You walk down the stairs. You turn to the right, glancing in the window, where you see your neighbor eating his dinner. You bend and pick up a rock, hefting it in your hand, before you cock your arm back, and...

Karin Lowachee used it very effectively at the beginning of her science fiction novel Warchild. This one is almost always in present tense, as well. Present tense is currently very, very fashionable-when done well, readers like the immediacy.

Third Person

Now we're getting to some complications. Simple third person is, of course, something like this:

Tom and Lisa walked down the street.

That's clear enough, right? But if one of them acts, or sees the act, then we start getting into distinctions. Different critics, teachers, and writers have all kinds of distinctions for variations on third, and you can find them in writing books. Here are mine:

Tight Third

Tom and Mary walked down the street. Tom watched the swing of Mary's hair against her back, and smiled when she caught him gazing at her. She took his hand. They gazed into each other's faces, Tom thinking happily about the movie they were about to enjoy together. He was only vaguely aware of the squeal of brakes coming round the corner . . .

What 'tight' means is, Tom is kind of like a camera. We cannot hear, see, smell, taste, or touch anything that Tom can't. Therefore we do not see what Tom looks like, unless he's thinking about his own appearance.

Now, you will find plenty of books in which a tight third POV is being used, yet the author does this:

Dark-haired Tom watched the swing of Mary's hair against her back, and his wide, curved lips smiled when she caught him gazing at her. She grinned back at his deep blue eyes with her azure orbs, and took his long strong hand into her delicate one...

I've found that technique most often in romance novels, where the reader expects a high degree of enforced intimacy, and constant awareness of physical attributes, and the characters' overriding attraction to one another. In a romance novel, the protagonists' relationship is more important than all other action, so word choices and scene structure are constructed with that aim in view.

Some writers will slide quietly into omniscient just briefly with:

Tom was so wrapped up in Mary he was unaware of the squeal of brakes . . .

More notes on that under Omniscient. Meanwhile, if we're using tight third, how do we get across what Tom looks like?

The easiest way is to have him look in a mirror. This has been overused a lot, but it's still useful if you're not obvious about it. In other words, it's boring if a character stands in front of a mirror staring at him or herself. But if they react, then it's more realistic, and thus more interesting. So, instead of:

Tom stopped to look in the mirror before leaving for his date with Mary. He studied his blue eyes, his long eyelashes, his dark swept-back hair, and his carefully tended two-day stubble on his chin, that looked just like the guys in the Matrix movies . . .

Bor-ring! Do we believe in Tom? Except for the bit about Matrix, which might raise a faint laugh, he's dull and kind of self-involved seeming. So:

Tom raced down the stairs, knowing he was late. Mary might not wait--she felt it disrespected her if people kept her waiting, but she couldn't know about his flat tire, and the extra work his boss had stuck on him, and the fact that Tom's watch had fallen off when he changed the tire, so he lost track of time. He glanced in the mirror as he ran by, and caught sight of a young guy with tousled dark hair, a wide mouth that reminded him suddenly of his dad, worried blue eyes, and, oh no, oh no, was that a big old honking zit forming right on his stubbly chin? Oh, great, Mary would never notice the expensive haircut he got just for her, the new silk shirt, the flowers--she'd be staring all night at that zit...

Tom becomes a little more real here, yet we still get plenty of details on his appearance.

Another way to get his appearance in is to slide in details as the story progresses.

This takes more time, obviously, but it doesn't draw attention to itself quite as much as a one-shot description. Such as:

Tom closed his hand gently around Mary's, intensely aware of how thin her hand was, the fragility of the bones. He hoped she wasn't disgusted by the calluses on his palms from all his weightlifting. He admired the swing of her pale hair against her back. Funny, until now he'd always been attracted to dark-haired girls, he'd always thought because that was what he was used to, coming from a family of dark-haired people, but as soon as he met Mary...

So that gave us various ways of getting at Tom. How do we get into Mary's mind? We can't in tight third. That's called head-hopping--jumping from one person's thoughts to the next. If we want to include Mary's POV, we finish the scene from Tom's POV, and continue the story with a scene from Mary's. We have to be aware that if we switch too often, the reader can get distracted, like watching too many MTV jump-cuts. Many authors restrict themselves to one POV per short story, or per chapter.

Okay, one last observation on third, what's called the Camera View.

This is where we stay outside anybody's head. Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett used this one, many years ago. In this POV we see the characters as if a camera is watching them, but we never hear anyone's thoughts. Like:

A hand reached for the door, which opened. Out stepped Tom. He looked up the stree, then stiffened. There was Mary waiting at the corner, her blond hair blowing in the breeze. Soon they were striding down the street together, their gazes locked. Then around the corner sped an SUV moving far too fast, just as Tom and Mary stepped off the curb . . .

Camera-eye tight third is sometimes called "dramatic third"-it's a kind of long-distance shot, and thus can be very close to Omniscient as it views without access to any thoughts, leading the reader to winnow out clues to the characters' inner lives from the textual clues.

This variety of approaches within third person indicates there are various degrees of depth available within each point-of-view. A writer's voice emerges not just through word choice and type of story, but how he or she slides from long-distance reportage to close-in, claustrophobic stream of consciousness. Many readers love the enforced intimacy of romance novels, wherein the reader is told who the hero and heroine are, how they felt, etc; other readers prefer a neutral voice talking mainly about ideas, the characters only sketchily described. Some writers preferred never to share the inner lives of the characters, but provide painstakingly recorded clues, like Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. A close look at the most enduring classics (ones people read for pleasure) seems to indicate that most readers prefer a dramatic change in distance between the reader and the characters: sometimes intimate, sometimes from a distant vantage that permits readers to come to their own intellectual, moral, and even emotional conclusions.

Omniscient

Or the God's-Eye view. This one is the way most 19th century novels were written. In this view, which we can call omni for short, the narrator can get into anyone's head, or follow anyone.

The first thing to realize is that in all stories there is a narrator present. That includes third person. In tight third, it's easy to forget this, or to mix the narrative presence with the actual author. In some cases they are indeed indistinguishable. In the example I put under third person, Tom did not hear the squeal of brakes, that is the voice of the narrator, popping in just for a second to give you an important fact for dramatic urgency.

Some people might mix the narrative presence with First Person. But here are two differences. The narrator can see into everyone's head, and a first person protagonist can't. Second, the narrator is not who the story is about. A first person story is usually some semblance of fictional autobiography.

In Jane Austen's novels, the narrator almost never emerges from the background, but just once is a while she will sum up the action, or make an observation: here, from Mansfield Park, opening chapter 27, "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can. ". Conversely in Vanity Fair, Thackeray's narrator strides out on stage, and lectures the reader directly about the story. He stops the actors in the middle of action ([an approximation] We shall halt here, before Mrs. Fussbudget sips her tea, and the motes of dust are still in the air, to consider now what we have learned about the wicked Mr. Nogoodnik) so the narrator can emerge once again and talk directly to the reader about the story, in order to really hammer in that point.

Sometimes the narrator was shrouded in what we call 'frames' to create a sense of reality, as if the story were true. Modern readers sometimes find the layers of letters at the beginning of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tedious and pointless, but at the time the book came out, with its scary cutting edge scientific experiments and extrapolations, the frame tale--as if the story was told in letters--made it seem as if it really had happened. Thus it functioned both as a science fiction novel, and as a horror novel.

Knowing who is telling your story and why is crucial in using Omni. The writer also needs to pay attention to transitions from one person's thoughts to another's, or there can be a confusion of pronouns. The successful omniscient authors do not try to get inside everyone's heads, but choose the viewpoints that add the most dramatic tension; most often the dramatic viewpoints are those engaged in the action, but sometimes it's from an observer's point of view. For example, many fans of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings scarcely notice a two sentence shift into the point of view of a fox passing through the wood when Frodo and Company leave the shire, but that quick outsider viewpoint serves to add dramatic tension to the story, reminding readers without coming right out and telling them that the hobbits are indeed now out in the wide and wild world, far from the comfortable home they know.

A Quick Word about Tense

The temptation to experiment is sometimes impossible to resist. And if you think your story would be better for a radical tense change, then by all means go for it. What could be creepier for a short horror piece than second person present tense? You walk up the stairs toward the black door...you hear the creak of the wood under your feet, but it's not as loud as the pounding of your heart . . .

That might even be effective in future tense: You will walk up the stairs...You will hear the creak, but your heart will pound even louder...

Whether or not you could sustain an entire book like that is anyone's guess, but I suspect only a really, really powerful writer could carry it off. For most of us, third person past tense is invisible: it gets us right into the story, without us having to think about it.

Of late, as I said above, present tense has become quite fashionable. It creates a sense of immediacy, but you really must have control of your sentences to make it work. You also need to have mastered your tenses. The perfect tenses would, in English, litter your story with helper verbs, cluttering it up. I suppose you could try, but who wants to read pages of:

He has gone to bed the night before, but then he's woken up. After he has drunk a glass of wine, he has tried to go back to sleep . .

Or even worse, past perfect: He had had a nightmare, but he had woken up from it. AFter he had drunk a glass of wine... Tedious, eh? So would future perfect be...You will have taken that first step up the stairs toward the mystery room. You will have felt the creak of wood beneath your feet, and your heart will have pounded...

Generally speaking, use the tense that best fits the mood of your story. And that means, being very aware of what you are doing when you employ the progressive tenses, the 'ing' tenses. I see otherwise good action sequences ruined by unnecessary employment of the progressives, which just clutters an otherwise tense scene. Example:

Instead of The guards dragged her down to the dungeon you get The guards were dragging her down to the dungeon. Only use the progressive for a true simultaneous action. Or: The guards were dragging her down to the dungeon while they told her the tortures the Dark Lord had awaiting her. One last remark: don't mix tenses unless you are really sure you know what you are doing. Thus, don't follow:

The guards were dragging her down to the dungeon while they told her the tortures the Dark Lord had awaiting her. So she kicks the guard on the left, punches the guard on the right, and runs off, screaming insults as they lie groaning on the floor behind her.

Oh yeah. Tom and Mary leaped over the SUV to safety. AFter all, we are writing fantasy! We can do that! We just need to remember to establish their wings.