Point of View: One Simple Rule
May 23, 2011 13 Comments
It is my hope that this post bores you. In fact, I’m going to start off slowly, so it’s pretty much guaranteed.
Back in high school my teacher told me there were three points of view (POV): First person (I), second person (YOU) and third person (HE or SHE).
I’ll start with first person. This is from my novel Satan’s Daughter Goes to Pittsburgh. Satan’s Daughter, Ruth, is conversing with a hovering angel who is trying to impress a Bolivian town with an angelic revelation:
Liwet gave me a smirk and said, “His loins are girded with bronze armor.” He rocked his head from side to side, like telling me so there!
Lot of good it did him. I had no idea what a loin was and the Bronze Age was over hundreds of years ago, if not nines and eights of decades even. I made it a point to not show him any reaction, knowing it would bother him worse than anything else I could do.
“His loins are girded with bronze armor. Oh, praise God!” yelled Sister Margaret. She ran up to the villagers and said this over and over again, touching each of them as if giving out hats. All the other nuns hopped up and down as if their feet were tied together and on fire.
Notice that Ruth (the ‘I’ in this story) is the one through which all thoughts, vision, smell, taste, touch and hearing occur.
Moving on, that English teacher told me third person was the technique that allowed you to be any and all the people on the stage. In addition, you can even be God, or the bird floating overhead.
THIS IS WRONG.
A little less boring, huh. A rock solid rule in all genre fiction is that you must pick a POV. Knowing that, we can even toss out the terms, first, second and third person. The new rule is this: Pick a POV! That’s it. Simple. Direct. And, one of the most violated rules new writers expose to the slush editor.
So, how does this work in 3rd person? Simple, actually. If you want to be God, you are. Easy as that. Just don’t be someone else. If you want to be Mary, fine, be Mary. Just don’t be anybody else. How about the dog, Spot. You’re spot. You can’t jump over and be the cat too.
There are a lot of sub-categories to 3rd person. There’s the journalist style and the pure omniscient style, for example. The first means a non-objective POV, and the second is kind of like God. Those each imply a singular POV, so no violation there.
The most common POV in genre fiction is called limited 3rd person. The difference between first person (like my example above) and limited 3rd person is virtually non-existent. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard someone say, “I hate 1st person, but I like 3rd!” Lots of hands, and to the reverse of that comment as well, I suppose. I repeat, there is no meaningful difference between 1st person and 98% of all accepted genre 3rd person (limited 3rd) writing. The rule is the same. One person is your POV.
In the case of the portion of my writing above, my POV is Ruth. Let me show you Ruth, my POV, in 3rd person limited:
Liwet gave Ruth a smirk and said, “His loins are girded with bronze armor.” He rocked his head from side to side like telling her, so there!
Lot of good it did him. She had no idea what a loin was and the Bronze Age was over hundreds of years ago, if not nines and eights of decades even. Ruth made it a point to not show him any reaction, knowing it would bother him worse than anything else she could do.
“His loins are girded with bronze armor. Oh, praise God!” yelled Sister Margaret. She ran up to the villagers and said this over and over again, touching each of them as if giving out hats. All the other nuns hopped up and down as if their feet were tied together and on fire.
There it is. Five changed words in all, simply altering ‘I’ to she, her or Ruth. Everything else is identical. And, this is no odd example. This would be the case for the majority of the entire novel. Notice all the thinking and seeing here happens to Ruth. Even Sister Margaret yelling is reported because Ruth is present. Otherwise, no dice. When Ruth leaves the scene, the section/chapter/novel ends because no eyes exist on the stage.
This is mother-nature speaking. We are all trapped within a body. The most natural way of thinking about a story is through a body. Weird is being everybody or floating about in the ether.
What I want to do next is show you how to do this wrong. Notice what happens when I violate the ONLY RULE TO POV (Only one person can be your POV):
Liwet knew he had her. He gave Ruth a smirk and said, “His loins are girded with bronze armor.” He rocked his head from side to side, letting her know so there!
Lot of good it did him. Ruth had no idea what a loin was and the Bronze Age was over hundreds of years ago, if not nines and eights of decades even. She made it a point to not show him any reaction, knowing it would bother him worse than anything else she could do.
“His loins are girded with bronze armor. Oh, praise God!” yelled Sister Margaret. Thrilled to the bones, she ran up to the villagers and said this over and over again, touching each of them as if giving out hats. All the other nuns hopped up and down, filled with glee, as if their feet were tied together and on fire.
There you have four POVs.
1) Liwet knew. He let her know.
2) Ruth had no idea. She knew it’d bother him.
3) Sister Margaret was thrilled.
4) The other nuns were filled with
glee.
This is a mess. I can write a long time about the many major ways this will plague the ongoing story and fatally weaken it. Some contend, “Well, I just want the reader to know what Sister Margaret is thinking.” To this I say there are plenty of better ways to SHOW what Sister Margaret is thinking, and in the two former examples, I do.
Maybe some other time I’ll write about how one breaks this one rule (or seemingly so).
About Gary Wedlund
You failed to bore me, but I can’t see that as a negative.
I have seen omniscient POV, switching between viewpoint characters within the same scene, done to good effect. I know Patrick O’Brian engages in this quite a bit, but I can’t pull out an example off the top of my head. Head-hopping is supposed to be a “no no”, but O’Brian manages to pull it off (but then, he’s a literary genius). Perhaps us mere mortals should stick to limited third or first.
I know what you mean. I wanted to keep the post simple and not drive too far afield. Beginning writers in particular should take what I wrote most literally.
The appoach of moving POVs (handoff), however, is really keeping a single POV when one considers good writers do this CAREFULLY, and CLEARLY, and for OUTSTANDING REASONS. If I’m the one doing the evaluation, my criteria for carefully, clearly and outstanding reasons is tight. What I see in much writing is a very loose application of camera (or cognative) movement from character to character. That is what I hope to limit.
The best example I’ve ever seen of an author doing what is called the hand-off approach to POV is Gregory MaGuire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. In that masterpiece, he had the stepsister arrive at the entrance to the grand ball. She was searching for her sister, but saw a man instead. That man looked over, capturing the prince, who was being very attentive toward Cinderella. It felt like a flying camera, and in the hands of a master, masterful. He did this carefully, clearly and for an outstanding reason. We were literally flying over the ballroom.
Another example is in my own book, Succubus Wolf. There’s a bar scene within which the succubus is speaking to her sister and the local deputy. She is the POV throughout. But, she gets up and leaves the room, going outside, where she meets Lilith at the scene break. For half a page prior to the scene break, I keep the scene in the bar, however, shifting POVs to the deputy. I hope is it carefully done, clearly done and for an outstanding reason. And, if done in that fashion, not really a violation of the single POV rule. After the shift, I had a single POV, the deputy. It was clear law in my head that he ruled that last half page. The bottom line should be this: As writers, we must be in control of our product and not the subject of whims of careless camera work.
Finally, I have notice a lot of mental POV shifting in romance writing. There is a tendency to tell us what is in the male lead’s head and then what is in the female lead’s head. This can be done very poorly, and usually is. On the other hand, I can see it working. How the artist employs the craft becomes increasingly critial as we do what is inherently unnatural. One POV is how we ground our world. One POV is how we ground the reader’s space. If we’re going to move around, we’re fooling with mother nature and we’d better hold our hands up way high and yell, “Hey readers! I’m fooling with mother nature here! I have a real reason for doing that. Trust me. My writing proves I’m worth it. The last thing in the world I’m going to do is confuse you.”
This can be done very poorly, and usually is.
Indeed. I’ve seen far more examples of poor POV shifting than good ones. And you’re right, when it’s done well, it’s done carefully and with purpose.
I think those are good points. The “wrong” example is just omniscient–the author needs to decide that this is the POV he’s using, and stick to it, but it’s not wrong if the author is comfortable with omniscience. It’s really just mislabeled. Admittedly it does also tell a bit more than it shows, but that’s a writing style thing. Some authors do third-person omniscient with lots of narrative very well. Rules are meant to be broken…
As a beginning writer who has had several works critiqued as having multiple POV shifts/problems (which weren’t conscious, done well, or for anything resembling an outstanding reason), I wholeheartedly support utlizing shifts being relegated to the master level.
Losing the reader and the reader’s interest because of poor POV is a kiss of death.
Sarah’s point is well taken. A lot of writers in the 19th century used omniscience and it is definitely a style. Here’s what happens though, and what is often mistaken for omniscient style. Some take it a step further. It stops being a godlike view over the battlefield, and ends up being an opportunity to travel inside the heads of a dozen different soldiers. Now you’re doing two things. Now you’re god and you are everyone. The reader then wonders where they are on the field of play. They quite literally get lost and have no idea where they physically are in the space. Another concern is we don’t know who to care for; characterization is the first victim.
And, yep, Petro, you are not alone. I speak from the experience of having written thousands of pages without a clue regarding how to handle POV. They don’t teach this well in school.
I’m personally a big first person POV fan. I’d write everything in first person if I could get away with it, and my favorite books are Glen Cook’s Black Company series and his Garret, P.I, series (though I’ll say, all of the protagonists kind of sound the same in the Black Company series even though they are different characters).
However, I read the first four of Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, and I thought he did something really interesting with multiple POVs. He labels each chapter with his POV character (so we can keep track of the gazillion plot lines and supporting characters), and each book tracks a half dozen or so POVs. What I found interesting was that he’d take characters and give you their perspective, then in later books, shift to new POV characters who interact with the old POV characters. By mixing POV characters this way, he was able to add a lot of character depth. “Villains” became sympathetic, and “heroes” became deeply flawed (and LOTS of characters die in really nasty ways).
I’m not sure if I can pull off Martin’s method myself, but I have a shelved project where I plan to feature as many as six POV characters with separate chapters for each POV (one chapter ends with a POV handoff, to maintain continuity). Once I finish my current project (first person POV), I think I’m going to give Martin’s technique a try and see what kind of mess I can make.
Martin is excellent stuff. Now, if he’ll only finish before he dies like Jordan did. I too love his approach. Multiple is, of course, a variety of limited third person (in case anyone was wondering). I loved how it was done in The Stand by Stephan King. What I didn’t like about it was that every time a chapter changed I knew I’d have six or seven more before I saw what happened to the character I’d just left off. In one sense it keeps you going, but in another you end up saying, “Oh, man!”
I also am a fan of 1st person. If done right, it can sing. Nothing gets you closer to the main character, which is both the blessing and the curse. the novel I’m currently writing is 3rd with the same POV for the entire work, which raises the question, “Why not 1st person?” To that I answer, other peoples prejudice. I’m doing it kind of out of spite. So many things get rejected just because they are 1st person. Thus I’m writing a novel that is basically 1st person, using 3rd limited form. Like I said earlier, if done right, there’s not much difference.
So, from your experience, there’s a prejudice against first person narratives? Why do you think that is?
I do write in first person, but I can tell you that I found it necessary to switch to a different POV character in my third book, because the heroine in the first two books couldn’t be everywhere at once. I needed someone in the center of the action of the series plot. First person is comfortable for me, but in a series you can’t always be too enamored of just one character as your POV. Nice points, Gary,
Everyone should read Denise’s great vampire books.
Robert, I’m just assuming that there is a prejudice against 1st person, but my assumption comes from seeing the comment online, at writer’s festivals and from publishers, that they dislike 1st person (often). I almost never hear anyone say they dislike 3rd, or will never buy a book because it’s written in 3rd. I’m guessing, but probably a solid 25% of the gatekeepers won’t look at 1st person at all. I doubt if there are more than 1 or 2% who would similarly reject 3rd, sight unseen.
Generally true. It takes a lot of skill to break a rule like this, and beginning writers rarely have it. You are correct that the rest of us peons should follow it, unless we have a specific reason to break it. Of course, we should have a reason for everything we do in a story.
Thanks for this great tip.
I just looked at a sequence in a new story I was writing and found an unwanted POV shift. By correcting the problem, I was able to improve the story flow.