by Jenna Kalinsky.
Point of view is the perspective through which the reader experiences a story.
Unlike other elements of writing craft a writer will consciously select and apply to their story, choosing a point of view is often an instinctive one based on the writer’s relationship to the protagonist; how intimate/accessible they want the characters to be; and the overall tone of the work.
It’s typically later, during revision, when the writer will lean back and examine the point of view they’ve used to see if it is working. If it is, they will enhance it by wielding it consistently and strategically. If it’s not serving the developing story, they can then adjust it or switch to a different point of view as needed.
To ensure your story comes across most dynamically, it’s essential to learn what the different points of view are, how they work, and how to manipulate them to make your fiction sing.
The point of view in fiction writing you initially choose will often be due to which character or characters you find most compelling.
These will be the characters with the most at stake, the greatest challenge to overcome, or the problem that’s most appealing to you personally.
• In a story about a family, you could take the point of view of one of the parents or one of the children
• In a romantic partnership, it could be either party (and radically different stories would emerge depending on which character you chose!)
• In a story about a town with a brewing evil, it could be one impartial narrator who resides on high.
There are three primary delivery mechanisms for using perspective, or point of view, in fiction writing:
Each point of view in fiction writing lends a different dynamic, tone, and narrative voice. They also offer the opportunity to play with degrees of emotional/intellectual distance.
When you use first person, your character is telling their own story. This means they, in their own voice, interpret what’s going on and tell the reader about it.
What they chose to tell (or omit) is part of their flaws as a fictitious human being. The reader’s job is to determine whether they’re reliably giving the whole story or whether they’re skewing it due to their own personality, wants, and vulnerabilities.
Learning whether our character is reliable or unreliable is half the joy in reading and a huge part of the first-person story experience.
For you as the writer, telling the story as your character is great fun. Every day when you sit down to write, it’s as if you’re an actor slipping into character.
Their voice, prose use, pacing, tone, and personality will typically be different from yours, and it’s an exciting task to bring them to life of their own volition.
Example, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.
(Read/download the whole book HERE)
This point of view is not as commonly used because it is more like a stunt narrator, a device, and a little trickier to employ. Second person forces the reader to be a character in the story (remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books?)
This point of view creates a dynamic and interesting method of storytelling because it thrusts your reader into participating in the story as the protagonist, and like it or not, they’re going on an adventure!
Here’s the opening of Lorrie Moore’s short story, “How to Become a Writer”:
First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age - say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She'll say: ''How about emptying the dishwasher?'' Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.
(Read/download the story HERE)
Other books written in second person:
The third person narrator is the most flexible of all three as it offers numerous options for how you can follow one or more characters and through what degree of distance/intimacy (called “psychic distance” *)
*More on that below.
The best way to think about third-person point of view is as if the narrator were a movie camera strapped to a drone:
The third person objective point of view is a challenging one because everything is shown; nothing can be told. The narrator is also not emotionally aligned with anyone in the story. This method of narration is great for giving an unbiased or detached perspective.
Any thoughts a character would have, their backstory, or a personality trait has to be outwardly exhibited in some physical way for it to be recorded.
The only way the reader will understand any character’s motivation for doing what they do or saying what they say has to be shown for the reader to determine what they want and what the problem is.
The benefit of the objective narrator is the reader gets to discover everything on their own, which is exciting as they have to pay attention to know what’s happening.
Great examples of objective point of view:
A limited third person objective narrator, while still detached emotionally and able only to observe and report, is predisposed toward showing the ongoings of one character in particular.
While the narrator still does not have any interior access to that one character, it’s clear because of the narrator’s level of attention on that character, that this is the protagonist.
The omniscient point of view in fiction writing gives you the greatest access to the characters. Unlike the objective narrator who knows nothing and only shows what is visible, the omniscient narrator can know everything and can both tell and show.
*Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses an omniscient narrator who knows everything about all characters (even things the characters themselves don’t know!) in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The “Little did she know …” device? That belongs exclusively to the omniscient narrator.
*The fun narrator from the TV show Jane the Virgin is a great example of third person omniscient narrator (who is also sometimes unreliable because even he doesn’t know everything!)
In their usual ability to know everything or nearly everything, these narrators have ready access to the interior emotional/intellectual lives of the characters as well as the ability to back up and show them in scene.
The Upside: Great Flexibility
A third person omniscient narrator is highly flexible. Technically speaking, they could be everywhere, doing anything, knowing all, and all at once.
This level of access to the characters’ interiority and ability to show everything at any given moment can make the writer’s job easier because there are no limits to what you can tell and show.
The Downside: Great Flexibility
(Too much of a good thing can be dangerous!)
Because the omniscient narrator is so flexible, you need to be careful when “choreographing” how you use it.
• Hopping from one character’s thoughts to another’s without transition can be confusing to the reader. (Writer Nathan Bransford calls it “awkward head jumping.”)
• Zooming in to tell the reader about what a character is feeling and then zooming out wide to show how that character is stalking their ex at work or burying something in the garden can be dizzying.
This point of view while fun and accessible will always require a keen eye during revision to ensure it’s smooth and adeptly used. The last thing you want is to shake your reader out of the dream of the story because of choppy narration.
Great examples of third person omniscient point of view:
(and countless others!)
This narrator is the closest representation to real life. The third person limited omniscient narrator knows everything (or as much as you want them to know) about one character—the protagonist usually—but can only see/hear what other characters do and say to know who they are and what they want.
You can limit what the narrator knows to what the character would know, or you can give the narrator more omniscience to know even more than the character knows about their own self or life.
Another way to play with limited omniscient narrators is to do like Jonathan Franzen in his novel The Corrections and have multiple third person limited omniscient narrators—creating an ensemble cast of protagonists.
Examples of books written in third person limited omniscient point of view:
Because of its flexibility, third person point of view in fiction writing is highly user-friendly:
From Beloved, Toni Morrison
“That’s all you let yourself remember,” Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself—one alive, that is—the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off—on her carelessness in taking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds had grown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.
(Read/download the full book HERE)
Psychic Distance is how intimate or objective your omniscient narrator is at any given moment.
In The Art of Fiction (1983), John Gardner explains how more psychic distance is best for showing the story, while less psychic distance is good for bringing the reader and the narrator into one, such that the reader experiences the interior life of the character.
In his example, he goes from greatest distance to least to show how you can smoothly move the “camera” in and out to create different effect with your story:
- It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
- Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
- Henry hated snowstorms.
- God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
- Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul…
If you’re a George R.R. Martin fan, you’ll enjoy this close examination of how he uses psychic distance in his Song of Ice and Fire series.
During the writing is when a story will invariably become its own entity. As a result, the initial point of view you used may either be just right or feel off somehow as if it’s not properly serving the story.
During revision, you will examine the point of view you used against the story’s distance/intimacy, access to the protagonist and other characters, and overall theme or tone.
If your chosen point of view is working, you’ll want to go through the story to make sure your point of view is consistent. If your point of view is not serving your story, you can change it out for one that will.
Note:
A story can be told from any point of view and be rich and dynamic. This is why your choice is an instinctive one, a personal decision based on your relationship to the protagonist(s) and the purpose of the story.
Whether you keep your original point of view or shift to a different point of view in later drafts of your fiction writing is a natural part of finding your story’s developmental legs and part of the process—and evolution—of ourselves as artists and of our projects.
You can do whatever you want with point of view in your story as long as you are consistent (and this caveat applies to all the craft choices you make in your story).
The lens you use through which you bring forth your story teaches the reader how to take in the story and serves as a “contract” (e.g. you establish the story as A, and therefore the reader get a hot drink, relaxes, and enjoys entering into the story as A).
By being consistent, you’re ensuring two positive things:
1) Maintaining the “dream” of the story keeps your reader immersed in your story
2) The longer your reader lives with your characters, who continue to develop and change over the course of the story, the more empathy and greater emotional investment they’ll have in your work.
Consider taking 10-15 minutes today to practice how to use point of view in your fiction writing. It’s a valuable exercise, and it will enhance your ability to bring the best point of view to your story.
Prompt:
Once you’re done, have a look at which point of view you used:
Is it satisfying? Does it feel fluid and natural?
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