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A Primer on Point of View

 
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ScottyDM
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Joined: 12 Feb 2005
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Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 4:44 am    Post subject: A Primer on Point of View Reply with quote

There are four basic point-of-view styles that work well and that professional editors will buy. There are minor variations on these and there are other styles, but the other styles are typically experimental and almost never sell. Always stick with one style in a scene, although it's acceptable to switch styles from one scene to the next.

First Person: The POV character is the narrator, so if that character doesn't see it, hear it, smell it, feel it, or taste it--it cannot be in the scene. If this were a movie, the movie camera would be peeking out through the eyes of the POV character and the microphone would be in his ear. This is a very intimate way for the reader to get to know the POV character as there should be nothing between the reader and the character. The character must not tease the reader with information he knows, but doesn't tell. However, if the character is the type of person to lie to themselves then they can also lie to the reader. Or you can simply not have that scrap of information cross the character's mind.

Third Person Subjective: This is exactly like a movie. There is no POV character and the reader does not get into anyone's thoughts or secret motivations. Think of your characters as actors and have the characters show their emotions by how they act and the words they choose to say and how they say them. With this POV style it's acceptable to slip between it and one of the other third person styles by using narrative distance.

In every form of third person the narrator is never the POV character. That's what makes it third person. Typically the narrator is a separate character from any of the other characters in the story and almost always remains invisible. Typically the narrator is the author. Readers do not like to be lied to by the author. It's okay if characters lie because characters are sometimes that way. If the author as narrator tries to fool the reader then you'll upset many of your readers and your story will get a bad rep.

Third Person Omniscient Unlimited (often called Third Person Omniscient): If the narrator is the author and is omniscient (you'd better be, it's your story), then in this form the author chooses to tell what each character is thinking. That is, there is more than one POV character per scene. Commercially, about the only markets accepting this POV style are regency romances and historic fiction. Commonly called "head hopping" and typically a sign of an inexperience writer (except for those few markets that accept this style). This can be very confusing for readers. It's also a good way to bleed off the tension that normally drives a story forward.

Example: Jill goes on a first date with Jack. During dinner he seems detached and at the end of the date he says a quick goodnight and rushes off. Jill is going nuts! She likes this guy but does he like her? She lies awake in bed and frets about it. Well, if we were inside Jack's head too we'd know that he received news earlier today that his mother's in the hospital and he really does like Jill, so he didn't want to cancel their date, but he's distracted. Which is the more satisfying read? If you limit POV to Jill, the reader will be biting their nails along with Jill, and at the end of the chapter they'll want to flip the page in the hope they can discover how Jack feels. In an unlimited POV the tension is gone--at least for the reader, Jill is still on pins and needles--and at the end of the chapter the reader can close the book and come back to it later.

Third Person Omniscient Limited (often called Third Person Limited): Here the narrator/author knows all but only tells the thoughts and feelings of one character in any given scene. That is the narrator limits himself to the POV character. This is the most common successful third person POV style. It can take some discipline, but for the non-POV characters treat them just like an actor in a movie and have that character show his or her emotions through their facial expressions, etc. Conversely, the POV character knows what she thinks, and the narrator lets the reader know what she thinks, but she cannot see her own facial expressions--especially if they are an involuntary reaction. I once had a non-POV character say to the POV character: "Oh, don't stick your tongue out." Another trick is to have the POV character or narrator guess the mental state of the non-POV character. She didn't look very happy.

Narrative Distance: Tied up with all of this is the concept of narrative distance. That is, where is the narrator in relation to the characters, particularly the POV character. With first person, the narrator is the character so the narrative distance is always very tight. With third person objective, the narrator is never any of the characters and this is the loosest POV. I like to think of this as being like a movie and the narrative distance is related to the camera position. In first person the camera is inside the head to the POV character--always. With the third person POV styles you can move the camera around. During the scene you can shift from a "long shot" (objective style) and move the camera into to perch over the shoulder of a character (limited style) and finally slip inside their head and even write a few paragraphs in what is almost a first person style (avoiding the "I" of first person). When done skillfully the effect gives a heightened sense of intimacy with that character.

And that brings up another problem with third person omniscient unlimited. When done poorly it's as if the camera is hopping from character to character. The poor reader doesn't know who to identify with and gets dizzy. But in movies we do see scenes where two people converse and the camera shifts during the conversation. Maybe a key factor is that the camera never really gets intimate with the person doing the listening. That is, keep it shallow and stay out of specific thoughts and interior monologue.

Depth: Depth is related to narrative distance. While distance is the camera position, depth is how far we dive into the thoughts of the POV character. It's best to link these. So if you open a scene with a few paragraphs done in an objective style, then zoom up behind the POV character and hover over their shoulder, you would not go deep into that character until you're tight with the distance.

Most authors know how to quote dialog, but there's no official consensus on how to quote internal monologue. That is, the direct thoughts of the POV character. Hans Christian Anderson and Jane Austen used quotes, but that was a very long time ago and quotes have fallen out of favor in recent decades. Some will use "funny" punctuation marks as if they were quotes, which is a good choice when you have no stylistic options. Renni Brown and Dave King suggest italics (chapter 7), which saves on the "he thought" "she thought" tags. Many authors will not do anything special, but rely on tense, voice, and subject matter to differentiate the interior monologue of the character from the telling of the narrator. And some authors avoid going deeper than emotional states like happy, irritated, angry, etc.

Ownership: Every utterance, every thought, every action, and every perception belongs to a character. I like to think of ownership--who owns the sentence (or sentence fragment). Never mix sentences owned by different characters into the same paragraph... usually. About the only exception is when characters are working in concert or act as one. This is rare.

Another ownership concept is that in conversations--or a fight scene, where the "conversation" is physical rather than verbal--lump all a given character's stuff (the stuff they own) into a single paragraph. Each paragraph is owned by one character and any character should not get two paragraphs in a row. There's a bit of flex to this "rule". For example if one character is giving a longish speech you can spread it across paragraphs. Also if a character does something, pauses, then speaks, you can add drama by separating their speech from their action. However too much drama wearies the reader. I've seen where an otherwise talented amateur separated the dialog from the actions in a conversation between two people. It was odd and confusing. The pattern of paragraph ownership was: he, he, she, she, he, he, she, she. Eight short paragraphs instead of four was too much and too crazy. Obviously if only one character is in a scene you must split the scene up into proper paragraphs. When and how is a judgment call.

Invisibility: In any common flavor of third person where the narrator is the author, you typically want the narrator to vanish from the reader's notice. For example the speech tags such as "he said" and "she said" intrude slightly into the reader's consciousness. Thus, it'd be terrific if we could eliminate the speech tags and other mechanics of presenting the story. If we choose a POV style with only one POV character per scene this happens naturally. For example: He didn't like the sound of that. "You'll have to prove it to me." Who does this paragraph belong to? The POV character of course! If you want to show a non-POV character with the same reaction you'll have to do it externally: She scowled. "I don't have to prove anything." We know this paragraph belongs to one of the scene's non-POV characters because scowling is involuntary and we normally aren't aware when we're doing it, plus there's nothing to show the internal state of the character. Within the context of the scene we don't need speech tags on these lines of dialog... unless it were in third person omniscient unlimited.

Strictly sticking to the ownership rules are a huge help too, and works with any POV style.

Mixing POV Characters and POV Styles: You may switch POV styles from one scene to the next. For example, if you prefer third person limited for most of your story because you like the ability to play with narrative distance, you could switch to first person for flashback scenes--almost as if the flashback were some written narrative by a character who was there. Or if you have a scene with no characters important enough to justify being a POV character (readers expect more from POV characters) you could write that scene in third person objective. Another possibility is to write in one of the third person styles, but give the narrator a bit of a personality, make her a character. Then toward the end of the book you can introduce the narrator as a real character and write their scenes in first person. This last idea would probably work best if the character has a bit of omniscience--she's a goddess watching the story unfold from her mountain top and only injects herself into it at the end.

When using a POV style with a single POV character per scene, it's common practice to switch POV characters to whichever one is the most appropriate when you switch scenes. You can even do this in a first person story, although in first person it's common to not have too many POV characters. While up to 30 POV characters can work in third person limited, it's way too many for first person. For professionally published fiction I've seen two first person characters in alternating chapters, and I've heard that The Magician by Sol Stein has six first person characters. Now when you bring two characters into the same scene where they'd each previously had first person status, you'll need to decide who "owns" the scene.

With a single POV character per scene, it's good form to give the first paragraph of the scene to that character. Many readers will assume that whoever owns the first paragraph is the POV character too. This isn't real strict. If you open with another character's paragraph and keep distant from that character, you can follow that with the POV character's paragraph and most readers will get it. But introduce the POV character as soon as possible!

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

Scotty

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