Whose point of view? Whose and how many?
1. ‘The man walked down the street, thinking of someone he knew, but unaware he was going to be deeply involved with her, soon, very soon.’
2. ‘The man walked down the street, he looked preoccupied, as if he was thinking deeply about something, or someone.’
3. ‘I walked down the street, thinking of her, always on my mind despite our slight history.’
4. ‘Jeff walked down the street, idly musing on the girl next door, indulging in a little harmless fantasy.’
5. ‘You walked down the street, thinking of her, drifting on a sea of maybes.’
I’m often asked about points of view, and which works best for a particular style or genre. It’s good to have a clear idea of what points of view options there are when writing, and how they interact with your reader.
The examples above are:
1. Omniscient narrator – the narrative voice knows what’s going on, even when the character doesn’t, and is both aware of the man’s thinking, and able to see what is coming next.
2. The narrator here doesn’t know what is going on, and is just an observer of this particular character. They have an idea, but they could be wrong, or don’t have all the details.
3. The most common for writers, this is a first person narrative. The narrator is the character, and can express feelings and motives, but is not likely to know what is coming next, unless they are looking back on events.
4. Third person narrative, here the author is inside the character, but there is an element of greater distance between the character and the reader.
5. Rarely used as it can quickly become pretentious or irritating – the second person narrative is hard to pull off, and hard to read, but can be used to great unsettling effect as it draws the reader straight into the action without asking permission.
There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these different points of view. When looking at your own work, take a moment to consider what depth of relationship you’d like your characters to have with your readers. Remember what information the characters will have to be involved in or witness, in order to pass on plot details.
The most important thing to remember about points of view is that the more you have, the more you’re asking of your reader. As a reader if you’re constantly skipping from one person to another, it’s very distracting and jolts you out of the world the author has created. For this reason, and to keep your writing tight and focused, I would recommend one or two points of view for most pieces of writing.
Try writing each scene from the point of view of the main protagonist and you should see which characters are dominating the action.
But whatever you do, don’t drift about in a scene, suddenly informing the reader what the bus driver is thinking when the rest of the scene is coming from the point of view of the main character.
So – what are your points of view stumbling blocks? Ask them here and I’ll do my best to help you sort them out!
January 16, 2012
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