View! Or am I?
by Ian Tennent
If you want to start a bar-brawl between writers, bring up the subject of Point of View (POV) between drinks. Stand back and watch with glee as jargon wages bloody war with dogmatism. And, trust me, there’s plenty of brawn on either side of that divide.
Understandable when you have a plethora of terms such as: Deep Third Person; Multiple First Person; Third Person Limited; Third Person Omniscient; Limited Omniscient (huh?); Objective POV; Subjective POV; Dramatic POV; Subjective Omniscient; and the list goes on - all trading blows with the supreme counter-argument of, “But *insert famous author* does it like that.” Add to this different ‘tenses’ and different ‘aspects’ and it’s no exaggeration to say few areas trip up new (and experienced) writers the way POV does. Straight off the bat, the reader doesn’t give a hoot what name you give your POV, all they want to know is that you’re in control of proceedings. My advice is to pick a framework that works for you and stick with it. You can cook with grams and millilitres, or ounces and pounds. The point is that you cook a great meal, not which measurement you use. So what then is POV? POV, simply put, is the perspective of the ‘narrator’ that’s doing the story-telling. Note, I said ‘narrator’ and not ‘character’. This distinction is important: sometimes the
‘narrator’ is a character in the story and sometimes not. Now, purists may argue that POV is not quite the same as perspective since a story written in a particular POV can be shown through the eyes of say, Jack, Jill and Mary, each with their own unique perspective. However, this distinction, while technically accurate, is not particularly useful in a discussion of the pitfalls surrounding POV. In the immortal words of Lord Bacon, “The thoughts of the philosophers can be likened to the stars; they are lofty, but they shed very little light”.
scene be filmed in real time?” If it can’t, then you’re dealing with backstory and you might want to relook at the way you’ve written it, but that’s a topic for another day.
In my view, technicalities such as these only distract from the ultimate purpose of POV, which is simply to enhance the experience of your reader. I’ll say it again. As an author, your primary goal when wielding the POV of your choice is to enhance and not spoil your reader’s experience! You do this by exercising control.
At its most basic the salient features of this framework look like this:
A lot of writers, myself included, like to talk about POV in terms of camera angles. i.e. Is the camera mounted in the sky? Or on a single person’s head? Or are there multiple cameras? The benefit of this approach is that it encourages you to keep your writing immediate and visual. You simply ask yourself, “Can this
I subscribe to the following simple framework, consisting of 4 vantage points or types of POV. Bear in mind that all POV can be written in ‘past’ or ‘present’ tense. For example “I walk” and “I walked” are both instances of First Person POV. Furthermore, each POV has its own pros and cons.
First Person POV I turned off the light. Seconds later I heard a window smash. My blood ran cold. Here, the ‘camera’ is like a GoPro mounted on the main character’s forehead. The narrator is a character. The reader gets to see the video footage from this character’s perspective and, in this way, experience the story first hand. The flipside is that the reader can only observe what that character observes, can only experience that
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