|
WHOSE
STORY IS IT ANYWAY? Point of View (POV) is more than just some character's viewpoint of a given situation, it's where character and narration blend together to create the heart of a story. POV is the perspective from which the reader experiences not just the action of the story, but the essence of the story itself. Because of the intimate nature of reading, POV is reader oriented but should always be author controlled.i As in all other aspects of writing – know your purpose. During writing keep in mind that readers want more than a view, they want an experience. The magic inherent in well-written POV is that it allows the reader to be both the character and the outside observer. This controlled viewpoint is the place from which the reader views the story. So what, exactly, is point of view? POV is where the reader experiences the story from inside the viewpoint character, or rather, the narrator's head and looks out from the narrator's eyes. The reader is only shown what the narrator sees, smells, hears, and tastes. That POV includes what the narrator thinks, feels, and believes including his/her worldview, prejudices, hopes, fears, etc. This intimate contact with the narrator is not objective. The story's experiences, actions and reactions are constantly influenced and interpreted by the narrator's nature. The narrator may or may not be the protagonist. It could easily be another character who has a conflict that must be resolved, or who will be transformed the most by the events of the story, or who will have survived the major ordeal that kills everyone else. The reasons for choosing this person as the narrator are varied. It could be to give the reader a unique perspective of a certain event, or to convey information that is only known to this character, or it may be the character with the most internally or externally at stake, or it may increase reader identification so that the narrator's goals and conflicts become increasingly important to the reader. A story, usually one with a large cast of characters, may contain multiple viewpoint characters. "Do not head-hop, that is the indiscriminate shifting from one character's POV to another's, when using multiple narrators. Use a single character's POV and only shift to another's head because it is going to accomplish something. The way to use multiple viewpoint characters is one at a time. A general rule is to maintain one character's POV per scene or chapter."ii If you use too many characters' viewpoints, your reader won't know who to sympathize with. Just remember that every time you switch narrators you jar the reader. The best way to learn whose POV you're in is to pick a character and rewrite an entire scene or chapter in that character's viewpoint from the First Person POV perspective. That is to change all instances of his/her name and pronouns to "I", as if you are that person. Now, as the viewpoint character, you can't possibly know what any of the other characters are thinking and feeling. This will show up clearly when you reread the altered passages. A stray viewpoint will show up when a line or two, or even a paragraph, goes into another character's head without any discernable reason, and then switches back to what has been the major POV in the scene. This shows a definite lack of control. In fiction there are three main types of point of view. Omniscient Point of View. Omniscient is an efficient way of controlling a large cast of characters. The story is told from the god's eye view and is therefore the most distant form of POV and the one with the least relation to characters. It records what can be seen and heard, but it cannot impart any feeling or thought. It is not confined to the narrow and personal perspective of the characters. For example let's use 'The Hobbit' by J.R.R. Tolkien. "This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected." Notice how in this POV we are not viewing the world from inside a hobbit's head; we do not know how this Baggins thinks or feels. From an outside perspective we are simply being told about him. First Person Point of View. In First Person the reader gets an intimate perspective of one particular character's perceptions. In this viewpoint the author's voice must disappear and leave only the viewpoint character to speak directly to the reader, so the character must be interesting enough to keep the reader going for an entire novel. In this POV you can't write anything your viewpoint character wouldn't know. For example let's use "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden. "I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyoto. I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan. In all my life I've never told more than a handful of people anything at all about Yoroido, or about the house in which I grew up, or about my mother and father, or my older sister—and certainly not about how I became a geisha, or what it was like to be one." This perspective is much more immediate and intimate. It is almost as if we, the reader, have become the woman reciting the tale. Third Person Point of View. Third Person point of view is a compromise between first person and omniscient , providing the reader with a mixture of narrative perspective and character intimacy. Third Person can be single (where the story is dedicated to one person's perspective) or multiple (where two or more characters are narrating events). Third person exclusive POV is much like first person POV. It is this control of a single character that creates an intense reader experience. For example lets use "The Conquest" by Elizabeth Chadwick. "Ailith, wife of Goldwin the Armourer, swept her gaze around her long hall, inhaled deeply of the rich, forest scent, and sighed out with pleasure. Great swags of Yuletide evergreen garlanded the roof beams and the timbered walls." In this particular POV we get the intimacy of first person where we are in Ailith's head gazing about and smelling the garland, but we also get the description told to us of what the roof and walls look like from an omniscient narrative. Sure the roof beams and timbered walls are something we'd see from Ailith's viewpoint, but at the same time a character who is familiar with what their own house would look like would not stop to think about what it looks like—hence the omniscient narrative to round out the description. The choice of what viewpoint to use comes from what you, the author, wish to portray. What experience do you wish to give the reader? What effect? What point of view you choose will determine whether the reader gets an intimate and narrow understanding of events (as in either first person or exclusive third person) or perhaps a contradictory and varied understanding of what's going on (as in multiple third person) or you might wish to give your reader a more distant yet comprehensive reading experience (as in omniscient POV). The choice is yours—choose with a purpose in mind. And don't forget—maintain control. Bibliography & Recommended Reading List: |
|