This week we’re talking about narrative point of view, a topic close to my rotten, diseased heart. My nearest and dearest will tell you that there is nothing I love more than annoying the living bejeezus out of readers by using an atypical POV.
Mind you, this only really works (for me) in short fiction. With novels, I always gravitate toward first-person. But more on that later. First, let me brag about my bad-ass POV-fu, and how annoying it is. I swear, sometimes I think I’m going to get myself knifed! Like the time I opened a story with a long passage in second-person future subjunctive. (“If you were to go downtown on a Saturday, maybe you’d be looking for this particular corner…then if you were to knock on the door and say, ‘I’m here to annoy readers’…”)
You woulda thought I’d just been caught in public badmouthing Joss Whedon!
Of course, far more common is my fondness for second-person. I love this shit, because it calls into question who exactly the viewpoint character is. My love of second-person narration is well known among my small circle of beta readers. (I even co-wrote two romantic books all in second-person.) Lots of people hate that.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that I love present tense. That’s not POV, but it certainly relates directly to it; tense and POV are the two most central (and easily variable) things about any piece of fiction writing.
Well, present tense may be popular with MFA students and lit professors, as proof that a work is “literary.” It may be a beloved variation that I gallop to whenever I get bored. But to read online forums, this absolutely flips many genre readers out. And yet, you’ll find it laced throughout my very favorite period of literature, the science fiction New Wave of the 1960s. There, experimenting with format was one of the new innovations that some of SF’s most brilliant writers brought to the table, and it set the groundwork for the vast expansion of SF as a literary genre. (more…)
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Point of view, while being basic to the mechanics of story, is complex in it’s simplicity — that is, there’s an art to it like much of writing. On the surface, it looks like an easy thing. Pick a POV. Done. It isn’t until you’ve practiced writing for a while that you begin to see the layers of subtlety behind these kinds of decisions. Yes, fashion does come into it. At the moment, first person is all the rage and omniscient third is totally er… not — at least in America. The trouble is, not everyone writes well in first person. Also, first person isn’t the easiest POVs to pull off. Frankly, it’s the toughest to do well and isn’t something I’d recommend for beginners. First person requires a Voice to hook the reader for one thing. Lack that Voice and the story will be dull as a corporate accountant’s suit. Have multiple POV? Even more difficult because you have to have multiple Voices, and each must stand out from the rest. That way the reader can tell the difference in characters. (It’s the same with dialog, really.) So, whatever you do, don’t decide on a POV just because everyone else is doing it. Even if some people claim that it’s one of the markers of a genre.* Write in the POV that best serves your story. In fact, if there’s one universal rule about writing, that’s the one: Do What Best Serves The Story. POV as a gimmick for gimmick’s sake? Yeah. That just gets between the reader and the story. Bad idea, that. Don’t do anything by accident. Real writers create with purpose.
