{"id":697,"date":"2011-01-10T10:20:33","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T15:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=697"},"modified":"2011-01-10T10:25:17","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T15:25:17","slug":"hidden-danger-point-of-view-pov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/hidden-danger-point-of-view-pov\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Danger: Point of View (POV)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My happiest discovery about point of view (POV) happened back in college, when my professor assigned Lorrie Moore\u2019<\/a>s \u201cHow To Be an Other Woman\u201d and I fell in love with 2nd<\/sup> person. \u00a0Moore’s irresistible story begins with the directive \u201cMeet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night\u201d and has a neglected, lovelorn protagonist who reminds herself: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of us are not Lorrie Moore and cannot pull off 2nd<\/sup> person with panache.\u00a0 But what about 1st<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup>?\u00a0 Those are workable choices, and the biggest difference between them is immediacy.<\/p>\n

Consider the first line of Mary Doria Russell\u2019s Children of God<\/a><\/em> and the same sentence in different points of view:<\/p>\n

A. \u201cSweating and nauseated, I sat on the edge of my bed with my head in what was left of my hands.\u201d (First person)<\/p>\n

B. \u201cSweating and nauseated, you sat on the edge of your bed with your head in what was left of your hands.\u201d (Second person)<\/p>\n

C. \u201cSweating and nauseated, Father Emilio Sandoz sat on the edge of his bed with his head in what was left in his hands.\u201d (Third person)<\/p>\n

\"\"

POV: The Perspective from which a Story is Told<\/p><\/div>\n

We get painfully close with all three examples, obviously, but there\u2019s a different kind of honesty, a willingness to divulge, and a risky potential for whining or self-absorption when Emilio tells us his story directly with \u201cI\u201d (A). We\u2019re privy to the way his mind works, and how his thoughts might conflict with what he says or does.\u00a0 We can have quick changes for humor, or feel his despair directly.\u00a0 Yet there\u2019s never any escaping experiencing the world through his perspective. \u00a0If he lies to himself, he lies to the reader.\u00a0 That complication can be fascinating, or a mess.<\/p>\n

Second person (B) sounds just crazy nuts.<\/p>\n

With third person (C), Emilio has a little dignity because the writer serves as a witness reporting the event.\u00a0 We\u2019re invited to feel Emilio\u2019s agony, but we\u2019re allowed to have a little impolite, dispassionate curiosity, too, because we trust that the author, not Emilio himself, is telling the story.\u00a0 We can still get Emilio\u2019s thoughts and feelings, and know if he lies, but there\u2019s a controlled neutrality about the way we get that information.\u00a0 There\u2019s also the implied possibility that Emilio can die, which isn\u2019t possible for a person telling the story as \u201cI\u201d unless the narrator is a ghost (The Lovely Bones<\/a><\/em>) or the writer is really breaking form.\u00a0 Because of the death factor alone, I\u2019d say it\u2019s more dangerous for a character to be in a third person POV. Russell\u2019s book, incidentally, is written in third (C), and indeed, her character Emilio is in such rough shape that it would be hard for him to narrate a coherent description of events.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no accident that many young adult novels these days are written in first person, when it so quickly establishes how a narrator thinks.\u00a0 First person lends itself especially well to a character who is thinking fast, possibly in fragments, on the spot, in a stressful situation.\u00a0 We know Katniss from The Hunger Games<\/a><\/em>, for instance, in first person.\u00a0 First person works brilliantly when the protagonist has a lively, interesting mind, and it\u2019s a riot to write with a funny character.\u00a0 On the down side, first person can limit vocabulary if the protagonist has a limited or non-standard education.\u00a0 Alice Walker<\/a> gets around this by giving her characters without traditional educations the words they would use if they knew them, so there are ways to manage, but having education line up with how a person sounds when they think out loud is one of the things I enjoy most and I wouldn\u2019t want to give that up.<\/p>\n

For Birthmarked,<\/em> I used third person because it felt natural and seemed to fit Gaia, who does things I am not morally comfortable with, like taking babies from their mothers.\u00a0 I was concerned that her actions would seem so cold that no reader would like her, and I needed the filter of third person so that the cruelty wasn\u2019t part of her own, inner mental voice.\u00a0 When she begins to question things (\u201cThis was far worse than she\u2019d imagined it could be\u201d), there\u2019s a play between Gaia\u2019s understanding of events and the reader\u2019s understanding. A little bit of distance gave me better control, plus I had no restrictions on vocabulary.<\/p>\n

Like other aspects of writing fiction, point of view is a tool to consider, but I find it is intricately woven up with character and plot and setting.\u00a0 It\u2019s not an arbitrary choice writers make on page one and then simply stick with.\u00a0 I like how Homer switches points of view from first to third for the last section of\u00a0The Odyssey<\/a><\/em>, when Odysseus is no longer perpetually bragging and there\u2019s a chance one of those suitor\u2019s arrows might kill him dead.\u00a0 2,600 years later, POV still offers danger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My happiest discovery about point of view (POV) happened back in college, when my professor assigned Lorrie Moore\u2019s \u201cHow To Be an Other Woman\u201d and I fell in love with 2nd person. \u00a0Moore’s irresistible story begins with the directive \u201cMeet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night\u201d and has a neglected, lovelorn protagonist who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-birthmarked-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":700,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}