JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #10
July 23, 2020
This week I want to talk about point of view (POV) in fiction. Ordinarily, tutorials on POV list a few possible points of view from which you can tell a story. These generally line up with grammatical person: that is, first, second, or third person, roughly equivalent to I, you, and He/She/They respectively. The most common POVs in fiction are first person, where the narrating character speaks about themselves: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago . . . I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world";* and third person, where the narrating perspective talks about other people: "The Grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind."† Third person POV is often split into two kinds: Omniscient, where the narrating perspective knows and explains the thoughts of any character it wants; and Limited, where the narrating perspective reveals only the thoughts of a single character. Third Person Limited is often described as First Person with the pronouns changed because both are limited to a single consciousness.
Other perspectives are sometimes mentioned, but these are much less common. Second person is when the narrating perspective refers to the character whose interior thoughts we have access to with the second-person pronoun, you. This POV is a kind of direct address where the narrator seems to be speaking to and about the reader, telling you what you do and feel: "Nowadays, the memory starts like this: there’s a rush in the red dirt, and you and your brother snatch up the tackle box and run from the girl."‡ Another infrequent POV is first person plural, the "We" narrator, where the narrating perspective represents a group of people speaking about themselves collectively: "We play the game at recess, and the teachers don’t notice. We stand on the playground by the flagpole, arms ringed with colored bracelets from the drugstore, waiting."§
Most of the time, advice about POV is restricted to the single dimension of grammatical person and how the narrating perspective is speaking about a character, as above. However, an oft-neglected dimension of POV is psychic distance, which refers to how close the narrating perspective is to the mental interiority of the character it is speaking of. Psychic distance can range from a distant and detached overview to representations of the immediate thoughts or sense-impressions of a character. Most importantly, psychic distance can shift within a story or scene, sometimes between sentences: "So that was that. In he’d go. As soon as they left. Leave, leave, leave, he thought, so I can go inside, forget this ever-- Then he was running. Across the lawn. Oh God! What was he doing, what was he doing?"# A first-person narrator can sometimes shift psychic distance in order to describe a scene in apparent or momentary third person, as if from another character’s perspective: "I heard a sound, a low cry of fear which escaped from the old man. Now I knew that he was sitting up in his bed, filled with fear; I knew that he knew that I was there. He did not see me there. He could not hear me there. He felt me there. Now he knew that Death was standing there."¶
Point of view in fiction can be incredibly subtle and powerful, a very important aspect of our writing. This brief distillation can only skim the surface of the possibilities available to us in our quest to control the reader’s experience of a story. Be sure to experiment not only with first, second, or third person, but with shifting psychic distance from moment to moment within a story.
References:
* - opening lines (elided) of Moby Dick by Herman Melville
† - opening lines of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O’Connor
‡ - opening lines of "Maidencane" by Chad B. Anderson
§ - early lines of "Girls, At Play" by Celeste Ng
# - in the middle of "Victory Lap" by George Saunders
¶ - in the middle of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
Next: On Writing What You Know