Point of View

Why Narrative Perspective Can Make or Break Your Story

Leslie Watts, Shawn Coyne

• Publisher: Story Grid Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645010371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Writing
• Index: Business

Finding the right point of view is one of the most important-and least understood-challenges writers face.

Point of view extends far beyond the choice of first, second, or third person. POV determines all that a reader knows about the world inside a story. Is the murder told from the criminal's, the detective's, or the victim's vantage point? An awful lot rides on that decision.

In short, a story's point of view guides the characters, message, and events that matter.

In Point of View: Why Narrative Perspective Can Make or Break Your Story, Story Grid Publishing Editor-in-Chief Leslie Watts provides examples from dozens of masterworks to help writers understand telling and showing points of view and narrative devices. Does a telling narrator live inside or outside the story? Is the focus of a showing POV external or internal? Every choice has an impact.

Watts offers a revolutionary approach to point of view, demonstrating how deep study of narrative perspective can empower and uplift storytellers themselves. When writers truly master point of view they can share the messages they want to share and bring their stories to life.

1

POINT OF VIEW

Let’s start with the basics. What is point of view?

It’s the technical choice we’re all familiar with—options that are variations on first, second, and third person.

• First Person: I (or we) wrote a story.
• Second Person: You wrote a story.
• Third Person: Alex (or she or he or they) wrote a story.

Any of these point-of-view choices can happen in the past, present, or future.

• Past: I wrote a scene.
• Present: You write (or are writing) a scene.
• Future: Alex will write a scene.

Point of view is also the vantage point from which a story is presented. To deliver a reading experience that satisfies, we must understand both aspects of point of view and how they work together.

What do we mean by vantage point? We might first consider external factors like the place and time where someone stands. Internal factors like the language a person speaks or the beliefs they hold about themselves and the world are relevant too. This is what we mean when we say the villain is the hero of their own story. From their perspective, they aren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, they’re doing the world a favor by dealing with that troublemaker claiming to be a hero. These external and internal qualities of where you stand (or take a stand) determine what you can perceive and the story you tell about it.

What’s fascinating is that you can use the same setting, characters, and events to craft very different stories depending on the vantage point from which it’s presented. For example, if you want to tell a story from a criminal’s point of view, the master detective subgenre of Crime Story (like Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie) wouldn’t be your first thought. You might choose the prison subgenre (like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King), or a heist (like Ocean’s Eleven), or a caper (like Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard). When you change the vantage point, you change the story, its message, and as a result, the events and circumstances that matter.

The specificity of a story’s vantage point is the reason we can’t change the technical point of view by changing the pronouns. In fact, the vantage point should inform our decision to write in first-, second-, or third-person point of view. Not the other way around. For example, if we’re writing from the vantage point of the protagonist, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (Worldview), first-person point of view makes the most sense. If we want to write a story that employs multiple perspectives, as in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Worldview), some form of omniscient narration is often a better choice.

With these thoughts on vantage point in mind, let’s look at the main point of view options from a fresh perspective. First, we need to break them into two groups based on showing and telling. For the moment, forget the advice to “show not tell” because that’s not what we’re getting at here. When it comes to point of view, the categories are about the way we present the story through the effect we create rather than a technique found in a particular passage.

Telling comes to the reader through a narrator. It’s as if someone or something is collecting, collating, and sharing the events and circumstances of the story. We hear about what happens from someone who is communicating with someone else. Showing is more immediate and recreates the effect of being present and observing the events for ourselves. Either option can be conveyed through first-, second-, or third-person point of view.

We’ll start with the point of view types in which a narrator tells the story.

2

TELLING POINTS OF VIEW

Narrated stories create the effect of a story the reader hears from someone else. In these stories someone or something stands between the writer and the reader to tell the story. It makes sense that who the narrator is and where they stand in relation to the events of the story are important considerations, and that’s how we distinguish among the types. We’ll move from narrators who participate in the story to those on the outside looking in.

First Person

Characters who reside within the story typically convey their tales through first-person point of view. With this point of view, we know who the narrator is relative to the story, and we often know to whom, when, and why the story is told. They can be the protagonist, which we call the luminary agent, or a peripheral narrator who tells a story focused on another character. Whether the central character or not, these stories are locked into one point of view, though there are some creative ways to include other perspectives.

Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (Action), Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Worldview), and Bridget in Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (Love) are typical protagonist-narrators who tell their own stories.

A peripheral narrator who is not the protagonist is a useful option when the protagonist isn’t the best character to tell the story because of their vantage point. They might lack the perspective to present the story on their own behalf or can be difficult to relate to. For example, Ishmael tells the story of Captain Ahab, who dies while pursuing the great whale in Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Action...