1. There are infinite shades of POV
“Basically, there are three choices
for POV – first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient.”
If you read a lot of advice on
writing – in books, magazines or blogs – you’ve probably heard something
similar to that a thousand times. Often,
the advice giver will go on to admit – grudgingly – that there are a few other
variations. (Like second person, if
you’re feeling really pretentious and affected.) And they will tell you that omniscient
viewpoint is “old fashioned”, out of date – and anyway, too fraught with peril
for any beginning writer to consider. So
pretty, much, your choices are first person and third person limited. In fact, third person limited with multiple
viewpoint characters – with the POV shifts scrupulously divided by chapters, or
possibly scene breaks (but never ever
ever happening within a scene!) is pretty much the default for big suspense
novels, epic fantasies and the like.
This is a lot like telling a
painter there are only three colors:
red, blue and yellow. In a way,
that’s true. And you could produce some
interesting paintings (or at least comic books) using that idea. But you would be severely limited. There’s an entire world of things you
couldn’t render realistically – and you’d have a hell of a time representing
perspective or depth.
POV is sort of the same way. We could think of third person (limited and
omniscient and all the “in-between”), first person, and second person as primary POV’s. They’re at the corner of the of the color
triangle. Between them, though, are all
the shades of the spectrum – as Mr. Spock used to say, “Infinite Diversity in
Infinite Combinations.”
A lot of people who should know
better – editors, agents and even other writers – will make it sound like there
are rules for POV. As with anything in
writing – or art (or business or love or life) – there is really only one
rule: YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT WORK.
In Moby Dick, which is arguably the greatest of all American novels,
Herman Melville starts in first person (“Call me Ishmael.” An opening that is not quite as clear cut as
it seems – notice he doesn’t say, “My name is Ishmael”, does he?) Then, about a third of the way into the book,
once the voyage of the Pequod is underway, Ishmael’s first person voice pretty
much disappears, and we find ourselves in something that looks a lot like old
school omniscient – complete with long essay-like passages about whaling, whale
anatomy, metaphysics, and other topics – then at the end of the book Ishmael’s
voice returns to wrap up the story. No
explanation, no apologies. Just try
getting that past your writing group.
William Faulkner, in the story “A
Rose for Emily” uses the voice of the town – a sort of collective “we” – to
narrate the events. More recently,
Stephen King, in Salem’s Lot has
passages in which the town itself is the POV, and we jump rapidly through
different locations and characters to see what is going on. Peter Straub picked this technique up from
King and expanded it brilliantly in Ghost
Story, where the town sections gives us a grisly overview of what is going
on everywhere – something none of the characters could know. Ghost Story, like most of Straub's work,
is a wonderful example of the range and power of effects that can be achieved
by experimenting with unusual POVs.)
2. A Memoir by Any Other Name is Still Not a
Novel
You could write a long essay – or a
book or a PhD thesis – on how it is that third person limited came to be the
default POV in American fiction in the twentieth century. To be brief, I don’t think it’s an accident
that this kind of fiction coincides with the rise of memoirs as a major
literary form. The twentieth century, in
America and the Western World, at least, was a time when a lot of people who
had never had a voice – never been able to tell their stories – finally got the
chance. There was an incredible release
of political and social energy there.
And it re-shaped the arts. We
became convinced that writing was about “telling your story”, and that the most
important element of art was “self-expression”.
I am skeptical about that, to say the least. I understand the importance of telling certain
stories, and of speaking things which have long been forbidden or repressed. But we lost something along the way.
I don’t think it’s an accident that
the novel as a form corresponds historically to the rise of liberal democracies
and multi-cultural societies. As Jane
Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the
Novel) has pointed out, one of the most powerful effects of the novel is
that it allows us to experience other lives, other times, and other points of
view. It expands our sense of what it
means to be human. The novel – as
opposed to older forms like poetry and romance – was frequently about the part
of society that had been left out and forgotten. It was about women, common people, even
slaves. The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bestselling novel
of the nineteenth century in America, which Lincoln only half-facetiously credited
with starting the civil war, was not that it was another polemic against
slavery – it was that for the first time in popular culture it presented slaves
as whole people with complex inner lives.
Once readers have made that leap – once they had glimpsed that
possibility – it was damnably hard to go back.
The great eighteenth and nineteenth
century novelists had a kind of ambition to encompass the entire world – or at
least the whole of a certain society – within their work. Think of Tolstoy sweeping across Europe in War and Peace or of Dickens scandalizing
London by showing the hidden connections between all the social classes. That’s how the novel works. The defining characteristic of the greatest
novels is not “self-expression” – its empathic
imagination.
To be fair, I should admit that I’m
not really fond of memoirs as a form. I
seldom read one that doesn’t contain a dog or a scientist. The difference between a great memoir and a
great novel is the difference a good home movie and the Sistine Chapel.
3. Third Person Limited is Just First Person
in Drag
Henry James once remarked that, for
any work longer than a short story, the First Person point of view was
“barbaric”. That might be (as John
Gardner has suggested) going a bit far – but there’s point to be made. First person is tailored to certain kinds of
stories – Raymond Chandler and his descendents for instance made it the
standard for private eye fiction – and most mysteries still use it. This kind of fiction depends heavily on
voice. There are mystery series that I
read not because I care that much about the plots, or who-dunnit, but because I
like the main characters, appreciate her (these days it often seem to be “her”)
voice, and like spending time in that world.
Outside of mysteries, Huckleberry
Finn is the classic example. It is,
ultimately, Huck’s voice that we remember, his peculiar take on the world. The same could be said of contemporary
writers like Robert B. Parker. I’m not
sure I could remember the storyline of any given Spenser novel all the way
through, or could separate the scenes in my mind by what book they came
from. But who cares? I can pick up any
one of his books, read the first paragraph, and I’m hooked. I’m seduced by the voice. That is the power of first person at its
best.
The drawbacks though are
serious. First person makes it very hard
to achieve any kind of real scale. The
first person narrative is limited in scope.
Third person limited (note that
adjective) has the same drawbacks – and lacks both the immediacy and the voice
of first. Its strength is that it can
take us deeper inside a character than any other viewpoint (except that
omniscient can do that too, and still have the greater scope at its
disposal). Seeing through the
character’s eyes gives the writer the opportunity to explore perception, to
color the world by the character’s thoughts and feelings. This can be very effective – and this kind of
subjectivity has been the obsession of twentieth century literature. The problem with it – I believe – is that it
traps us in a world where nothing is ever true – just “perceived”. And where our viewpoint – the writer’s, the character’s,
human being’s – is all there is.
This is probably the place to say
that I’m really tired of the whole “unreliable narrator” shtick. We get it.
People don’t always tell the truth – even to themselves. How you see much of the world depends on
where you stand. It’s possible that
we’re all crazy. Yep, we get it. It’s been done. Like photo-realism in painting, it’s an
interesting experiment – once or twice.
Then …
4. You don’t need God to be Omniscient
Many critics believe that
omniscient viewpoint in fiction lost favor in part because of the breakdown in
our religious world view – the onslaught of science, philosophy and skepticism
broke down the old certainties, and it was no longer possible to be quite so
confident that there was an over-riding truth, or even an objective
reality. Maybe POV is all there is. This was a revolutionary idea in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century (and apparently still is, at least in
Hollywood, which explains why Phillip K. Dick is the only science fiction
writer a lot of people can name). It is
an idea, I think, that has pretty much run its course.
Science shows us that, while it may
never be possible to find absolute certainty about the world, it is possible to
grope our way to better and better approximations of it. Some things are true independent of belief. (If you step off a twenty story building,
you’re going to fall – no matter what your deeply held personal convictions
are.)
I don’t see why fiction can’t reflect
this. What if our omniscient viewpoint
was not God, but evolution? Or Deep
Time? Or just the ecological web of life itself?
Step out in your yard for a
second. Close your eyes. Listen past the traffic noises and the
neighbor kids playing. What do you
hear? Find the sounds of life going on
around you. What are the concerns of the
songbirds in the trees? The rats
tunneling under the fence? The opossum
sleeping in the back of your garage with her babies in a pouch? Where are they in our fiction?
When we limit our ideas of POV, we
don’t just limit our style. We limit the
kinds of stories we can tell. We limit whose
stories we can tell.
As an everyday person, I’m small. Selfish, impatient, opinionated. But as a writer, as a Novelist, I should be
more. I should contain multitudes.
5. Don’t Use POV to cheat your reader
I said above that first person was
the most common POV for mysteries – where-as large scale suspense novels are
often written in some form of third person – usually with multiple viewpoint
characters. There’s a reason for
that. And it has to do with the
difference between mystery and suspense.
Imagine a group of characters
standing around a table. On the table is
a box. If none of the characters – or
the reader – know what’s in the box, it’s a mystery. Mystery is basically an intellectual
effect. We wonder and think about what
could be in the box. First person, or
very close third person, works beautifully for mysteries because the reader
doesn’t know any more than the narrator and can learn everything as the
narrator does.
Suspense, however, is an emotional
reaction – it’s akin to tension, anxiety and fear. Whereas mystery comes from what we don’t know
– suspense comes very often from what we do know.
Back to the box on the table. If none of the characters knows what’s in it
– but the reader knows it’s a bomb and it’s going to go off in two minutes –
that’s suspense.
It’s also called “dramatic
irony”. The literary term for when the
reader knows something the characters don’t.
And it can be extremely powerful.
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to achieve in first person or
close third person.
Historical novelists can use this
to great effect. You can show us,
Abraham Lincoln, for instance talking to his advisors about his plans for the
future, on the day before he goes to the play at Ford’s Theater. If this is done well, it can be incredibly
poignant. A young wife is planning a romantic
dinner for her husband’s homecoming, but we already know the husband is
dead. Or a character who is stressed and
freaking out about his small problems, while we’ve been shown a larger
perspective and can see just how shallow his concerns really are.
I’m a big fan of dramatic
irony. I tend to think that in any plot
that isn’t specifically built around “who killed Roger Rabbit” – a mystery in
other words – that withholding information from the reader is cheating, and the
suspense you create by doing it is cheap and unfair. (Even in the mystery, there is a sense that
the writer should “play fair” – that the information to solve the problem
should be there, if the reader can only discern what’s important.)
The worst examples of this kind of
thing are often found in those big suspense novels we mentioned earlier, with
their third person, multiple-character viewpoints. I’ve read too many novels where the writer
actually puts us into the head of the villain early on in the story and
“cleverly” – by misdirection or outright deceit – hides the person’s true
identity from us. (Are you listening Dan
Brown?) As soon as I realize this, I
lose all faith in the writer and in his story.
He cheated. How much more effective
would it have been to simply reveal the villain to me – while hiding it from
the protagonist – and generate real suspense out of that knowledge?
POV is one of the most important –
and infinitely flexible – tools in the writer’s arsenal. The ways in which can be told, the voices and
perspectives and combinations that can be used, are as rich and varied as the
rainbow. I’m not suggesting that you
don’t use the primary colors. I’m just
telling you that there’s a whole spectrum to paint with. And the only way to learn that spectrum is to
read – as widely as possible – and start experimenting with mixing the colors
yourself.
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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.
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