Power of POV

Using Point of View to Invite or Alienate Your Reader

First, a quick update to June’s Let’s Tok About It, in which we discussed the TikTok viral “hack” of purchasing a Kindle book, reading it within the seven-day return period, then returning for a full refund to read books “for free.” In response to the uproar, and following pressure from the Authors Guild, Amazon has changed their e-book return policy such that automatic returns are available only if a book is 90 percent or more unread; if a user has read more than 10 percent of a book, then they must go through a customer service rep and provide a reason for the return. Hopefully this squashes the problem. See the Authors Guild’s update on the subject.

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If you did not read today’s title in Huey Lewis’s singing voice, what are you even doing with your life? Stop what you’re doing and rethink everything. Just kidding, don’t stop reading Shelf Life. But seriously, reevaluate everything else. Stop, drop, and (rock and) roll.

Today’s Shelf Life is about using point of view intentionally to affect your reader; it also includes tips on using point of view to unstick yourself when you’re stuck in the middle of some writing venture or another. Two more things about today’s article. First, it builds on some things we discussed in last winter’s Know Your Narrators, so consider reviewing that one if you could use a refresher. Second, it goes hand in hand—kind of—with Thursday’s article in which (as of right now) I’m planning to cover narrative tense.

How do point of view and narrative tense go together? Well, lots of ways to be honest. But in this case the thread that connects these two articles is the concept of defamiliarization, a literary (and artistic) technique in which the writer (or artist) shows the audience something normal but in an unusual way, making the common and ordinary feel uncommon and strange. 

I’m also going to talk about other reasons why you might choose a specific narrative tense or point of view for a specific work that don’t have to do with defamiliarization. But defamiliarization will feature in both. Not really a two-part Shelf Life, but perhaps a one-two punch.

Point of view (POV), as you already know, refers to a story’s narrator or narrative voice and the perspective from which they tell the story. You may have a first-person narrator:

I went to the store.

A second-person narrator:

You went to the store.

Or a third-person narrator:

Catherine went to the store.

Your third-person narrator, further, maybe be limited or they may be omniscient, terms that describe the scope of access the third-person narrator has to the characters: A limited third-person narrator does not know everything, while an omniscient third-person narrator knows everything that’s going on. Further, a third-person narrator may be close (also called intimate) or they may be more distant.

Personally, I think a third-person narrator can be omniscient and intimate; or limited and intimate; or omniscient and distant; or limited and distant. I know some authorities might disagree on this and consider limited and intimate/close to be the same thing. When I use these terms, here’s how I define them, so I can make sure we’re all working with the same understanding for the purpose of this essay.

Omniscient and limited refer to scope of awareness, while close and distant refer to whether the narrator is inside or outside a character’s (or characters’) skull(s).

So an omniscient narrator is aware of things that are happening “offscreen,” away from the characters’ immediate area of perception; while a limited narrator sticks with a character (or multiple characters), seeing only what they see and knowing only what they know. An omniscient narrator may (intimate) or may not (distant) know what is going on inside characters’ heads, their thoughts and feelings. Likewise, a limited narrator may (intimate) or may not (distant) know what the POV character is thinking or feeling.

Remember, there’s a difference between making an observation about a character’s feelings based on what they do or say (“Eileen blushed furiously, clearly embarrassed”) and being inside a character’s head (“Eileen felt her cheeks flush and wished she was anywhere but there”).

Omniscient and limited are an either/or proposition: The narrator either knows everything or they don’t. Narrative distance, on the other hand, is on a spectrum from closest or most intimate to furthest away or most distant.

All of that was just the setup to lead us into why we might choose one narrator over another. I’m going to start with the defamiliarization aspect and then move on to some other factors.

The defamiliarization technique is used in writing, and in fiction particularly, to cause the reader to step back and look at something common in an uncommon way; to take something familiar and make it less so. The example my favorite professor gave in college was something along these lines:

She took a small box from her pocket and withdrew a white-and-orange tube stuffed with crumbly brown bits, which she then dangled from her mouth and set on fire.

This takes the act of removing a cigarette from the pack and lighting it and describes it in a way to make it feel unfamiliar. This is how you might describe that act if you had never seen it before and you weren’t sure what was happening. No linguistic shorthand is used here at all: “She took out a cigarette” presumes the reader knows what a cigarette is, but the defamiliarized version does not, and instead breaks the idea down into simpler and more descriptive language. We could take it further and assume the reader might not know what a pocket is:

She took a small box from a little pouch sewn into the lining of her clothes and—

So you get the point. When you defamiliarize something, you make it alien to the reader. You make it strange. Something they ordinarily would not have to think much about (“she took a cigarette out of her pocket”) is made into something the reader has to think more about to piece together. 

This is true not just with reading but with all kinds of things: When something is unfamiliar, we notice it more acutely. The things we see often, all the time, sometimes blend into the background, fail to stand out in our mind, because we don’t notice them as acutely. This is why when you drive to the same place all the time you sometimes find your thoughts wandering and then boom! You’re suddenly there and you don’t remember the drive. Familiar things can be done without thinking much about them.

This comes from the same place in the brain as our basic survival instincts. We notice what stands out against a pattern. The predator in the tall grass. The smell of smoke where there shouldn’t be any. And so on.

When we read, we are less likely to notice the narrative voice if it is very familiar and more likely to notice the narrative voice if it is unfamiliar to us. 

The third-person POV is the most common one in fiction, and therefore the most comfortable for most people to read (even though it may not be their favorite). This is also the voice most of us use to relate a story to another person when the story is not about us specifically (“Listen to what Diane did at work today. She was walking to her cube when—”). Close behind third-person is the first-person POV. This is slightly less common but still very familiar to most of us, and another voice in which we tell stories to one another in conversation all the time (“Oh my god I was driving to the library today and—”).

Second-person POV, on the other hand, is fairly rare in fiction and, as a result, most people will notice right away when they’re reading something in the second person—because it’s unfamiliar and (perhaps because of its unfamiliarity or perhaps because of the sheer audacity of second person) it’s also uncomfortable.

Here’s an excerpt from Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins, which is written in second person:

You kick off your shoes and flop onto the bed—landing, of course, among millions of mites. Had you any inkling that your bedding was alive with arthropodic crablets, chomping away on flakes of your dead skin, you would be so disgusted you would probably choose to lie on the floor. 

It’s uncomfortable to read because it’s an unfamiliar point of view but also because second person necessarily feels like it’s telling you what to do and what to think, which can cause you to raise your defenses against being bossed around (and also the mites are gross).

In light of all of the above, then, the question to ask yourself when choosing your narrator and POV is this: Do you intend for the narrative voice to be invisible or near-invisible to the reader, letting your characters and their actions, words, and thoughts take it away? Or do you want the narrative voice to be a part of the story—and if so, to what extent, and to what end?

Choosing the first-, second-, or third-person POV and the narrative distance and omniscience is half the battle. The other half—at least, if you have chosen first-person or third-person-limited, is choosing from which character’s (or characters’) perspective you will tell the story. If you’re writing in first-person POV, you will have to select the character who is narrating the story, who is speaking to the reader.

For instance, in The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is the book’s first-person narrator. She’s also the protagonist of the book and the series. Think about how The Hunger Games might be different were it told in alternating first-person points of view, for instance, one chapter told from Katniss’s point of view and the next from Peeta’s and the next from Katniss’s, and so on. 

The first-person POV in The Hunger Games is critical to the way the story is told because Katniss is working with limited information. Peeta, Haymitch, and Gail (among others) often have information that would be useful for Katniss to know, but she doesn’t—and neither does the reader, because we’re only privy to what Katniss knows. In fact, the people around Katniss routinely withhold information from her because they believe they are helping or protecting her; and her lack of insight causes her to take actions that are perhaps not ideal in the circumstances, and thus drive the plot forward.

Likewise, with third-person-limited POV, you limit the information the character has access to and you can create dramatic tension by playing with the information the reader has access to. When you have multiple third-person POVs in one story, you can ratchet things up by withholding information from one character that other characters and the reader have access to. This is Leigh Bardugo’s go-to strategy in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, in which a crew of six individuals split up to pull off a complicated heist.

I promised to give you a pro-tip for how to shake loose a stuck story using point of view, and here’s that pro-tip. You don’t need to open a new file or grab a fresh piece of paper for this—though you can! You can do this just as a thought exercise if you prefer.

Pick a handful of points of view to tell your story from other than the one you’re using. So if you’re writing in close third-person limited, try thinking it through in first-person. If the story is being told from the perspective of the protagonist, switch it up and think through it from the point of view of someone else in the story, like an important supporting character or the antagonist. Or perhaps someone not in the story—a historian looking back on these events 100 years later. The characters’ pet goldfish who watched the events unfold but did not take part. The protagonist’s little brother, who wasn’t there, but heard the whole story from his big sister and is now retelling it in his own voice.

Sometimes this can help you suss out why your story is stalled. Maybe there’s a piece of information you’re having trouble conveying to the audience because the perspective you’re telling the story from can’t impart that information. Sometimes thinking it through from another character’s POV illuminates something for you (the author) that you didn’t realize before, some key motivation or tidbit of information that unravels the knot. 

One last word on point of view for today: If you have not read Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (sequel to Gideon the Ninth), I can’t recommend it enough as an example of using point of view in a creative and unexpected way.

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