Ten Shun!
On 24 August I posted some exercises about Point of View, an issue that seems to vex developing writers to a significant degree.
As I said in the August post, I don’t think you can determine what the right POV is for your narrative except by trial and error - in other words , what ‘feels’ right. Like most writers, I struggle with POV when I start to write - at least, when I think about it too much.
Below are the fundamental possibilities for POV ( although experimentally inclined writers often come up with quirky ones - my book ‘The Seymour Tapes’ is partially narrated by a CCTV camera, for instance, and also partially narrated in the first person by a fictional writer called ‘Tim Lott’.)
1. First person.
A single first person narrator is probably the simplest and most common of literary approaches, often favoured by those writing a form of autofiction in which the main character is mainly based on themselves. Think ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’, the central character of whom quite closely resembles the persona of the author as she was writing the book, Helen Fielding.
This approach has the benefit of immediacy and intimacy. It’s very personal, and can nicely incorporate argot, or idiosyncratic or regional speech. It’s simple but restrictive because limits you to a very particular set of impressions. Only what the narrator has seen, could see, can know or think is able to be reported.
There are subsets of this form. These include
Multiple first person narratives ( ‘Trainspotting’) (‘The Collector’) Then there is First Person as disinterested observer rather than protagonist – Nick Carraway in ‘Gatsby’ or Charles Ryder in ]Brideshead Revisited’, a kind of ‘sleeping partner’ who is not really central the plot. Or there is First Person as ‘unreliable narrator’ for instance Blake Morrison’s ‘The Last Weekend’ where you gradually realise that the first person protagonist is lying to you, the reader.
Second Person – ‘you stand there. You watch him come. He walks towards you. You feel anxious’ - is too rare to spend too much time to thinking about , but feel free to give it a try if you think it works for your story.
A Third Person narrator can be neutral observer - the author as a camera, so to speak - or full of personality and observations, like Martin Amis of Philip Roth. John Updike, gives his protagonist Harry Angstrom many thoughts in his Rabbit Trilogy that he would be barely capable of having in reality as a not particularly bright mid western car salesman. In this Updikean style, there can be two third person narrators, so to speak - one the main character, and one the author who has a ‘voice’ that narrates as well, and these can elide and overlap with one another. This is known as ‘free indirect style’ or ‘close third person’.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.