P.O.V. Part II: the Why and the How

In part one of this P.O.V. thing, I talked about the various points of view as well as the modes of the third person. But here’s the question I’m asked most:

Why?

As in: Why, Matt? Why would I want to use anything but the (insert P.O.V. with which asker is most comfortable)??

Simple: Because your story will demand it of you. And while it’s important to always maintain the illusion that you are the boss of your writing, the truth is, the story is the boss.

I find that if I have a workshop of seven new writers, six of them will write in the first person. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a necessary acknowledgement that writing is, at its heart, a kind of acting. It’s exciting to pull on a new identity, a new brain, and I think for a lot of people it’s also what feels most natural. A lot of students tell me third-person is hard.

But while the first person feels easiest, I maintain that it’s actually one of the more complicated ways to tell a story. Think about it: Your main character is also your narrator. While everybody likes a twofer, now you can present only that information to which your main character is privy. There’s no stepping outside Joan and showing what’s going on around her, there’s no letting us know that Joan is in fact going down a dangerous path in her mission to find her dad’s missing body. (I’m freestyling here; go with it.) Or rather, there are ways of showing us these things, but wow do they ever get complicated with first-person P.O.V.

There are ways around, or through, this. Other characters show up, information in hand. Or you show enough of the scene/situation around your narrator that the reader hears the alarm bells before the narrator does. The most extreme form of this is with the Unreliable Narrator, where the speaker is either so deluded or so misleading that the gulf between what they say and what we perceive is so large as to become a kind of shadow character, a mute Nick Carraway to the narrator’s chatty Gatsby. (Chatty Gatsby, by the way, was the most popular little girls’ doll in 1925.)

Then there’s the question of tension and urgency. If your protagonist is telling me this long story filled with danger and mystery, don’t I already know they’ve walked away fine and dandy? Unless they’re telling it Sunset Boulevard style? But doesn’t this ease some of the uncertainty I might have if this had been a third-person narrative?

There’s also the most nagging question of first-person narrators, which is: Who the hell are they talking to? Do you acknowledge this with your reader (“You’ve probably heard about [thing XYZ]. It was a pretty big deal.”) or do you completely ignore the fact that “you” are talking to someone and not at all asking for their reactions or input? There’s no wrong answer to this, but it probably best explains why I’m almost never comfortable in the first person.

Third person is no cakewalk, either, my broheim. While you have more options for telling a story in third person — again, you can shift freely between those beautiful, beautiful modes — you have…more options. It becomes daunting, and nothing makes a writer freeze up faster than a platter of possible choices. (Several wise authors have pointed out that writer’s block isn’t an absence of ideas, it’s a surplus of them.)

With third person, there’s a constant evaluation going on (for me, at least) of How much of this should be in Joan’s head, vs. how much should I be pulling back and showing Joan and everyone else in the scene? My main tendency is to write in as close a voice as I can for the first draft. Then, in the rewrites, I’m more likely to pull back and play narrator here and there.

Note: I’ve probably recounted here before the story of the writers’ conference workshop where the famous author held up my awesome close-third-person story and said, “This is an example of close third person, which is what’s killing American fiction.” While I now agree that the story was shit, I think its narrative mode was actually among the lesser reasons. However, his real point (as this author’s stories traffic plenty in close third person) was that to use only the close third is to throw away your narrative authority. It removes context from the story, presenting only voice. I am on board with this, though I’m still 100% killed by this George Saunders story, which is done entirely in close third, via two characters. (Maybe this is what makes that story work: Because we’re not strictly in one person’s head, because we see things from both Marie and Callie’s P.O.V., we do have that context.)

That idea of Voice, by the way, covered elsewhere on this blog, should be a huge consideration when you’re looking at which P.O.V. to use. First-person absolutely demands a great voice. After all, if you’re asking me to spend 300, 400 pages in the head of one character, that had better be a damned interesting character. They’d better have a way of telling that story so that it feels like no one else possibly could. Look at Lolita, an incredibly dense novel told by a pedophile who is unreliable enough and pathetic enough and charming enough that we can’t imagine anyone else telling his story. And remember how I mentioned that first-person reminds us that the character almost certainly comes out okay in the end? The best first-person narrators make us forget that. David Copperfield regularly makes fools of all who read it.

What about the “crazy” P.O.V.s, the ones your writing instructors always tell you not to do? I’m speaking, of course, about second person (“you”) and first-person plural (“we”). It seems crazy to write a book in a “you” or collective “we” voice. Yet, three of the biggest debuts in the last 30 years have done just that: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (second person) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Joshua Ferris’ And Then We Came to the End (both first-person plural). They get a lot of attention, these books, because they’re such novelties. But it’s a mistake to believe that’s all they are.

Second-person P.O.V. has a curiously intimate effect. You, the reader, become “you,” the main character. And while it occasionally has the feel of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book (“You walk down the hall. There’s a door. Do you open it?”), what should be a gimmick and therefore distancing can feel more like acting in the first-person than first-person narrative itself.

First plural does something different, though it also plays with identification between the reader and narrator(s). In a traditional first-person narrative, we’re asked, immediately, to identify with the narrator and also decide: Are they to be trusted, or are they deluded/full of shit? With the “we” voice, there’s still that, but it’s now a collective. Meaning, it’s a little easier to digest great or terrible choices when they’re made by a group than it is by one person with whom we’re forced to spend all our time. Humans, see, are a judge-y lot. If one guy kicks over a snowman, we think: What a horrible prick. We have now lost empathy for this person. If a group of people kick over a snowman, we think: Huh. Why would they do that? And deeper down, part of us thinks: They must have their reasons. Which is crazy, but that’s the dumb, dark, pack-minded of human nature. (See also: “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; the Third Reich.)

The first plural is especially great for presenting a passive narrator. Think of the narrative groups of And Then We Came to the End (do-nothings in a dying corporate office) and The Virgin Suicides (boys in a town, onlookers, while five sisters all commit suicide). Passive characters are generally a problem in fiction. We (the reader) become annoyed very quickly with a character who doesn’t want anything, or who never does anything to get what she wants. With a group, again, we’re more forgiving. In fact, we (the reader) eventually become part of the “we” (the group). By identifying with the pack, we become more complicit in the story, whereas with a single passive narrator we might’ve become disenchanted or irritated.

There are a lot of options with Point of View. Some key questions to ask are:

• How interesting is my narrator?
• How fun is it to hear That Voice for fifteen pages? Five hundred?
• Do I want to present other characters’ P.O.V.s? You can shift in all modes, by the way*. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is multiple first-person voices (vs. first plural); Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is multiple first- and third-person voices, depending on which chapter you’re in.
• How much do I need my reader to identify with the main character?
• How much mystery do I want to maintain?
• Do I need my reader to be aware that they know more than my character does?
• How do I plan to reveal information to my reader as the story progresses?
• If third-person, do I want to be in the main character’s head? How much? How often?
• Is there a chance my third-grade teacher was being sarcastic or ironic when she said I should become a writer?

* The negative workshop term for changing third-person P.O.V.s is “head-hopping.” My personal rule of thumb is that I change scene in order to switch to a new P.O.V. However, in a lot of older fiction, and in a lot of current genre fiction, switching P.O.V.s in a single scene is done with regularity.

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