I’ve had a couple of recent queries about first person v. third person. Maybe I’ll tackle them in my blog. I’d bloody well do something in my blog if I’m to hold up my head as a content creator. And what, after all, was a writer if not the ur-content creator?

She’d had a couple of recent queries about first person v. third person. Maybe she would tackle them in her blog. She’d bloody well do something in her blog if she was to hold up her head as a content creator. And what, after all, was a writer if not the ur-content creator?

I am not too impressed with the finer points of first v. third person in terms of voice, interiority, exteriority, character development, the necessity of plot . . . Third person limited and first person are much the same creature. Sure, you can attribute language idiosyncrasies to your character in first person, but the truth is, you can do it in close third as well. See the second example above: the voice, the language, the thoughts are all, without attribution, clearly those of the third person character, yes?

In first person, you still cannot tell everything rather than showing it. There is little to trust about a first person confession: even with our best friends, we want the juicy details, the scene and interactions, not just the ideas and conclusions.

The key differences come about when you consider the powers of an omniscient third. Now you have the possibility of a storyteller and the option to dip into the thoughts and experiences of many characters.

Of course, you can alternate between two (or more) first person perspectives, but after a while, it can start to sound like a support group or literary experiment. Still, the bottom line rule for writing is, always and ever: whatever works.

Questions to ask yourself: Does this story belong to one main person? Is there someone whose perspective is engaging enough (sometimes because of its limits, as with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), to carry the whole? Do I want access to many points of view, to scenes outside of what my potential narrator has witnessed?

Then again, Madame Bovary was actually written in first person, the narrator a classmate’s of M. Bovary, and yet he has access to the intimacies of Madame’s boudoir. So I refer you, once again, to the bottom line for writing (above).

Finally, do not get hung up on the mechanics. You pick your strictures and your structures and they are the net that Frost insisted on for poets playing tennis: they make the game worthwhile. (Frost said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net.) You use what your choices have to offer, stick to the promises you set up in establishing those rules for your book, and then tell story, Baby!

Spoiler altert: I discuss the full plot of the book and film Rebecca in this blog, as well as the ending of Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”

I first saw Daphne Du Marier’s  Rebecca as a film–Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing movie with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. I was just a kid; my babysitter, who was a writer, took me to a little theater that used to live by LaVal’s pizza in Berkeley. As the credits ran, I searched for the name of the actress who’d played the most captivating character of them all, the title role of Rebecca. But of course, she never shows up in the film. In the book, too, she is entirely a creation of the narrator and the people around her.

The narrator is the mousy and very young second wife of the drowned Rebecca’s husband Maxim de Winter. Everything we learn about Rebecca is filtered through her lens, and although we cringe at her meekness and long for her to stand up for herself and realize her own worth, we are as convinced as she is that Maxim is in love with Rebecca and probably always will be. His moodiness is easy to understand as an inability to adjust to this simple, plain wife after having been married to the charismatic and gorgeous Rebecca who stirred so many people’s passions.

The great turning point near the end of the book comes when our nameless narrator learns that Max did not love Rebecca. “I hated her,” he declares. In fact, he killed her, struck her because she was carrying another man’s baby and knew that he would be too ashamed to divorce her and call her bluff. Or so he believes. In the movie, the young protagonist can barely hear Maxim’s confession about hitting Rebecca, watching her fall, realizing she was dead and shunting her off in her sailboat. She just keeps repeating, “You didn’t love her.”

Here is where I am making my grand play for the POV is plot argument: The plot of Rebecca is dependent first on the narrator’s perspective. If we knew all along that Max hated Rebecca, we’d have a completely different story–almost no story at all. Once that tidbit is revealed, we are given a new set of facts that are taken as concrete–Max killed the pregnant Rebecca.

At Rebecca’s cousin-cum-lover’s insistence, the characters begin to follow clues left behind by Rebecca about her last days. It turns out that she’d gone to a doctor far away, up near London. The cousin, the crazy housekeeper who was Rebecca’s nursemaid, the inspector and Maxim’s loyal estate lawyer, Frank, all go, along with Max and his young wife, to find out why Rebecca went to the doctor. The narrator and Max know why, of course: she was pregnant. The suspense at this time, then, is how will these facts come out and how will this cast further suspicion on Max. They are really just stretching out the time before the inevitable discovery of Maxim’s crime–and they want, now, to spend that time together.

But at the doctor’s we learn that Rebecca was not pregnant, as she’d told Max. She had cancer and was dying.  Point of view, again, sets us up and turns the story.

Plot is about what is revealed and what is hidden. What somebody knows that somebody else does not know. Therefore, in those moments when you wish you could follow some other characters to some other place and leave your chosen narrator behind, consider instead your plot options–what your narrator doesn’t know can hurt him, but that can’t hurt the plot!

Plot, in turn, will test your characters, which will reveal them the more fully, which will have an impact on their point of view.

A few more brief notes on some of the other ways point of view is interwoven into every aspect of the book: What your narrator sees and misses in a room or landscape will define your setting. The character’s mood will define, too, what s/he sees and how it looks. The voice, the language choices, that shape your narrative will come from the narrator, whether an embodied character or an omniscient point of view or one that moves among characters. The language will shape the page, the rhythms and feeling of the story.

What your narrator hears will influence dialog. Think of Denis Johnson’s wonderful use of dialog to end “Emergency.” (I am discussing this from memory, so forgive any slight errors.) He sets us up for the line a couple of pages ahead, telling us that it was saying this thing that showed the narrator what set his friend apart from him. Then we get the whole scene about picking up the guy who’s gone AWOL, and at the very end, the AWOL guy asks the friend, who is a drug-addled orderly, What do you do for a living? And the orderly answers, “I save lives.”

What is remarkable about the line is what it means to the narrator and how it is set up, rather than the sentiment itself. This whole story is about point of view, as when the narrator sees giant angel faces full of pity and it turns out to be the drive-in movie theater in the snow. Oh, he says, I thought it was something else. The splendor of that scene, and of the entire story, is wholly dependent on the misunderstandings fostered by the point of view.

Does this mean you should stress out more about your point of view choices? I don’t think so. I think it means that you should lean into the limits of the point of view. Use them for plot turns and thematic revelations, and as guides to language, setting and dialog. Trust the work that point of view does in your story and see where it can lead you.

[I am offering an online course in revision beginning January 15 for anyone with some rough manuscript, fiction or narrative non-fiction--including memoir. Send me an email to receive my once-a-month writing tip newsletter for sales and special offers. See you on the screen!]

Point of view is plot. E. M. Forster says, in his wonderful lecture series/ book Aspects of the Novel, that in a novel with a story, the reader asks, “And then what?” while in a novel with a plot, the readers asks, “Why?” But the trick to creating those questions in your reader has much to do with point of view. The narrator’s perspective or cunning reveals enough to engage while withholding enough to entice. The narrator, that is, through design (storytelling capacity) or circumstance (the limits of his or her own knowledge force limits on the reader’s knowledge), baits the reader. Who that narrator is and when he or she is telling the story will shape the boundaries of the book and thus its plot.

While the characters in a narrative are dealing with ascending levels of problems, attempting solutions that land them back at a bigger problem, the writer of a narrative must grapple similarly, but more successfully, with her own problems. Point of view offers much material for this pursuit.

Think of the story about the blind men and the elephant: one says the elephant is a wall, another a rope, another paper, another a snake, another the trunk of a tree. Each fingers some piece of the beast–side, tail, ear, trunk, and leg, respectively–and each pronounces on the whole.

Your omniscient narrator can show us the entire elephant or dip down into the experience of the man at the ear and then, in the next chapter or a later section, reveal the perspective of the man at the leg.

Your close third sticks to the tail or may pull back to the whole creature, but won’t get over to the trunk.

Your first person narrator delivers you the side, say, and in this way, it might be said that all first person narrators are unreliable, but these days most of our questions are about ourselves anyway, alas, and we appreciate the intimate exercise of believing in our narrator’s version of the world.

Your second person narrator is messing around, tying you up with elephant parts.

Point of view makes demands upon the voice of your work, too.

The first person narrator requires a language of his own. How does he speak? What words does he choose? What tone? What does he notice? (This moves us from language on through to setting.)

The third person narrator may or may not adopt the voice or vocabulary of a character into whose head it goes. It otherwise will have its own voice and vocabulary. Somehow, the more disembodied voices we experience in this age of cell phones and podcasts and voice guidance machinery, the less comfortable we are with the disembodied voice of a narrator, bringing us through a story. Who is this person or creature? Yet the narrator can become transparent; the story is being told but no one is telling it. And even this transparent narrator has a voice. When we talk about like a book or finding it easy or hard to read, we are very often talking about voice.

In Part 3, I will wrap up my discussion of what no one ever tells you about point of view. I welcome any questions people have about craft or things related to writing, and will attempt to address them in future blogs.

A student writes:

I would like you to talk about point of view – even something as simple as an enumeration of the possibilities. I told my story from the point of view of an omniscient third person who knew the thoughts of the main character but of no one else. This was inconvenient at one point because I envisioned a chapter where [his] love interest goes off with [his] mother [for a scene]. I couldn’t do that directly because the storyteller only knew what was going on through the main character’s eyes. Did I make a mistake? Can an omniscient storyteller know everything? That was about the only place I needed that extra knowledge for the storyteller.

Part One of my three-part reply:

Usually, when people talk about point of view, they concentrate on the technicalities. Let’s get the technicalities out of the way.

Generally, the point of view can either be

* first person (“I walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed me five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) First person can be singular, as shown in example, or collective, as when a town or a family or some other group entity narrates, using “we.” This tends toward a more omniscient role, as the storytellers are often part of the setting more than they are the main character. First person singular need not be a main character, either. Madame Bovary is written in first person from the point of view of a classmate of M. Bovary who shows up briefly in one early pronoun and not much more if at all . . .

* second person (“You walk down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owes you five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) Note verb tense change. Second person is a bit of a stylistic tic and tends to come in present tense, perhaps to give the impression of hypnotising the reader.

* third person (“She walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed her five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”)

Third person can be “close” or “omniscient”:

* A close third operates from inside the head of one character, or follows that one character and dips in and out of his or her head. It is similar to first person, except for the pronoun choices.

* An omniscient third is the God point-of-view. Your narrator can see all; however, this does not mean that your narrator tells all. An omniscient narrator hopping from head to head can be as dizzying and unappealing as a 1970s hippie doing the same from bed to bed. Omniscience is about control, about that bird’s eye perspective that can zoom in, sometimes here, sometimes there, but thoughtfully, craftfully. No zipping, no hopping.

The other technical point of view issue to keep in mind is distance in time between the moment of narration and the moment of the events of the story.

This is an issue in non-fiction, as well, especially in memoir. The writer is obviously going to write in first person–or perhaps I should say, likely going to unless serious experimentation is taking place, whether legitimate–The Autobiography of Miss Alice B. Toklas–or illegitimate–A Million Little Pieces. However, a narrator looking back across a span of fifty years has a different first person point-of-view than one writing as if just upon the heels of the events. Either narrator will zoom in on the events to give the reader a sense of immediacy–we don’t want every moment moderated by that fifty-year perspective–but the first narrator can draw back and reflect, while the second keeps us close to the bone of the story.

Naturally, in any point of view, the distance in time will impact the perspective such that one could argue that the narrator is a different person at one age than at another.

That’s about what you will get in a standard creative writing course. Maybe less.

But I am going to tell you what no one tells you about point of view.

Point of view is story. It is plot, voice and therefore language, character, dialog, setting, the whole caboodle. It could be said that all of these elements of narrative are doors into the same large, labyrinthine room, but that does not mean that the interconnections are not fruitfully searched.

These elements will be explored in parts 2 & 3 of this post.