Novel Writer's Toolkit: Revised Edition

Tool 4: Point of View and Voice

After many years of writing and teaching novel writing, I firmly believe that perspective or point of view is the number one style problem for most writers.  It is also one of the easiest problems to correct with awareness of both the problem and possible solutions.  For the sake of simplicity, in this chapter I will stick with the term point of view, although it is interchangeable with perspective.

Here’s a question:  What is reality?  Ultimately it’s what someone perceives it to be.  Thus there is no one, singular reality among people.  Thus your choice of the point with which to tell your story taints the story for the reader.  The same story told from two different points of view is a very different story.

In real life if three people see an event, you have three different points of view.  When writing your novel, the point of view the author chooses to channel the scene through is the point of view the reader gets.

So who is telling the story?  You are.  But whose voice does the reader ‘hear’ when they read?  The point of view through which you relate the story.  It could be yours in omniscient voice, or channeled through various characters in third limited, or simply be a narrator telling a story in first person.

When considering how to tell your story, the first thing you have to do is select a point of view.  This may be the most critical decision you have to make.  Often the type of story you are writing will clearly dictate the point of view, but a good understanding of the various modes of presentation is essential because this is one area where beginning novelists often have problems.  They may select the right point of view, but it is often used poorly because of a lack of understanding of the tool itself.

Regardless of which point of view (or points of view) you choose to use, there is one thing you must have: you as the author must have a good feeling about the point of view with which you are telling the story.  If you don't have a warm and fuzzy about that, this confusion will most definitely be translated to the reader.  Remember, ultimately, point of view is your voice as a writer.

Some people write like a music video:  point of view flying all over the place, giving glimpses into each character but never really keeping the reader oriented.  I say this because the best analogy I can give for point of view is to look at it as your camera.  You as author are the director:  you see and know everything in your story.  But the reader only sees and knows what the camera records:  the point of view you choose.  You must always keep that in mind.  You see the entire scene, but your lens only records the words you put on the page and you have to keep your lens tightly focused and firmly in hand.

The key term to know, like a director, is the word ‘cut’.  A cut in film terminology is when the camera is either a) stopped, then restarted later, or b) stopped and another camera is then used.  To a writer, a cut is a change in point of view.  In a music video, they go about three seconds before having to ‘cut’.  Robert Altman, in the beginning of The Player, uses an extremely long single camera sequence before the first cut—another reason to watch the film.

The most critical thing to remember about point of view is that you have to keep the reader oriented.  The reader has got to know from what point of view they are viewing the scene.  Lose that and you lose the reader.  Thus, as with everything else, there is no wrong point of view to write in, or even mixture of point of views to write in, but it is wrong to confuse the reader as to the point of view through which they are ‘seeing’ the story.

Take the camera point of view a bit further.  When directors do a scene, they immediately look into a viewfinder and watch the recording of the take.  They do this because, although they saw what happened, they have to know what the camera recorded.  As an author, you have to get out of your own point of view as the writer and be able to see what you write as the reader sees it.