Choosing a point of view 2.0
by philopoemen
When it comes to point-of-view, you have four options to choose from, each one with its own pluses and minuses. In a second, I'll demonstrate and discuss them all in turn. I'll also talk about the few times I've tried mixing different points-of-view within the same work.
Let me preface this by saying that, for me, writing is mainly about character -- or, to put it another way, exposing a reader to a character's unique voice as much as possible. This influences my own stylistic choices and preferences, which may or may not match your own or the needs of your story. So take my opinions with a grain of salt. The way I see it, in writing, there are no rules except the ones you choose to impose on yourself. (Aside from those of basic grammar, anyway. Remember, kids -- spell check is your friend!)
But enough chit-chat. Let's get to it.
First Person
When writing in the first person, you put the reader inside of your protagonist's head. Your narrator addresses themselves as I -- I did, I said, I looked. Personally, I associate this mode with hardboiled detective fiction. So let's go with a typical scene from that genre:
Someone knocked on my office door. I tensed up. "Yeah? Who is it?" I called out. My hand reached into my desk and grabbed my trusty revolver. I wasn't expecting any visitors. Hopefully, that meant they wouldn't be expecting me.
The big advantage of writing in the first person is that, in many ways, it's the most personal point-of-view one could choose. The reader gets direct access to the narrator's thoughts and feelings. As a writer, it lets you fall back on the question of what your character would be thinking or doing at any particular moment if you ever get stuck. It also replicates the feel of storytelling in its most basic form, where it's just one person telling another about something that happened to them. In this mode, you can easily imagine the narrator talking to the reader around a campfire, or -- in the case of our hardboiled detective here -- in a smoky bar somewhere over drinks.
However, I see two downsides to this choice. The first is that this style can make it weirdly difficult to reveal important details about your narrator in a way that feels natural. How many times in an average day do you pause to think about your own name, or what color your eyes are, or what your childhood was like? Putting aside therapy sessions and issues with contact lenses, my guess is that you don't, at least not on a routine basis. Those kind of details are such an obvious and unchanging part of our lives that they're almost not worth thinking about. Yet they're all things your reader is going to eventually want to know about your character.
I've sometimes seen writers working in the first person decide to just bite the bullet and try to force exposition, naturalness be damned. "I, Alice Jenkins, randomly decided to stop and study myself in the mirror..." I'd personally advise against this approach. Better to let the details creep into your narrator's thoughts bit by bit. Giving them an actual in-story reason to examine the details in question is generally best. As a reader, I'll even accept shoehorned-in stuff like "I pushed my strawberry-blonde hair out of my eyes," at least in moderation.
The second downside: without some kind of framing device or contrivance, switching between first-person narrators can be a real pain. Once you're inside your main character's head, you're kind of stuck there. If your plot could really use a switch to another person's perspective, or if you want to reveal information to the reader that your narrator's not privy to... well, good luck with that.
If you do choose to jump perspective in a first-person story, remember that you need to find a way to let your reader know whose head they're in at any given time. That's where you have to watch out for that first downside I mentioned -- it's hard enough to reveal information about one narrator in a natural way, let alone two or more.
There are ways to overcome these problems. If you set up some kind of pattern and stick to it -- say, switching between two narrators every other chapter -- or if your narrators all have strong, extremely distinct voices, you can generally trust the reader to figure things out themselves. Certain framing devices can also resolve the ambiguity. If you'd like to see me play around with yet another approach to a first person narrative, take a look at fate/first order derivative, where I experiment with what I've heard called quest-style writing and in general shred the fourth wall to hell and back. It's been a lot of fun so far.
Second Person
With a second person perspective, you basically shove the reader entirely into the story as a character themselves. Here, everything is about you -- you did, you said, you looked. (Or you do, you say, you look -- most times when you see this, the writer will use the present tense in order to put the reader into the moment as much as possible.) For instance:
You heard someone knock on your office door. You tensed up. "Yeah? Who is it?" you called out. Your hand reached into your desk and grabbed your trusty revolver. You weren't expecting any visitors. Hopefully, that meant they wouldn't be expecting you.
First, the advantage: if you want to plop the reader into your setting, it doesn't get any more direct than this. Call it the Minecraft approach to writing. Just toss 'em into a different world and let the poor sods fend for themselves.
In my mind, though, the second person point-of-view combines all the disadvantages of first person with one or two new ones of its own. On top of making it difficult to reveal details about the narrator and to switch perspectives to a different character, the second person simply feels bossy to me as a reader. No, I do not push my strawberry-blonde hair out of the way. It's not that color. No, I don't want to grab the revolver -- let's just jump out of the window and run.
Maybe these are just my personal expectations showing, but I think using the second person invites a desire for interactivity with the narrative in a way that's just not possible in traditional prose. Your reader may wind up resenting the character or the choices you've forced upon them. Kind of like how video game players can feel hemmed in by invisible walls or other barriers placed in their way by developers. These things are usually inevitable given the medium, but they're still frustrating.
For this reason, I haven't personally seen the second person used much outside of interactive fiction or choose-your-own-adventure books. Formats, in other words, that provide the reader with some level of choice over the direction of the narrative, in exchange for having some limitations or decisions forced upon them by the author(s). Otherwise, I am aware that xReader fics written in the second person are a current trend. I honestly haven't had the chance to read any of them myself, so I can't really comment on whether or not I think the style works.
Third Person Omniscient
When using this form of third person, you pull the perspective outside of your characters and into the wider world around them. Your narrator, such as they are, is some god-like entity, observing everything through an objective, all-knowing eye. Like this:
Alice heard someone knock on her office door. She tensed up. "Yeah? Who is it?" she called out. Her hand reached into her desk and grabbed her trusty revolver. I'm not expecting any visitors, she thought.Hopefully, that means they won't be expecting me.
On the other side of the door, Bob smiled to himself. Bet the broad won't be expecting this, he thought as he pulled back the bolt on his machine gun.
There's a number of advantages here. For the first time, we learn our protagonist's name, and even see what's waiting for her on the other side of the door. Since the narration is divorced from the character's perspective, it's easy to fit in details as you please. I could, for instance, throw in this exposition somewhere without breaking the flow:
At age forty-two, Alice had seen her fair share of scraps. Her strawberry-blonde hair might have been starting to gray, but her aim was as sharp as ever.
Jumping between perspectives also isn't an issue, what with the narrator invisibly floating somewhere in the aether.
The downside here, I'll admit, is a matter of personal taste more than anything: I find that the omniscient perspective distances the reader from the characters and what makes them distinct. You'll notice that there's little sense of Alice's voice in the example, at least compared to the first person example. It's restricted to her internal and external dialogue, bricked off from the reader by a litany of she saids and she thoughts. I'd argue this makes it a lot harder for the reader to emphasize with Alice or to get a sense of her character. In a way, they might know more about her from an omniscient narrator, but they're at a remove from the qualities that make her who she is.
So -- is there a way to split the difference here?
Third Person Subjective
Also known as third person limited or third person multiple. Here's the way I think of this style: rather than viewing your world as its all-knowing creator, you choose one character to act as your 'camera' in a given scene and let their voice and perspective influence the narration. Like this:
Someone knocked on the office door. Alice tensed up. "Yeah? Who is it?" she called out. Her hand reached into her desk and grabbed her trusty revolver. She wasn't expecting any visitors. Hopefully, that meant they wouldn't be expecting her.
***
On the other side of the door, Bob smiled to himself. Bet the broad won't be expecting this. His hand pulled back the bolt on his machine gun.
So here we get some of Alice's bravado and Bob's outdated slang into the narration while still giving them names. The phrasing of their thoughts might be a little awkward, but I'd argue it's made up for by making their voices feel more present to the reader.
The one downside to this approach: when you do switch perspectives -- or cut to a different 'camera' -- you generally have to find some way of letting the reader know that you're doing so. The typical way of doing this is via a chapter or a section break, sometimes indicated by an asterism (⁂) or a dinkus (those three side-by-side asterisks I used in the example) or some other symbol. Whatever you use, the point of the thing is the same: to communicate to the reader that we're either jumping to a different perspective or forward in time. I suppose this technically breaks the flow of the story, but it's so commonly used that I personally just skim right past it.
(Side note: there is another way of going about this that avoids chapter or section breaks, which I've heard called free indirect discourse. This approach tries to find a middle ground between third person omniscient and subjective, where the narrator is a kind of all-knowing ghost who slips in and out of people's heads as it pleases, taking on their voices and thoughts. The advantage is that you still get character voice while avoiding breaks. The downside is that you risk confusing the reader, who -- lacking some kind of signal to indicate a change in perspective -- has no way of telling what viewpoint is being followed or why the narrator is suddenly talking with a funny accent.
I haven't really played around much with this approach myself. You might be able to pull it off if your characters have really distinct voices, to the point that it's instantly obvious who's speaking whenever they open their mouths. Otherwise, unless your name is James Joyce, I can't see your average reader having much truck with it.)
Mixing Different Points-Of-View
I'm not talking about switching between narrators or 'cameras' here. I mean actually having different point-of-view styles within the same story -- having a section written in first or second person within an otherwise third-person-subjective narrative, for instance. I've played around with this some in certain places within The Evangelion Error, mostly with the in-story justification of the characters having dreams, psychic visions, or hunger-induced hallucinations. (That's one of the good parts about writing a fic partially based on a fairly trippy anime. People don't tend to ask too many questions.)
You'd have to judge for yourself whether or not it works, but I feel like these experiments were mostly a success. That said, absent the kind of narrative devices I used (which also includes stuff like fictional documents or letters written by the characters), I can't see it really being successful as a general tactic. Imagine a story that, say, switches back and forth between the second person and third person omniscient without warning or justification. While I will admit that, now that I've brought it up, I do feel kind of compelled to try writing something like that, just for the challenge of the thing... I can't help but suspect the result may not be to most folks' taste.
All the same, I wanted to point out that switching point-of-views within a story is a stylistic option and can be made to work. At the same time, let me offer the following words of warning: there might not be any rules in writing, but I tend to think there's a certain limit to how far you can push the conventions people are used to before you start losing your readers. Where exactly those boundaries are varies from audience to audience, and there's no telling what they are until you try. All the same, it's something to be mindful of as you try and find the style that works best for you.
In Conclusion
In case this wasn't obvious by now, my personal weapons-of-choice tend to be either first person or third person subjective, depending on the needs of the story. I've recently found that first person pairs well with the present tense. There's something exciting to me about a narrative that seems to be happening right now, as if it's being dictated through a live stream as the reader's eyes fly across the page.
But again -- that's me. I don't know your story. I don't know you. You might feel perfectly at home writing in the second person, or your story might really need an omniscient narrator for the climax to work. It all depends.
I'd encourage all of you to experiment the way I have. Try things out. See what works for you and -- above all else -- what seems the most natural. The nice thing about writing fan fiction is that you're allowed to make mistakes. It's kind of a playground in that respect. You could butcher your entire approach to a character, or completely screw up your story altogether. As long as you can spell and know how to use punctuation, you'll still be better than 90% of what's out there. Worst-case scenario, you just throw everything out and start from scratch. I've done that myself more times than I can count.
That's it. Have fun!
Have you ever changed your idea about a story POV while writing it?