What Point of View?

Let’s imagine for a moment that you have written a little bit of something. It may be a paragraph or two, or a page or two, or maybe even a complete short story. If you haven’t, then write something now. Something short will do.

Now that you have a passage written, take a look at it. What point of view have you chosen to use?

If you have written a lot of ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that’, then you have used the First Person point of view (POV). If, however, your sentences look more like: ‘He did this’ or ‘She did that’, then you have used Third Person POV. You may even have been adventurous and used ‘You did this’, which is the Second Person. If you have a mixture, then you may want to begin by rewriting your passage using only one of these points of view.

Most of us feel more comfortable with either the First or the Third POV and will often find that we tend to begin writing in whichever one feels most familiar to us, perhaps modelled on our reading. But, take a moment before you go on, to think about whether you actually have the best point of view for the piece.

It can sometimes be useful to rewrite a new piece using an alternative point of view, and maybe even again in a third. Sometimes you will find that a different point of view has a different feel to it, and it may be that you feel more comfortable or inspired by using an alternative.

Of course, each point of view has its advantages and disadvantages. A first person point of view can only be told from the perspective of the character who narrates the story. Otherwise, the piece may feel awkward and confusing to the reader. However, it can feel more personal than the third person can, particularly if you are writing something that involves a lot of inner dialogue or the thoughts of one character.

Third person can allow a little more distance between the narrator and the reader: to experience the story from a little bit further (or a lot further) away, to observe it from the outside, so to speak. It also makes it a little easier to handle multiple character perspectives.

Second person is something a little rarer. It can be used in an attempt to make the reader feel completely absorbed and complicit, as if the events in the story are happening to them. However, it can be quite a difficult point of view to handle well and may be better attempted once you have some experience under your belt. But feel free to experiment with it. It can produce surprisingly interesting results.

Here is an example of a short passage in two different perspectives. Examine them and see if you can detect any differences in the way you respond to each of the points of view.

First, let’s start with one of the most common - the third person perspective:

Data was an android with human features but pale skin. His dearest wish was to be more like his human friends and he worked hard at replicating their emotions and humour.

Now, let’s try this with the first person. Note, one can’t really describe oneself without resorting to cliché, so a complete rewrite will be required:

Being an android, I have no real feelings, but I would dearly love to be more like my human friends. Every day, I stand in front of my mirror in an effort to replicate their emotions. My attempts at humour, however, appear to need much work.

As you can see, first person has limitations but it can be quite an intimate and revealing perspective, and it may even make it easier to express the character’s voice for some writers.

Third person can allow more freedom, and it can be written in a way that is very close to the first person, a style that remains with the experiences of the one narrator. But it can also be used for a more omniscient (all-knowing, God-like) perspective where you can move around, at will, from the head of one character to another (often called head-hopping). However, take care when using the latter, as it can be difficult to keep the writing coherent and often takes a skilled hand to pull off.

As for second person, well, this article is written from that perspective. But, maybe you can try rewriting my invented sentence above, or one of your own, to experience the effect for yourself.

This is only a very brief introduction into the subject of Point of View, and I will write more on the subject in later articles. But, for the time being, I am going to treat my audience like my blog – beginning and new to all this.