Perspective is Everything: Point of View

I learned about point of view (POV) from my editor, and it was the single most important learning experience I’ve had as a writer. He provided feedback on POV control in a developmental overview memo. Below is an excerpt from that memo. I think there are important lessons in it for all indie authors. There are also references to a few books on editing. I’ve redacted some words so as not to give anything away about Lucid. For more detail on my editing journey, including my work with my editor, check out my post Editing Never Ends: Confessions of an Obsessed First-Time Author. Good luck. Work hard. Keep dreaming.

Developmental overview memo excerpt:

Here’s how author and editor Sol Stein defines POV in On Writing: “The term point of view . . . means a character whose eyes are observing what happens, the perspective from which a scene or story is written.” Stein says “eyes,” but he really means all the senses—sight, sound, touch, etc. He’s also talking about thought and assumption—internal monologue and so on. I like to phrase it this way: As a reader, whom are we walking alongside in a scene, chapter, or entire book? Who’s pointing out that mountain ridge or noticing that facial expression? Whose thoughts are we intimately and immediately privy to?

Readers usually notice a lack of restraint or discipline with POV—that is, they notice arbitrary deviations from it. Sometimes they notice it consciously. Sometimes it’s just a feeling that sours them for reasons they can’t quite define. Stein writes: “It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.” I’m not sure it’s quite that dire, but he’s onto something for sure.

So how does one begin to better control POV, to be more disciplined with it? It starts by just having a keener awareness of what it is and what deviations from it look like. Take chapters 6 through 17, for instance. You’ve controlled most of the POV here very well within Will’s perspective. I felt as if I were traveling and suffering through this new experience with him and as if he were sharing his thoughts with me along the way. But then look, for example, at this, on p. 113:

Thom hadn’t expected this and was not a hunter himself, but he offered to go with Will. He was relieved when Will said that he wanted nothing to do with killing animals.

We’re suddenly viewing the world from the point of view of Thom—a character so minor he’s almost forgettable. Or note how on p. 236—in a chapter where I already felt a bit tossed between Will’s and [character B’s] POV—the reader is abruptly witness to a Gray Man’s internal monologue, for about the only time in the entire book. Here’s another example from p. 185. Watch how the reader is jostled between Will’s and [character B’s] POV.

Will had successfully suppressed those words since hearing them days earlier. Now images of [redacted] flashed in his mind. He shook his head violently and forced them back under. [Character B] watched Will struggle. Great Nurin, he senses it already. 

When point of view is switched without restraint like this, it’s known as head-hopping. And the more headhopping there is, the more jarred a reader gets and the more she begins to ask herself, Who’s steering this ship? “When you jump from head to head,” author and editor Renni Browne writes in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, “you’re trying to achieve narrative intimacy with all your characters at once, and readers will almost always find that more confusing than engaging.” 

Omniscience Point-of-view control is about more than head-hopping, however, which is only one part of omniscience, or the ability for the writer to get into any character’s head at any time and at any place, with abandon. Omniscience also includes the voice of the author himself or a narrator, someone who isn’t actually a character at all but rather someone invisible, removed. Notice how almost all of chapter 18, for example— when it’s not being told via Mila, another minor character given such a prominent place on the POV stage—is told via some distant POV who knows a ton of (questionably relevant) backstory about Igum Wylon. And note how in the following examples the prose feels aloof, sometimes even didactic. The reader wonders, Who is “speaking,” exactly?

·         p. 31: “The eastern sky was a deep and dark royal blue, the blue that is the day’s final gift.”

·         p. 48: “They played a few games of pool, shared some laughs, and all was as it should be.”

·         p. 60: “But suppression implies at least two levels of consciousness . . .”

·         p. 124: “as animals somehow understand each other”

·         p. 149: “but that which is suppressed maintains its energy below the surface and eventually demands recognition”

There’s another brand of omniscience in the manuscript, one I call the “collective POV.” It’s a sort of advanced form of head-hopping, but it also lends a fairy tale–like effect to the prose (à la “When all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse . . . while visions of sugar-plum fairies danced in their heads . . .”). It reads oddly because most of the book doesn’t read that way; the collective POV arrives unexpectedly and, as with most head-hopping, takes us away from the POV-controlling character of the scene. For example:  

·         p. 4: “Everyone in Timpani knew of Gideon.”

·         p. 5: “His statement registered as little more than static in the people’s minds . . . beyond their ability to imagine.”

·         p. 12: “No family was alone in their home that night in the River District.”

·         p. 18: “The sound of fifty namids walking on cobblestone streets was heard and seen as shouting voices, houses collapsing, armies clashing, meteors crashing, and other loud things growing louder and louder in each unique dream world, until the good people of the River District were roused from their sweaty sleep.”

Stein again: 

The usual reaction of beginning novelists is “Why can’t I just use omniscient and be done with it? I can go anywhere, do anything—sounds great.” . . . [But] a story about everybody is a story about nobody. Before he’ll let himself become involved, the reader wants to know whose story this is. He expects the writer to focus on individuals. . . .The [omniscient author], in other words, needs to be quite a character to manage the omniscient point of view interestingly. . . . The danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking instead of experiencing the story.

So, if you decide to take a scalpel to the POV, here’s my advice on moving forward: First, because it’s such a challenge to pull off well—particularly when it’s not a strategy from the start—and because it would thus require extensive rewriting, nix the omniscient point of view, for the reasons outlined above. 

Next, ask yourself, Whom do I want to tell this story? That is, Whom do I want to be the controlling POV? Whose “eyes” do I want the reader to see through? Will appears to be the most natural choice—chapters 1–5 have clearly painted him as the protagonist, so the readers expect him to lead them through the story. This approach would require some small(ish) changes, and some big ones. The small: in scenes and chapters where Will plays a role (most of them, in other words), restrict the POV to him by reining in the head-hopping. The big: if they’re not entirely necessary to move the plot forward, nix chapters and scenes told entirely from others’ POV, such as [redacted], and so on. 

By “not entirely necessary,” I mean: If I removed this scene or this chapter, would the next scene or chapter happen anyway? Or, If I removed this scene or chapter, would the reader be confused about what comes afterward? Or, If I removed this scene or chapter, would the reader miss an important point in the personal development of my protagonist? I’d suggest that the more no’s there are to questions like these, the more likely it is that those scenes or chapters are acceptable candidates for omission. That’s not to say that there might not be important bits to those chapters or scenes (the [redacted] being destroyed, for instance, precipitates a major conflict). It’s merely to suggest that those important points be communicated via a different POV in a different scene or chapter. The options for how exactly to go about this are many—that’s what creative license is all about. But the restraint here—POV—is singular, and the expert control of it will help guide the way.

Now, what if you don’t want Will to be the only controlling POV in the book? That’s fine. Here’s what Stein says: “In general, I advise the [first-time] writer not to mix points of view within the same scene, chapter, or even the same novel. It is unsettling to the reader.” But note the hierarchy there: scene first, chapter second, novel third. I’d recommend that POV be controlled per chapter, but controlling it by scene is an option, too. Renni Browne again:

It’s almost always important to stick with a single viewpoint throughout a given scene—to decide which character’s viewpoint you are going to use, get into that character’s head, and stay there until the scene is over. . . . So what happens when you have to shift your point of view for sake of the plot? If, say, you are writing from Inspector Hendircks’s point of view and want to establish that Farnsworth the butler is nervous, without letting Hendircks know—how do you change the point of view without jerking your readers around? It’s quite simple: end the current scene, insert a linespace [i.e. line breaks/asterisks —ED], and start a new scene from the point of view you need . . . Linespaces prepare readers for a shift (in time, place, or point of view), so the change in point of view won’t catch them by surprise.

The further question is, if you decide to use more than one character for POV (again, one POV per chapter preferably, but no more than one POV per scene), how many should you use? I’d suggest no more than three for a book like yours, perhaps a fourth for an epilogue, perhaps a fifth for a prologue. These numbers (3–5) are arbitrary, but deciding on how many to use from the beginning helps to instill further discipline in how the POV is handled. Plus, again, Will’s been painted as the story’s protagonist; it’s not necessarily an ensemble cast, in other words (like, say, Game of Thrones is), so any more than 3–5 begins to dilute Will’s own story. Speaking of which, I’d suggest looking through any book in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and watching how no matter how many characters there are in any given chapter, the POV is nearly always controlled to one character per chapter. Each of his chapters, in fact, is named for the controlling POV character of that chapter.  

You’ll notice I’ve pointed out a lot of instances of head-hopping in the margins of the manuscript and have “realigned” the POV in some places where a small change made a significant difference. This wasn’t exhaustive, however, only demonstrative.