When I write books, I like to strongly develop multiple characters and pit their motives against each other. Because of this, and because my books contain multiple threads of plot, some immediately related to each other, and some that don’t combine until much further along in the story, it makes sense to me to use third person limited omniscience with the POV character shifting from scene to scene. I could use complete omniscience, but I prefer to used limited omniscience to spotlight the character whose POV I’m writing from in a given scene. It allows me to get deeper into the thoughts and feelings of each individual character.
While the POV I use is common to my genre, Epic Fantasy (Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones both use it), it is not required of it. Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s apprentice, along with several other of her works, uses first person and still spins a highly complex story with multiple strongly developed side characters. However, I believe she achieves this effect by having the narrator tell the story looking back on it, as an old man, having had time to contemplate the reasons for the actions of the other characters. The effect is an emotional immediacy in scene, framed by the reflection and distance of time, and it works extremely well.
The point is, there are a lot of different ways you can manipulate POV in a story in order to achieve whatever effect you want to achieve.
I believe, based on my own experiences, that often when people start writing, they don’t choose POV deliberately. Instead, they start telling the story in whatever voice sounds right, probably based on what they like to read. Feeling out POV like this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can only take you so far. I know more than one writer who’s drafted an entire book and then decided to change the POV. That’s a lot of he’s to replace with I’s.
If you decide to deliberately choose a POV before writing your next story, here are some things you should consider:
Purpose: What do you want to achieve with this book? What do you want the reader to take away? Is there a single, clear theme you’re embedding in the book, or are there many complex themes woven together? Is one voice enough, or do you need many? Do you want the reader to be led through the story by the interpretations of the characters, or do you want them to draw their own interpretation of the work? Know the effect you want to achieve before you start writing, and you will be ahead of the game. Even if your purpose changes mid-draft, you’ll still have a plan to revise rather than no plan at all.
Genre: What is the convention in the genre? How are other books in your genre usually written? You should be aware of these conventions, even if you decide not to follow them. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting, but experimentation without a solid understanding of the fundamentals of convention can lead to frustration, because you won’t understand why something you’re doing isn’t working. Learn the rules before you break them; it sounds cliche but that’s because it’s true.
Information: Do you need to convey information that the main character won’t know in order to build suspense? Or can you manage suspense and tension purely from the POV of the main character? One thing I love about using multiple close third person POV is that I can give the reader more information than a given character has, a great tool for building suspense. But a character’s inner struggle can also provide enough suspense and tension to keep a story engaging without a reader having any foreknowledge.
Distance: I wrote a lot about distance in the last post so I’ll just touch on it briefly here. How close or far do you want the reader to be, emotionally, to the characters? Deep in their thoughts and feelings or held at arms length? Close-up or wide shot, or somewhere inbetween?
If you want to get really fancy, you can experiment before you draft an entire book. Write one scene in limited third person, then re-write it in first person. What changes? Then try writing the same scene from the POV of an entirely different character. Just for fun, try writing it in second, or total omniscient. Notice how your feelings about the characters change as you look at their story from different vantages. Pick the one that has the feeling you want to convey and use that one to draft the book.
Even if you choose to limit your POV to one character, you can get a closer understanding of other characters in the story by writing scenes (that you will not include in the book) from their POV. If you’re having trouble getting a secondary, non-POV character to work in a particular scene, re-write it in a separate document from that character’s POV. You’ll quickly learn what they are thinking and feeling, and that information will help you write their actions in the original scene. Beware, though. Every time I do this I end up wanting to include their POV in the book, which is why Dream of a City of Ruin has even more POV Characters than Dream of a Vast Blue Cavern. I like to think that Robert Jordan had the same inclination.
Now that you know what to consider when choosing which POV to use, tomorrow I’ll cover how to recognize and fix broken POV in 101 TIWIK #26: POV III, Fixing It.
This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.
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