Writing a Novel, Part Three: Point of View Madness

Welcome back to my ongoing series on how to write a novel.  Part One covered average novel lengths and how not to get overwhelmed by them, while Part Two discussed strategies to come up with a great story idea.  Part Three is all about a key stylistic element in your novel—Point of View, or POV.

Let’s do some quick definitions:

First Person POV:  Text where the narrator (the writer or whoever the writer is pretending to be) uses words like ‘I’ and ‘me.’

Example – I will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Second Person POV: Text where the narrator uses words like ‘you.’

Example – You will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Third Person POV: Text where the narrator uses words like ‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘it.’

Example – She will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Here’s the complication—each of the example sentences included a third person element.  The Stone is an ‘it’ all the way through.  This isn’t a jokey sort of nuance.  Most books aren’t any one of the three POV types, but rather a combination.  Urban fantasy books show up these days primarily in First Person, but one common device in such works is to have the viewpoint character watch another group of people interact.  Such segments are effectively in Third Person, with some important Second Person elements.

Second Person has a reputation for not getting a lot of use in novels (Charles Benoit wrote a novel named You in order to better emphasize its special primary POV), but Second Person is a tool that has to be managed by just about every author who cares about dialogue.  If I’m writing a story where Sir Stalwart berates a lizard for jumping into a cup, the Stalwart is going to be talking at someone.  Long dialogue is rather like a miniature story in Second Person.

 To be fair, choosing whether to write from inside the head of your hero or from a remove is probably the most preliminary choice you as a writer has to make—“I rammed my axe at the dragon’s forehead” cannot be confused with “Henerik the Fire Eater rammed his axe at the dragon’s forehead.”—but it is crucial to be aware of role dialogue plays in fiction.  Writers can lose readers by not including enough of a First or Third Person frame around their characters’ conversations.

Next time—Making characters talk to each other.