Point of View Techniques

Creating a Narrator through Point of View

·      First Person – limits story to the narrator’s mind and ears! (I/me/mine/my)

·      Second Person – rarely used, difficult to stay in the “you” mode. Narrator is making the reader participate in story by telling them what they are doing and thinking, etc. (You, your)

o   Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City

§  “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

·      Third Person Limited – narrator knows only the thoughts and feelings of one character in the story, but is structured “He/she/they/their”

·      Third Person Omniscient – narrator can access everything about characters (He/she/they/their)

POV Exercise: write the same scene from different distances (points of view).

·       You must consider with each distance: What can be known? What details would narrator focus on? How much dialogue; exposition; internal versus external thought?

The Plot: a guy and a girl are in a canoe in the middle of a lake.

o   Try First Person – choose one of the characters and write from their POV (I)

o   Then, try Second Person – focus on same character!

o   Then, try Third Person Limited – again, focus on the same character you did with 1^st person so that you can show how the information differs

• Then, 3^rd person omniscient – finally(!), you get to be the God Narrator and get in both characters’ minds