POINT OF VIEW IN CREATIVE WRITING
- Cully Perlman
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Point of view in creative writing, or POV, is one of the most important (and often misunderstood) elements in fiction. According to Merriam Webster, point of view is a “position or perspective from which something is considered or evaluated.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines point of view in literature as “the voice in which a story is told and its relationship to the events in the story.” And the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Languages defines it as “a. A position from which something is observed or considered; a standpoint, and b. The attitude or outlook of a narrator or character in a piece of literature, a movie, or another art form.” In fiction, however, we know that POV is broken down into the first-person (I, me, we [the plural First-Person pronoun]) point of view, the second-person (you, your) point of view, and the third-person (he, she, they) point of view. But it’s not that simple. And here’s why:
These three points of view can be further broken down or categorized into further types of POVs, such as:
Limited First-Person POV
Third-Person Omniscient POV
Third-Person Limited (or Close Third) POV
Third-Person Objective POV
Fourth-Person POV
We’ll get into all of these in a second. But for clarity’s sake, understand that there’s also a fourth-person Plural POV as well, which is the collective voice and which we’ve seen used in more recent times. The fourth-person POV uses the “we” and “us” pronouns and, in my opinion, is difficult to pull off in fiction, although novels like Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Chang-Rae Lee’s dystopian novel, On Such a Full Sea, certainly succeed. At any rate, let’s get into each one.
POINT OF VIEW IN CREATIVE WRITING
Limited First-Person POV
First-person point of view, while extremely popular, is probably the easiest to use as a writer of fiction. We use the pronouns “I” and “we” to tell the story, and our narrator’s role in our story tells us the psychological relationship to the things happening in our tale, as well as the narrator’s role in the plot of our tale. In terms of narrators, it’s important to note that three exist: reliable narrators, unreliable narrators, and the first-person peripheral, which is where the narrator is telling the story of someone else, meaning the narrator is acting as a witness to someone else’s story.
When you write in the first-person limited, you’re confined to your narrator’s perspective. All of their thoughts, what they observe, what they feel, it’s all seen through the eyes of our narrator. “I did this;” “I saw this;” “I thought I saw a ghost;” “We jumped across the crevasse.” First-person limited does not allow us to know what other characters are thinking (unless they tell us). Our narrator learns and experiences things at the same time that our readers do. Any biases, how our narrator is feeling, and so on are projected by how our narrator views the world. As readers, we’re close to our narrator, because her tale feels immediate, and it feels personal. First-person can build tension, which is something we, as writers, want to do. As writers, it’s easier, in my opinion, to get the words down. I once called writing in the first-person “cheating,” because I find it much easier to write believably, to put down words on the page that readers just go with rather than walking on a slippery narrative that’s more difficult (again, in my opinion) to construct, i.e., using the third-person POV or even the fourth-person POV.
Here’s an example of the first-person, taken from the opening of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all – I’m not saying that – but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was ‘The Secret Goldfish.’ It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”
Third-Person Omniscient POV
Third-person omniscient point of view is where the narrator is considered “god-like.” This type of narrator knows everything. They can enter the minds of all the characters thoughts, feelings, emotions, motivations, and so on. The narrator may be detached from the events within the story, but since she knows everything, she can provide the reader with information not even the characters themselves know. The narrator’s foreshadowing may provide dramatic tension and works for the reader’s understanding of everything that’s going on, but writers must be careful not to slip into a different point of view, which is easy to do.
Here’s an example of the third-person omniscient point of view from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell.”
Third-Person Limited (or Close Third) POV
Here’s an example of the third-person limited (close) point of view taken from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Series, specifically A Dance with Dragons:
TYRION
“The world is full of wine,” he muttered in the dankness of his cabin. His father never had any use for drunkards, but what did that matter? His father was dead. He’d killed him. A bolt in the belly, my lord, and all for you. If only I was better with a crossbow, I would have put it through that cock you made me with, you bloody bastard.
Belowdecks there was neither night nor day. Tyrion marked time by the comings and goings of the cabin boy who brought the meals he did not eat. The boy always brought a brush and bucket too, to clean up. “Is this Dornish wine?” Tyrion asked him once, as he pulled a stopper from a skin. “It reminds me of a certain snake I knew. A droll fellow, till a mountain fell on him.”
The cabin boy did not answer. He was an ugly boy, though admittedly more comely than a certain dwarf with half a nose and a scar from eye to chin. “Have I offended you?” Tyrion asked, as the boy was scrubbing. “Were you commanded not to talk to me? Or did some dwarf diddle your mother?” That went unanswered too. “Where are we sailing? Tell me that.” Jaime had made mention of the Free Cities, but had never said which one. “Is it Braavos? Tyrosh? Myr?” Tyrion would sooner have gone to Dorne. Myrcella is older than Tommen, by Dornish law the Iron Throne is hers. I will help her claim her rights, as Prince Oberyn suggested.
Third-Person Objective POV
Third-person objective point of view is where the narrator has no biases. They report the dialogue and actions they see without providing any judgement or thoughts about what’s occurring before them.
Here’s an example of the third-person objective point of view from one of my favorite short stories by Hemingway, “The Killers”:
“Two other people had been in the lunchroom. Once George had gone out to the kitchen and made a ham-and-egg sandwich “to go” that a man wanted to take with him. Inside the kitchen he saw Al, his derby hat tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook were back to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths. George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.
“Bright boy can do everything,” Max said. “He can cook and everything. You’d make some girl a nice wife, bright boy.”
“Yes?” George said, “Your friend, Ole Anderson, isn’t going to come.”
“We’ll give him ten minutes,” Max said. Max watched the mirror and the clock. The hands of the clock marked seven o’clock, and then five minutes past seven.
“Come on, Al,” said Max. “We better go. He’s not coming.”
There’s a lot of dialogue in this excerpt, which was taken about halfway through the story. But there’s a lot of dialogue in general in it. “The Killers” is a hard-hitting story, yet notice how there’s no input from the narrator other than providing exactly what’s happening, as if she were a fly on the wall and nothing more. Hemingway’s style is what separated him from other writers and why he’s credited with changing the way we write—he replaces long, elaborate prose with short, declarative sentences, as we see in the “Killers.”
Fourth-Person POV
While fourth-person point of view is often not included in what has been accepted as the standard, accepted, three points of view, at this point I think it’s silly and should just be included, given its growing use.
The fourth-person POV uses the collective “we,” “us,” and “one.” It is considered experimental, and it’s often used as a narrative providing a universal voice that steps outside traditional narratives and characters. Characters may speak to the reader, and, like the first-person point of view, the reader feels a more intimate relationship with the narrator.
Here’s an example of the fourth-person point of view from Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides:
“Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian’s glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.”
Notice the use of “we” and “us.” What does that make you, the reader, feel? There’s a closeness you feel, is there not? Because of the “we” and “us,” we feel as if we’re part of the story, at least partially. For me, it’s like there’s an agreement between everyone that everything the narrator is saying is true, even if he is not, or doesn’t know he’s not.
Deciding which point of view you want to use in your novel can be a grueling, tricky, or, if you’re lucky, an extremely easy decision to make. I’ve written novels in the third-person, only to go back and rewrite them in the first person because, I had to admit (much to my chagrin), the narrative worked better in the first-person point of view. Sometimes you just need that closeness for the book to work. But remember, you don’t have to stick to one point of view for your entire book. You can jump around from one point of view to another if the narrative works. And that’s the key, right? Does your narrative, your story, your novel, work when you do that? I’m here to tell you that it is one hundred percent possible, because as the saying goes, “if it works, it works.”
My novel, The Losses, is told from six different points of view. Five of the six chapters are told in the third-person, the last is told in the first-person. I wrote my novel like that because the story I was writing had to have the same story told in each chapter, but the events that took place over a particular family reunion had to be seen from the distinct perspectives of six of the novel’s characters. My goal was to show how the same exact events in a story can be experienced in very, very different ways depending on whose eyes we’re looking through. Each chapter was roughly sixty pages, so the chapters were longer than most of the ones you read in other novels. But I chose that structure because it was what the novel called for—a deep dive without interruptions into the worlds of each character. And for my novel, this was what had to be done for the book to make sense, and to deliver to the reader the impact I wanted to bring to the story they were going to spend hours or days reading. How you structure your novel, what point or points of view you choose are up to you. Just make sure you understand the limitations of each perspective. If you don’t, you may just lose some or all of the readers you’re looking to impact with the story you’re trying to tell.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, The Losses. He can be contacted at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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