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The Power of Point of View by Alicia

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The Power of Point of View by Alicia The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life Alicia Rasley [email protected] www.plotblueprint.com Alicia Get a free plotting article! http://bit.ly/AliciaRasleyStory Get notified of my intensive Revision Mastermind http://bit.ly/revision- mastermind Get info about my Building Bolder Scenes course. https://www.getdrip.com/forms/976436646/submissions/new THE POWER OF POINT OF VIEW © 2008 by Alicia Rasley. Dedication This is dedicated to my late parents, Jeanne and Robert Todd, who guided all of their eight children to be avid readers. Acknowledgments Too many fellow writers have helped me to name them all individually. But special thanks go out to the members of Indiana RWA, WITTS, Romex, and the Demo Dames, who patiently suggested examples for my most arcane points. I truly don’t know how any writer gets by without a little help from friends! Also many thanks to my editor, Lauren Mosko, for her unending patience and savvy in revamping the book. And I also owe my husband, Jeff, and my sons, JJ and Andrew, for the many passages they suggested and all the hours they listened patiently to my obsessive lectures on point of view. Table of Contents Introduction Part 1: The Basics CHAPTER 1- What is POV? CHAPTER 2- POV Choices and What They Communicate About Your Story CHAPTER 3- POV and the Elements of Story Part 2: Building Your Story CHAPTER 4- First Person CHAPTER 5- Second Person CHAPTER 6- Impersonal Third Person CHAPTER 7- Personal Third Person: Single CHAPTER 8- Personal Third Person: Multiple Part 3: The Master Class CHAPTER 9- Individualizing POV CHAPTER 10- Levels of POV CHAPTER 11- Creating Alternative and Unusual Voices The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life Alicia Rasley [email protected] www.plotblueprint.com Alicia Get a free plotting article! http://bit.ly/AliciaRasleyStory Get notified of my intensive Revision Mastermind http://bit.ly/revision- mastermind Get info about my Building Bolder Scenes course. https://www.getdrip.com/forms/976436646/submissions/new 3 Readers are different today. But they’re not different in the negative way so many social critics assert. Today’s readers aren’t worse readers than their predecessors or more shallow or less discriminating- far from it. Anyone who reads fiction for pleasure instead of watching television, playing video games, or surfing the Web is probably a very experienced, very educated reader-- not necessarily someone with a PhD in literature, but someone educated in how stories work. In fact, they often know more, consciously or subconsciously, about story structure than we writers do. Think about it: A reader who has read three hundred mystery stories is hard to fool. She notes that casual mention of Deborah’s grandmother’s brooch, immediately labels it a “clue,” and puts Deborah in the suspect column. A constant thriller reader has had his fill of stalkers-- another isn’t going to chill him much. A reader of romances has seen a hundred couples paired off happily, and when she’s three chapters into a new novel, she might already know how this couple is going to overcome the barriers to love. This doesn’t mean the books are bad-- only that readers of popular fiction are often hard to impress in this new millennium. Readers like to read and they like to buy books, so they are definitely the writer’s friend. But the more they read, the more it takes to impress them because they are so familiar with the traditional storytelling forms. UNIVERSAL THEMES, FAMILIAR FORMS Familiarity of form is not, as some critics might aver, a sign of lack of creative imagination. That’s like saying a pitcher throwing three fast balls in a row to strike out a batter also lacks imagination. In fact, these storytelling traditions are one of the reasons genres have survived for so long—because they lead writers to explore themes of universal interest (for example, justice, love, or survival). Genre readers like to see old stories done in new ways. This doesn’t mean they’re afraid of experiments, only that they get more pleasure when a writer’s experimentation is performed within the boundaries of the genre’s expectations. These readers are sophisticated enough in “story grammar” to tie us poor writers into knots trying to keep them intrigued, when they have pretty much seen it all before. I remember the astonishment of a friend after reading his first mystery. He was blown away by the ending—you know, when the sleuth figures out who the murderer is? My friend went on and on about how smart this sleuth was, how he never guessed the bad guy was so- and-so, and how, wow, it was a great book. To get that sort of reaction from an experienced fiction reader, you have to do a lot more than out a murderer. But this is good news, because trying to impress those experienced readers makes us become more innovative in our writing techniques. One way to make fresh the familiar story structure is through point of view (POV)— the narrative perspective through which the reader experiences the story. From the earliest times, storytellers realized that a story changes depending on the narrator: Victorious Odysseus’s version of what happened during the Trojan War will differ in experience, detail, interpretation, and attitude from the defeated Hector’s. (Homer, trickster that he was, started the trend toward multiple viewpoints by giving us both versions in The Iliad and The Odyssey.) Unique characters can offer unique experiences even of common, familiar events— and this truth lies at the center of the POV-construction process. The Amazing Doubling Trick To better understand the power of POV, add to this uniqueness of perspective the educated readers’ amazing cognitive “doubling” trick: They can descend entirely into the experience of a compelling character, while maintaining the distance of the outside observer. In this way, they simultaneously participate vicariously in a fictional event and analyze their participation rationally. This is how law-abiding readers can understand very well why Hannibal the Cannibal bites off a guard’s nose and still remain amazed at themselves for being so taken in by this serial murderer, all the while rooting for Clarice to get him in the end. This cognitive doubling trick isn’t understood by the puritanical social critics who assume that those who read Stephen King have a death wish, those who read Thomas Harris are latent murderers, and those who read Nora Roberts must be unhappy in love. The truth is, experienced readers are much more capable than nonreaders of distinguishing between fiction and reality, because they do it constantly as they read. Unfortunately for us fiction writers, this makes sustaining our readers’ interest and belief doubly hard. In this book, I’ll be exploring how varying POV can help writers provide readers with a complex, sophisticated, interactive experience and make every book, even one with old themes, seem new. First, writers must create vivid characters with strong motivations who are placed into difficult or interesting situations; next, they must designate and develop POV to make the story come to life within the readers’ heads. Thinking About POV Like a Writer I first got intrigued with POV while writing my master’s thesis on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe wrote almost exclusively in first-person POV, experimenting with the “unreliable narrator” technique that makes this type of narration so much fun. (That is, you don’t quite trust the narrator of Poe’s “Berenice” when he says he can’t imagine how his fiancée came to be buried alive in that tomb.) There are 150 years’ worth of literary criticism on this seminal writer, but I found few critics had the same understanding of his POV approach as I did. It isn’t that I am smarter than they are, but I am a writer, and I found myself analyzing his POV approach as I’d analyze my own: How did he convey what other characters were thinking and feeling when confined to the narrator’s solipsistic POV? How did he make a narrator’s voice sound both rational and insane? Why did he pull away from sharp perception and go into abstraction right at the moment when the narrator gets his hands on the poison? When did the narrator start lying to the reader? In fact, I found only a few critics who truly explore Poe’s POV approach, and these were all writers themselves: Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and D.H. Lawrence. (You can tell what a significant influence Poe was to attract such critics.) This confirmed my supposition that only writers fully understand the mechanics of POV (consciously or not) and that only writers care how it’s done. Writing that thesis also taught me that mastering POV can add layers of meaning to one’s stories: It was Poe’s control of POV that led generations of readers to know in their bones that Poe’s narrators were lying when they proclaimed that they really didn’t mean to bury their wives alive, which, in turn, led generations to assume Poe himself must have 5 buried a wife or two. (One hazard of writing in first person is that your readers tend to think that –the narrator is actually –the author.) Poe would have enjoyed knowing that his readers dug beneath the surface of his stories and sought the hidden mysteries underneath, even if it came at the cost of his own reputation. He would have applauded Robert Frost’s observation, “I want people to understand me.
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