Dear David, Elizabeth Julie, and Holly
Mary and Eleanor answer their questions on point of view
Four questions about point of view in fiction.
David Roberts asks:
If you have a novel without a single dominant protagonist, how do you assess the pros and cons of omniscient vs. rotating close third or first? Can a writer slip in and out of omniscience vs. inhabiting someone's inner thoughts?
Elizabeth Bobrick asks:
I got halfway through the first and only novel l tried to write. I had five main characters and five chapters with each of them owning the POV but had no idea what to do once they were all in the same room.
Julie Gabrieli asks:
One thing I appreciate about multiple POV is the clashes and contrasts between different views of the same event, place or character, and equally the alignments. Is multiple POV a more "feminine" way of storytelling? In these fraught times it feels more of an imperative to consider different perspectives.
Holly Starley asks:
I've been thinking about the distinction between narrator, character, and author. I want to give myself new ways of thinking about and playing with this distinction in my writing. Can you talk about how you think about or use it in your work?
Oh, wow, where do I start? Here’s some general advice I prepared in a video; I’ll address each of you in what follows:
For All of You:
Almost always, the first sentence we write determines the point of view. Point of view is best seen as a continuum from knowing everything like a god, to knowing only what one character could know, or could be told or what the narrator could know about his character all the way to the other end of the continuum where the camera knows only what the main character knows or is thinking.
Point of view is like a director’s camera. Writers need to know where the camera is and how to use that camera.
Does that sentence begin with “I”, with “you”, with “he” or she”, with “they” or something like this that I made up? “The Joneses always had Sunday dinner together except this Sunday, Ruthie said she wouldn’t be coming.” That last sentence immediately gives the narrator privilege to all the Joneses—not only Ruthie—even when Ruthie is not around to see or hear.
Tolstoy’s first sentence in Anna Karenina is not the voice of a character in the story: “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the narrator’s voice, established in the opening of the book and letting us know that he is there and he will tell the story.
So let’s go back to the first sentence I made up: “The Joneses always had Sunday dinner together except this Sunday, Ruthie said she wouldn’t be coming,” giving the writer/director more privilege.
I made a decision to let my camera move around, know more than just what Ruthie knows.
Suppose this is my first sentence: “Ruthie wasn’t stuck in traffic. She was stuck in love and couldn’t tell anyone. So no way was she coming to her parents’ Sunday dinner.”
I can’t now willy-nilly switch to Ruthie’s mother or any other of the Joneses, unless I started off with that other first sentence, giving my camera the privilege to move around —but I do contradict myself on this point at the end of this essay. So, tricky stuff about what we can get away with.
The problem with shifts in points of view that don’t involve some sort of hint to the reader as to what is going on is that the reader may sense a gap—as if something’s been left out. The reader may feels as if a new story has started. As in: What just happened? —unless the reader senses that this was a good place to stop and wants to hear about this other character.
Also key: Our stories need to be able to bear the weight of shifts in point of view as if—yeah, yeah, that’s where the camera needed to go! The reader needs to see some purpose to the shifts. Usually, one of the points of view in the shifts will be the dominant point of view—as it is in Anna Karenina even though Tolstoy uses an omniscient narrator.
David: Tolstoy leans more and more on Anna’s thoughts and feelings, and the story, most of us would agree, is undoubtedly hers. Generally, you need to establish omniscience in some way to move around from one point of view to another.
The problem with shifts in point of view that don’t involve some sort of hint to the reader as to what’s going on—what the metafiction writer would do.
Elizabeth Tallent, who often uses more than one point of view, explains. She says, “If you’re going to have different points of view, it’s a question of when you have a gap. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, calls it ‘popping.’ You pop the point of view. The point of view you’re in has to release it. There has to be some kind of satiation with that point of view, and then you need the next one to start very fast. That’s a problem I do see in students. They don’t understand that going to the next point of view is like starting the story over.”1 Also, see my answer for Holly below.
Elizabeth: Getting everybody in the same room is what Susan Sontag did in her story “The Way We Live Now” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1987 and is about AIDs2. What she did in her first long sentence was to get all the characters in that opening. So that’s one way to do what you ask about. Another way is to establish omniscience in your first sentence, giving you the privilege to move around. I lean towards Sontag’s approach for your q. because she doesn’t have a dominant point of view. Rather, the idea of “The Way We Live Now” dominates because of the way the force of AIDs hit us all.
Julie: I don’t think the choice of which POV has anything to do with a feminine or masculine stance. I can name male authors and female authors who’ve used omniscience: Tolstoy, Austen—just to start. I do think that omniscience is the hardest point of view to control well. I have done it in a quirky sort of way as I explain when I get to Holly’s q. So, I don’t dismiss the choice.
When teaching, I advise my students to first write a story in third limited because once we learn how to do that well, we know everything we need to know. Here’s a definition of third limited: The term “omniscience” refers generally to how much privilege or knowledge you give your narrator. In third-person-limited, you limit that privilege to all that a single characters knows and aspects about that character that he knows but might not express himself, giving the narrator a bit more knowledge than simply what his main character is thinking.
Here’s an example from Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish.” At the end of the first paragraph, Bellow’s narrator writes: “We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis.” Having read this story we might now think that word peristalsis would not be one that Woody, his main character in third-limited, would use. This is the narrator’s voice but in the very next sentence we are reassured that this narrator is squarely in Woody’s point of view. Here’s what Bellow writes: “Woody, a businessman in South Chicago, was not an ignorant person. He knew more such phrases than you would expect a tile contractor (offices, lobbies, lavatories) to know. The kind of knowledge he had was not the kind for which you get academic degrees.”
Holly and David: I have used omniscience in that quirky way I mentioned earlier in my short stories “The Burglar” and “Sine Die” that appear in my collection The Woman Who Never Cooked – and both stories won prizes. I then used it again in the novel I’m now posting Who by Fire. But I hadn’t thought about that much until your question caused me to look at those works with a cool eye. I realize that, in all three, I don’t establish omniscience in my first sentence in any of these works—contradicting my advice above. I “think” — I use that word because I’m not the best judge of my work. So, in looking at these stories—I “think” I used imagination of the main character to allow me to get away with this unconventional way of doing this. To go back to David’s question, I “think” what I did was to allow the interior monologue to stand alone as a shift in point of view. I know that sounds crazy, but I did get away with it and convinced readers that I knew what I was doing.
So, bottom line: Point of view is tricky. Let me close with Eudora Welty’s advice:
Eleanor and I ask you to remember that these are separate posts (we share the video that I record) but we both hope for comments on EACH of our posts—as they are separate. That’s the gift to us both as we work hard to study and consider each q.
P.S.: I have a full course I introduce here—the link is for you to take a gander—it’s free…. https://marytabor.substack.com/p/write-it-how-to-get-started
If you missed our launch post, take a look at Write it! and This Writing Life.
Ask us a question in Comments or Notes (be sure to tag us both). Or direct message me. I’ll get your q. to Eleanor!
Coming next: Q. from Dr. Levent Mollamustafaoglu, John Halbrooks, and Holly Starley on Q.: Novel or Memoir?
David, I can send you one-on-one a published story by Elizabeth Tallent.
This was so helpful, Mary, a valuable resource. I’m afraid I was a bit lazy in my shorthand use of the word, “feminine,” without explaining that I meant it in a Jungian sense. As in, an energy that all humans have, ideally balanced with “masculine” qualities. In a patriarchal culture, empathy and intuition are devalued, in favor of, say, power and control (to cite examples of unhealthy, unbalanced masculinity). I’m interested in how a healthy balance can show up in literature both in content and form. I think I understand from both your responses that multiple POV, when used with intention and restraint, can be a way to engender empathy.
OK, seeing this line here delighted me: “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
That's because the tagline right on the front of my novel is:
"All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park