Operating the POV Camera
By Victoria Fortune
In filmmaking, a POV shot is one where the camera focuses on what a character is looking at, as though the character has taken the camera. In writing, POV is sometimes described as “who’s holding the camera.” It’s typically presented as a binary choice: As James Woods says in How Fiction Works, “. . . we are stuck with third- and first-person narration” (and rarely second-person). “Anything else probably will not much resemble narration.” It sounds deceptively simple, as though POV is a point and shoot camera, when in fact, it’s more like a manual one, with various controls that can be adjusted to alter the image the reader sees.
In his in-depth post “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction Writing”, David Jauss says, “In my opinion, classifying works of fiction according to their person tells us virtually nothing about either the specific works or point of view in general.” Citing examples from Hemingway and Chekhov, Jauss asserts “the most important purpose of point of view is to manipulate the degree of distance between the characters and the reader in order to achieve the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires.”
In her post on POV, British author Emma Darwin says “the three keys to handling point of view and narrators are
a) understanding the basic idea of what a point-of-view is, in writing,
b) thinking of the narrator as a separate entity from the characters, and from you as the storyteller, and
c) working with psychic distance.”
The Basic Idea of POV
For more on POV, the posts cited above are great sources, but the basic idea is whether the narrator uses “I” or “He/she/they” to tell the story. Sometimes it’s described as whether the narrator is involved in the story, or looking at it from the outside, but the narrative voice is always a part of the story. And a narrator who uses “I” isn’t necessarily the protagonist of the story. Even with a first-person narrator, whoever they’re telling us about could be the real protagonist, as is the case in The Great Gatsby. Or, as in Lolita, a first-person narrator may be fixated on another character, but it is the narrator’s fixation that is the focus of the story, making him the protagonist.
This brings us to b) The narrator is a separate entity from the author and from the characters. In terms of the camera analogy, even a first-person narrator is not the one holding the camera. It is the author who holds the camera. The narrative voice is more like the lens, just one of the parts of the camera that can be manipulated to adjust the final image.
Narrator as Separate from Character and Author
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this idea when I first encountered it in a memoir class. In that context, it was especially difficult to distinguish between the author, the narrative voice telling the story, and character at the center of the story, which all seemed like me. But in fact, they are separate. Just like in fiction, a memoirist is an author telling a story designed to evoke a response in the audience. She chooses a narrative voice—the style, diction, etc.--that sets the right tone for the piece. And then she uses that voice to craft a character (in this case, herself at a particular moment in her life). The combination of narrative voice, character and events that occur evoke the desired emotional, intellectual or moral response in readers.
Psychic Distance
Another control on the POV camera is psychic distance, which is a bit like the telephoto feature of the lens. According to John Gardner in The Art of Fiction, psychic distance is how closely the narrative lens is zoomed in or out on the characters and events of the story. Gardner offers his famous progression from 1 to 5:
It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
Henry hated snowstorms.
God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul
In the first example, the narrator is very distant, giving readers nothing but the most basic description of the character that one could observe from afar. This is somewhat like the camera swooping over the town at the beginning of a movie, giving the audience an overview of the setting. Progressing through the examples, the narrator moves closer and closer to the character, in #2 telling how he feels about snow, in #3 indicating the depth of his feeling, in #4 using the character’s language in free indirect style to show his voice, and in the last example, taking the reader into his stream of consciousness.
The goal, as Gardner points out, is not to pick one of these, but to move among them. The first example gives perspective but no feeling for or emotional investment in the character. The final example offers intense emotional connection but a very limited perspective. Depending on story, the ideal is to move among these distances, making smooth, gradual transitions. It can disorient the reader to be soaring high above a landscape in one sentence, and in the next, suddenly be dropped inside a character’s stream of consciousness. (See Emma Darwin’s post on psychic distance, for examples in first-person and more detail about transitions.)
How the the POV Camera Works
If, as Jauss says, “the most important purpose of point of view is to manipulate the degree of distance between the characters and the reader,” then how do the controls of the POV camera adjust that distance?
First-person POV has the least distance between readers and character. Without the third-person narrative voice reminding readers of the author’s presence, the illusion of the story is more complete, and readers may feel more immersed in the dramatic action. But this POV limits the author’s ability to pull out for wide angle shots or to include other perspectives.
Conversely, third-person allows for a much broader perspective, but the narrative voice creates greater distance between the audience and the characters. However, with effective manipulation of psychic distance, an author can bring a third-person narrator as deeply into a character’s head as a first-person narrator.
Tense is another feature the author can adjust to change the distance between the reader and characters or events in a story.
First-person, present tense collapses the distance as much as possible—the reader is along for the ride as events are happening to the narrator in real time. This POV can be intense, making readers feel completely caught up in the dramatic action, but it can also be limiting. There’s very little leeway for perspective in time and space. For a writer it can feel suffocating and constraining, but it works really well for certain genres, especially thriller suspense stories like The Hunger Games, where the stakes are high (survival) and there are no dull moments, or psychological novels that are about the inner workings of the narrator’s mind.
First-person, past tense creates a little more space between reader and the events of the story. The narrator is still involved in the dramatic action but is telling about events that are more distant in time. The narrator has presumably gained perspective over time and from subsequent events and now sees things differently than at the time the events took place. This allows room for reflection, which is an important part of the story. It also allows for foreshadowing that can raise the dramatic tension (i.e. “I should have seen then that he was going to be trouble.”) A classic example of this POV is Jane Eyre. (The title page reads, Jane Eyre, An Autobiography)
Close third-person, present tense brings readers close to the action, offering that same sense of immediacy and immersion as first-person present tense, but it allows for a greater range of psychic distance. Even though the reader experiences the dramatic action as it unfolds, the narrative voice can see things about the characters that they can’t see themselves, and tell us about events and the world of the story that a first-person narrator can’t.
For example, in one scene in The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer, the protagonist, Lee Miller, is uncomfortable about revealing her relationship with Man Ray to a friend. “Lee looks down peevishly at her hands, folded in her lap, and is distracted by a smudge of ash on her glove, which she tries to rub out with her finger.” Is Lee actually distracted, or is that how she appears to her friend? If a first-person narrator said in this moment, “I look down at my hands, folded in my lap, and am distracted by a smudge of ash . . .” we would know she is actually distracted (or she’s an unreliable narrator). But the third-person narration allows for the interpretation that she has not actually lost focus, but rather is avoiding the conversation, and thus the reader senses her discomfort. This approach allows for perspective—the ability to see the protagonist from the outside—as well as the sense of immersion in the action.
Third-person, past tense has long been the most common option used in fiction because it allows the narrator the greatest flexibility in terms of psychic distance. It allows for moving close into any character’s head and pulling back for a panoramic view, while also providing room for hindsight and reflection, as well as foreshadowing. The downside is that the dramatic action and characters can feel more distant to readers, failing to engage them emotionally if the writer does not skillfully manage other controls like psychic distance.
A camera may not be a perfect analogy but thinking of POV as one gives an idea of the complexity of this vital tool in the writer’s tool-box.
Photo credit: ID 2866263 © Anna Bakulina | Dreamstime.com
