Operating the POV Camera
By Victoria Fortune
The following post first appeared in 2021 and has been lightly edited.
Point of view is one of the most critical decisions a writer must make, and yet it is often reduced to 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.” But to reduce POV to whether the narrator uses first person (“I”) or third person (“He/she/they”) is 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 what the reader sees.
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, however neutral and invisible, as a separate entity from the characters, and from you as the storyteller, and
c) Working with psychic distance.”
The Basic Idea of POV
At the most basic level, the POV is the voice telling the story. It may be an omniscient narrator (third-person), who knows all, can see things the characters can’t, tell the reader things the characters don’t know, see inside the heads of numerous characters. At the other extreme, it can be a single character involved in the events (first-person) who can only reveal to the reader what s/he sees and knows.
In film, a POV shot is one in which the camera is pointed at whatever the character is looking at. I have heard a similar analogy used for POV in writing: that the narrator is the one holding the camera, but in fact, the author is the one holding the camera, determining what to point it at, what to depict. The narrator is more like the lens—the part of the camera through which one sees the events.
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 years ago. In that context, it was especially difficult to delineate the author, the narrative voice telling the story, and character at the center of the story, which all seemed to be me. But in fact, they are separate. Just like a fiction writer, a memoirist is an author telling a story with a purpose in mind. She chooses a narrator—a particular version of her voice with a unique perspective, style, diction, etc.--and 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.
The difference is easier to delineate in fiction. In The Great Gatsby, for example, author F. Scott Fitzgerald created a first-person narrator (Nick) to tell the story of the main character (Gatsby). If he had told the story from Gatsby’s POV, there would be none of the mystery surrounding Gatsby that is essential to the story. By creating a first-person narrator who is close to Gatsby, however, he draws readers into the story, while still maintaining the necessary distance for Gatsby to remain mysterious.
In his in-depth post “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction Writing”, David 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.”
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.
Psychic Distance
Another control on the POV lens 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 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.)
Tense
Another way an author can change the distance between the reader and characters or events in a story is through tense.
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 of the story took place. This allows room for reflection, which is an important part of the story. It also allows for foreshadowing that can increase 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 readers 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.
It may not be a perfect analogy but thinking of POV as a camera with settings that can be adjusted gives an idea of the complexity of this vital tool in the writer’s tool-box.
Photo credit: ID 2866263 © Anna Bakulina | Dreamstime.com
