POV Smackdown: I vs. We

You’ve got your characters and your basic plot, and you’re ready to start writing. Not so fast! First you have to decide which point of view you’re going to write from. You’ve got three basic choices: first person, third person limited and third person omniscient.

(Technically there’s a fourth: the you form, or second person, which we reserve mainly for self-help books, travel guides, experimental literature and Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The main difference between the three basic POVs is intimacy and scope.

Intimacy is a measure of internal knowledge. The closer you are to the narrator, the more intimate your understanding and the easier it is to forge a bond with the narrator. The further you are, the less you know about the narrator’s feelings.

Scope is a measure of external knowledge. It has an inverse relationship to intimacy: The closer you get to the narrator, the less you can know about what’s going on inside other characters and in places she’s not directly observing.

In our continuum, first person is the most intimate but has the least external knowledge, and third person omniscient is the least intimate but has the most external knowledge.

Seems simple, right? Oh, but you know things never are. So what’s tricksy about each of these?

I Ate the Taco: First Person

(Yummm…)

First person is most common in YA because YA novels are often focused on the particular, personal experience of one teen. You don’t see first person as much in adult novels.

First person: One eye, very close

First person is intimate; you experience the narrator’s thoughts and emotions with her. But want to know what someone else is thinking? Too bad. Need to know what’s happening behind the narrator’s back? Bummer. But just because you can’t get inside the other characters, you still need to make sure they’re fully developed. One of your challenges with first person is to do that within the very limited perspective of your narrator.

Another challenge is that you really have to nail the voice. After all, your narrator is telling her story directly to the reader. If anything is off, you’ll lose the reader. 

And that wonderful introspection you get with first person? Yeah, don’t overdo it. It’s easy to dwell too much on the internal when writing in the I. Focus on what’s happening, not what the narrator thinks about it.

She Ate the Taco: Third Person Limited

(Hey! That chick stole my taco!)

Third person limited is the Toyota Camry of POVs: common, dependable, affordable. Outside of YA, most novels are written in it.

Third person limited: A handful of eyes

In third person limited, we know what’s going on only from the perspective of one person or a very limited set of characters. Because of that switch in pronoun (I to she, he or even it), it’s less intimate than first person, but you’re still closely focused on one character at a time. That slight distance allows you to keep things from the reader. In first person, the reader is inside the narrator’s head every moment and knows everything that’s going on. In third limited, there can be a little mystery about exactly what the narrator is feeling or thinking. That’s good for tension.

What you lose in intimacy, you gain in scope because in third limited, you’re allowed to head jump. Want to know what someone else is thinking or what’s going on somewhere else? No worries. You can find out in the next scene when your focus moves to another main character.

Here’s the tricksy: Third limited is limited. The reader knows only what the POV characters know. Unless you’re George R.R. Martin, you can’t pick a billion different characters to inhabit. You get to pick two, maybe three. So make sure they’re good ones. Also, you don’t want to give your reader whiplash. Pick one perspective per scene or chapter. No changing mid-paragraph.

She Ate the Taco Redux: Third Person Omniscient

(This is getting ridiculous. You people better leave my tacos alone.)

Third person omniscient is also called the god’s view because the narrator knows and sees everything. It pops up a lot in 19^th century literature, like Pride and Prejudice. An omniscient narrator tends to be a lot more removed from the action and may even address the reader directly.

Third person omniscient: All-seeing
and pretty creepy

What’s cool is that you can tell your reader anything you want to about what’s going on in a character’s head or what’s happening on the other side of the world, unbeknownst to any of your characters. On the other hand, seeing everything can be a super fast way of destroying tension. And an omniscient narrator can seem like a pretty stiff know-it-all.

I said earlier that third omniscient is the least intimate POV. You may be wondering how that’s true, when an omniscient narrator knows everything. An omniscient narrator may know exactly how someone feels, but her distance from the characters makes it harder for the reader to bond.

Who Else Can Eat the Taco?

There are lots of variations on these three basic POV: multiple viewpoints, the epistolary (letter) novel, the unreliable narrator, first person plural (we instead of I). The weirder it is (first person plural and second person fall in this category), the more careful you have to be. But strong voice is the key to all POVs. Heck, strong voice is really the key to pretty much everything. Like the strong voice I use when someone steals my taco.