I wanted to type up a little rundown of quick n dirty writing tips based on things I see a lot in fic/ amateur original manuscripts, and, uh, it turned out that they all revolved around POV. Nailing point of view in fiction writing is both crucial and one of the least intuitive building blocks of writing to learn: an understanding of POV has been the only useful thing i took from my college creative writing classes, and god knows how long I’d have stumbled along without it otherwise.
So! I am saving you, baby writer, the trouble of slogging through a miserable writing class with a professor who’s bitter as FUCK that genre fiction sells better than his “sad white man drinking” lit fic novels. Here are some assorted writing tips/ common mistakes and how to fix them, as relating to POV:
(this turned into a WALL OF TEXT so i will be using gifs to break it up)
>“I watched the ship tilt” “he saw the sky darken” “she noticed flowers growing on the rusted gate.” no. If the character who felt/saw/noticed etc is your POV character, whether in first or third, then this is called filtering and it takes the reader out of the story by subtly reminding them of the separation between the POV character and themselves. in most styles of writing, this is bad, not to mention it unnecessarily complicates your prose. try again: “the ship tilted.” “the sky darkened.” “flowers grew on the rusted gate.” Readers will instinctively understand that the POV character is witnessing the story happen, they don’t need to be told it.
I’m not telling you to never refer to your character “watching” something, of course: “I watched the birds dart around for hours,” isn’t filtering because watching is a notable activity, here, rather than an unnecessary obfuscation of the “real” thing happening. But understand how phrasing can jar readers momentarily apart from the character viewpoint, and use it with intention.
> Close Third Person POV still requires you to be mindful of your POV character. this is a rookie mistake i see allllllll the time. “Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers,” is a sentence in Josh’s POV. “Stupid” tells us how he feels about the tears, “beautiful” tells us how he feels about the display. ok. all good so far. BUT.
“Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers. It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography. Martha had to suppress a fond smile at his reaction; he was always so sweetly emotional after the curtain fell.”
Do you see what’s wrong with this paragraph? The first two sentences are Josh’s POV, and then the third one suddenly becomes Martha’s. A lot of amateur writers don’t even realize they’re doing this, which in its most egregious form is called “head-hopping,” but it’s disorienting and distracting for the reader, and makes it harder to connect with a single character. In multi-person close 3rd POV story, the POV should remain the same for an entire chapter (or at least, for an entire scene/ segment,) and change only between them. If you’re new to POV wrangling, watch your adjectives/ interiority (we’ll get to that in a second) and think “which character am I using as a lens right now, and am I being consistent" every once in a while until you get the hang of it.
> Related: let’s talk about interiority. Interiority is a more sophisticated way of thinking of a character’s “internal narration,” IE bits of prose whose job is not to advance the plot, set tone, or describe anything, (although it CAN do any of those things as well, and good prose will multitask) but to give us a specific sense of the character’s internal life, including backstory, likes, dislikes, fears, wants, and personality. In the above example paragraph, the middle sentence “It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography” Is interiority for Josh. It tells us that not only did he love the show, he’s very familiar with this art form and thus had expectations going in; likewise, listing the technical components is a way of emphasizing his enthusiasm while pointing out that it’s informed, implying that Josh himself is intellectually breaking down the performance even in appreciation.
“That’s a lot for a throwaway sentence you made up for an example.” Well, yeah, a little interiority goes a long way. Interiority is what creates the closeness we have to POV characters, the reason we understand them better than the non-POV characters they interact with. It’s particularly key in the first couple chapters of an original work, when we need to be sold on the character and understand the context they operate in.
If readers are having trouble connecting to or understanding the motivations of your character, you might need more interiority; if your story’s plot is agonizingly slow-moving (and you don’t want it to be) or your character is coming off as melodramatic, you might need less. It’s not something you should necessarily worry about; your amount of interiority in a WIP is probably fine, but being able to recognize it for what it is will help you be more mindful when you edit.
(Fanfic as a medium revels in interiority: that’s how you get 10k fics where nothing happens but two characters lying in bed talking and having Feelings. Or coffeeshop AUs that have literally no plot to speak of but are 100k+ long.)
>try not to describe the facial expression of a POV character, even in third person. rather like filtering, it turns us into a spectator of the character when they’re supposed to be our vessel, and since it’s *their* POV, there should be other ways available to communicate their emotion/ reactions. There are ways of circumventing this, (the example sentence where “Martha had to suppress a fond smile” is an example) where their expression is tied up in a physical action, or something done very deliberately by the character and therefore becomes something they would note to themselves, but generally, get rid of “[pov character’s] eye’s widened” and “[pov character] smiled.”
so that’s what i got! go forth and write with beautifully deliberate use of POV.
I have written one for Hobbit! “A Different Road” is kinda technically a monologue by an AU Bilbo who left the Shire after the Fell Winter and became an adventurer, but it DOES count as first person!
And if I may briefly launch into a diatribe on first person POV it is a hard, hard POV to write. I know it dominates YA literature but you are seeing the best of the best of authors, ones who can master that very difficult art, and who make it look deceptively easy.
First Person seems easy to a lot of beginner writers because 1) they’ve read a bunch of First Person, and how hard can it be? 2) you’ve developed your OC and it’s sometimes easier to write in sort of a diary format (especially if you’re a writer who practiced by keeping a diary) or just speaking with “I” as you would in an essay or real life.
But the thing is, First Person is very limiting in many ways and as such presents a ton of challenges over and above the basic challenges of writing and completing an actual story:
– If it’s First Person/Present Tense, it can be disorienting for the reader as we’re stuck in the very narrow view of the character. We know only what they know in that moment, so sometimes a writer has to resort to crazy coincidences like overheard conversation to expand the available information beyond what the character knows. Present tense in general, even in Third, creates a dreamy quality for readers that can be disorienting.
– First Person/Past Tense then the reader can automatically infer that the character survives long enough to tell their story after the fact. If you have a death-defying action packed adventure, that lowers a lot of tension because we know the protagonist survives at least to a certain point near the end. (First Person/Past can be well utilized in epistolary-style stories, btw, written down after the fact for a certain audience by the character.)
– First Person begs the question of not just when the narrator is speaking, but who the narrator is speaking too. One can also reasonably assume that how they tell their story is affected by who they are telling it to (a lover, a friend, family member, an enemy, a figure of authority, or an audience of strangers).
– To pull off an engaging First Person you have to have a strong and unique character voice. If your narrator just has a fairly bland, informative voice you might as well just keep it in Third Person because you’re not gaining much by having it in First.
(Aside: Third Person gives you a lot of tools, like the ability to jump around in time, to jump between characters inside and outside of scenes without confusing people, the ability to show events the narrator isn’t aware of, and the ability to kill characters in the middle of action because they’re not the vehicle through which the story is being told. To give an example, the Hunger Games books are told in very close First Person. We don’t know anything Katniss doesn’t know until waaaay after the events of the story, and the novels can be very claustrophobic at times as a result. The movies, in contrast, while a different medium, are in Third Person, in that we know events running parallel to Katniss’s experience as they are happening and even in her POV we see things external to her.)
Going back to the value of a First Person voice, man, when you can pull off a good First Person voice you are a god. One reason I’ve avoided it is because I don’t really think I can do most characters justice by staying in First Person the whole time because you have to be really engaging. What voice I can pull off I think I can still do by filtering the description in Third Person through their POV to add color, without taking on the limitations of the POV (see the beginning of The Only Way Out is Down which is Third Person but runs very close to First in terms of voice, a deliberate choice of something I wanted to practice on my part). Basically, I think I can do First Person, but I don’t think I can do it well, I’m not a huge fan of what is gained rather than lost in terms of using First over Third (a more intimate view and in exchange for all the above mentioned tools) and most importantly, I don’t think I can sustain it for more than a couple thousand words, much less write a novel in that voice.
That said, one of the best fics I ever saw, the one that made me believe First Person might actually be worth doing and isn’t universally garbage except at the highest published levels was a Bleach fic called “After the Fairytale Ends”.
To paraphrase my writing teacher: unless you have a deliberate idea of something you want to do in your story that can only be done in an alternate person and tense, just stick to Third Person/Past Tense. It’s the clearest, the easiest for readers, and provides the most tools for writers.
Avelera 