CHAPTER 16

THE BEST POV FOR YOUR STORY

BY NANCY KRESS

Because we lack telepathy, we humans are imprisoned in our own skulls. As Joseph Conrad wrote, ‘‘We live, as we dream, alone’’—at least alone within our heads. The only thoughts, plans, dreams, and feelings we can directly experience are our own. It’s because this one-viewpoint reality is hard-wired in us that fiction is so fascinating. It lets us experience the world from inside someone else’s head.

This is the definition of point of view: whose eyes we view the action through, whose head we’re inside of, whose feelings we experience as that character feels them. As such, your choice of point-of-view character or characters is critical to your story. It will determine what you tell, how you tell it and, often, even what the action means.

PROTAGONIST VS. POV CHARACTER

The protagonist of your story is the ‘‘star,’’ the person we’re most interested in, the one with the engaging action. Usually, but not inevitably, your protagonist will also be a POV character. Thus we see the events of John Grisham’s best-selling The King of Torts through the eyes of its protagonist, Clay Carter, who is both the star and a POV character.

However, you can obtain some interesting effects by having your POV character be someone other than the protagonist. Two classics that do this are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence.

Gatsby is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, who is involved in the main action only peripherally, mostly as a standby friend and go-between. The real protagonists are the illicit lovers, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, particularly Gatsby.

Maugham goes further yet. The protagonist of The Moon and Sixpence is Charles Strickland, who abandons his middle-class London existence to travel to the South Seas and become a painter. The unnamed narrator of the novel, the sole POV character, knows Strickland only slightly, as the friend of a friend. The narrator has several casual encounters with Strickland, but at no time does the narrator ever affect Strickland’s life or Strickland affect the narrator’s. Much of Strickland’s later life is told to the narrator by other people, after the artist is dead.

The disadvantages of this convoluted structure are obvious: It lacks immediacy. Everything important that Strickland does, or that is done to him, occurs offstage. The narrator is told about events later, and he tells us about them. Maugham sacrifices a great deal of drama this way. So why did he do it?

Because separating your POV character from your protagonist also confers certain advantages:

• The POV character can continue the story after the protagonist dies, which both Strickland and Gatsby do during their respective novels. Maugham’s POV character traces the fates of Strickland’s widow, children, and paintings.

• The protagonist can be portrayed as much more secretive if he is not also a POV character. No one learns about Gatsby’s real past until he is dead, and it’s revealed that he has invented for himself a much more glamorous background than his actual one. Had Gatsby been a POV character, we readers would have known that from the very beginning, because we would have been “inside his head.” Protagonists who are not also POV characters can preserve their mysteries. As Maugham’s narrator says, ‘‘I felt that Strickland had kept his secrets to the grave.’’

• The POV character can make observations that would never in a million years occur to the protagonist. Carraway comes to see Buchanan as a careless lightweight and Gatsby as a touching idealist, views neither character (nor anyone else in the book) would have shared.

The first questions you should ask yourself about your use of POV are: Will my protagonist and POV character(s) be the same? If not, do I have good reason for the split? Will I gain more than I lose?

Once you know whether or not your protagonist will be a POV character, the next step is to determine who else will occupy that critical role.

POV CHARACTER SELECTION

It’s a good idea, before you write anything at all, to consider all the choices for POV characters. The first choice to come to mind may not be the best pick.

Consider, for instance, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which takes place in pre–World War II Alabama. The main plotline concerns the framing of a black man, Tom Robinson, for the beating of a white woman, a crime he did not commit. His lawyer is the respected Atticus Finch, father of two children. Finch forces the identification of the true assailant, the victim’s father, who then attempts revenge by attacking Finch’s kids.

Lee could have told her story from any of these points of view. Instead, she embedded her main plot in a coming-of-age story and made her first-person narrator Finch’s eight-year-old daughter, Scout. As a result, she ended up with a far different story than she would have if the POV character had been Atticus Finch, Robinson, or the true assailant. A better story? A worse one? No one can say; we haven’t read any such alternate versions.

But certainly Scout is an effective choice. She meets the general criteria you should consider when choosing your POV character:

• Who will be hurt by the action? Someone strongly affected emotionally usually makes the best POV character (although Maugham, as we have seen, chose to sacrifice emotional immediacy for other goals). Scout is the victim of attempted murder by the disgruntled woman-beater and thus is in danger. Pick for your POV character someone with a strong stake in the outcome, including pain if the outcome will be negative. This criteria, incidentally, is why detective novels often work very hard to create a personal connection between the murderer and the detective. It raises the pain possibilities, which in turn increases narrative tension.

• Who can be present at the climax? In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is there. So is Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Your POV character should be, too, or else we’ll have to be told secondhand about the most important event of your story, thus distancing us from the action.

• Who gets most of the good scenes? We want to be present at those, too. Scout sneaks into the courtroom to witness her father’s defense of Tom Robinson.

• Who will provide an interesting outlook on the story? Scout brings to Lee’s novel an innocent, fresh view of racism that no adult could. Carraway similarly views the action of The Great Gatsby from a more idealistic, simpler vantage point than do its other characters, who are mostly New York sophisticates. What kind of observations about life do you want to make in your novel? Who is fit to make them? Do you want that character as your ‘‘eyes’’ and ‘‘heart’’?

• Whose head are you most interested in inhabiting during this story? Don’t underestimate this criterion; it really is key.

DIFFERENT EYES, DIFFERENT STORY

You may think you already know who your POV character will be. Perhaps you’re right. But take a few moments to imagine what your story might be like if you were to choose differently.

Let us suppose, for instance, that you are writing a novel about the abduction of a child. Major characters are the father, the mother, the child, the abductor, a suspicious-but-innocent neighbor, and the lead detective on the case. The child will be recovered, but the family will never be the same again. There are at least six potential novels here, all vastly different.

• If the mother or father (or both) is your viewpoint, you will likely find yourself writing a novel of anguish (which might very well be what you want). These are good points of view if, for instance, the couple will eventually divorce, unable to incorporate the strain into an already fragile marriage. Perhaps one of them has an extramarital affair after the abduction. Perhaps one mounts an independent investigation. Perhaps one hires someone to murder the neighbor, who is then revealed—to the characters and to the reader—to be innocent.

• If the child is the POV character, you have a novel of bewilderment, fear, maybe rescue or escape. You will, of course, lose all scenes of the investigation and of parental interaction, because the kid won’t see them. But you’ll gain a lot of scenes between the abductor and abducted.

• If the neighbor is the POV character, you will have a novel of injustice. This could be quite interesting; stories of people wrongly accused always make for strong reader identification. Everyone loves to cheer on an innocent underdog.

• If the abductor is the POV character, you probably have a novel of either evil or madness. What is his motivation? Do you want to explore that? If so, he’s your man.

• If the police officer or FBI agent is the POV character, you have a mystery novel. What’s this character’s stake in the conflict, beyond professional competence? Do you want to focus on how an investigation looks from the inside?

None of these POV choices is inherently better or worse than any other. It all depends on which suits the version of the story you want to tell. But if you don’t at least consider points of view other than the one that first occurs to you, you may be cutting yourself off from some very exciting possibilities.

Who among your assembled cast might be an interesting POV character with a more original outlook on the plot than your first choice? If you were not the writer but the reader, whose viewpoint might tell the most satisfying story?

CASTS OF THOUSANDS

How many points of view are you allowed? There is no one answer. A rule of thumb is: Have as few points of view as you can get away with and still tell the story you want to tell.

The reason for this is the aforementioned entrapment in our own skulls. We’re used to experiencing reality from one POV. Each time you switch from one fictional viewpoint to another, the reader must make a mental adjustment. If there are too many of these, the story feels increasingly fragmented and unreal.

On the other hand (there is always ‘‘another hand’’ in writing fiction), you may gain more than you lose. If you want to show how a romance feels to both parties, you need two points of view. If one character simply cannot be present at every important scene you need to present, you need more than one POV. You may need three, or even more, especially for a complicated or epic plot.

Figure out the fewest number of points of view you can have and still cover all major scenes and internal dialogues that your story requires. The point is to lessen the demands on the reader as much as possible so he can concentrate on the story and its implications, rather than being distracted by trying to remember what that eighth POV character was doing the last time we saw her, which was two hundred pages ago. Be aware that it can take a while to cycle through eight points of view and do justice to each one, and that too many points of view can be hard on the reader.

Then choose the best way to tell that reader your story.

  NANCY KRESS is the author of many short stories and books, including Dynamic Characters and Beginnings, Middles & Ends.