Point of view is quite easy to understand in that it refers to the character or characters through whose eyes the story or an individual scene in the story is going to be seen or be told. In brief, there are six viewpoints from which a writer can choose:
Objective viewpoint: in which the narration stays outside of the characters at all times and the story is told objectively and without attitude, as if by a reporter.
Omniscient viewpoint: in which an all-knowing narrator who is not the author but who exists outside of and beyond the author tells the story. The omniscient narrator is a powerful being who can telescope scenes, collapse scenes, summarize narratives, make comments about characters, and have opinions.
First person: in which a single character tells the story from her sole point of view and with her sole attitude.
First person shifting: in which the viewpoint character who’s telling the story alters as the story progresses. The alteration is generally indicated by new chapters or new sections of the book, but this—like everything else in novel writing—is not a hard-and-fast rule.
Third person: in which the story is seen and told through the eyes and with the attitude of a single character.
Third person shifting: in which the story is seen and told through the eyes and with the attitudes of multiple characters.
To choose a viewpoint, then, the writer must answer two self-imposed questions: Among the characters that I’ve created, who can tell the story best? and Whose individual story—as revealed in the character analysis—appears to be compelling enough to sustain a POV throughout the entire novel?
You’ll no doubt notice that first person POV and third person POV sound very similar, and they are. As I see it, the main difference is that with first person you have a narrator who is in a position to relate directly the action in a scene as well as her thoughts, feelings, and reactions to what’s going on. With a third person narrative, however, action is normally rendered, rather than related. We’re seeing it as it happens, not hearing about it later or merely being told it’s happening. Narrative reactions to what’s going on tend to be rendered as well.
What I mean by this is that the third person narrator isn’t simply “angry” as a first person narrator is. Instead, the third person narrator experiences the physiology of anger, relating for the reader what anger is doing to her body, without using the word anger at all: Her stomach tightens, heat suffuses her face, her head begins to pound, her teeth clench so hard that they ache. While a first person narrator would experience all this, it wouldn’t make sense to render it when the first person narrator could simply say “I was so angry I wanted to bite off his ear, just to taste his blood.”
You’ll also note that I haven’t mentioned second person as a point of view. This is because it’s rarely used, and even when it is used, its success is limited. For me, additionally, the reading of a second person narrative is both tiresome and exhausting. Because of its showboat nature, it draws attention to itself and, as a result, draws attention away from the story with its constant repetition of you. I see it working well in a short story or even in a few pages of narrative in the body of a novel. But I personally doubt my ability to sustain interest with it, so I don’t use it.
Once the writer makes the POV decision, the POV character or characters each must have a distinct voice. The POV character’s voice is not the voice of the author. Instead, it’s a voice that reflects who the character is, how the character thinks, what the character’s attitudes are, what the character’s agenda is.
Voice, then, is yet another tool the writer has to engage with the reader. Without it, a scene can lose a lot—if not all—of its punch. With it, the reader has a chance to connect in some way with the POV character. Engagement and connection are what lead to page turning in a character-driven novel. And any kind of novel can be character-driven: literary, commercial, genre-specific, young adult, children’s chapter books, and so on.
The following example is from Lynley’s POV. Hence, it should reflect who he is, how he thinks, what he feels, what he imagines, etc. And the voice of the narration is his voice.
Because there was no point in putting it off, he went to the phone and punched in the numbers. He was hoping that there would be no answer, just a machine picking up so that he could leave a brief message without the human contact. But after five double rings, he heard her voice. There was nothing for it but to speak.
He said, “Mother. Hullo.”
At first she said nothing and he knew what she was doing: standing next to the phone in the drawing room or perhaps her morning room or elsewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse, raising one hand to her lips, looking towards whoever else was in the room and that would likely be his younger brother or perhaps the manager of the estate or even his sister in the unlikely event that she was still down from Yorkshire. And her eyes—his mother’s eyes—would communicate the information before she said his name. It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.
She said, “Darling. Where are you? How are you?”
He said, “I’ve run into something . . . It’s a situation up in Casvelyn.”
“My God, Tommy. Have you walked that far? Do you know how—” But she didn’t say the rest. She meant to ask whether he knew how worried they were. But she loved him and she wouldn’t burden him further.
As he loved her, he answered her anyway. “I know. I do. Please understand that. It’s just that I can’t seem to find my way.”
She knew, of course, that he wasn’t referring to his sense of direction. “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders . . .”
He could hardly bear the warmth of her voice, her unending compassion, especially when she herself had borne so many of her own tragedies throughout the years. He said to her, “Yes. Well,” and he cleared his throat roughly.
“People have phoned,” she told him. “I’ve kept a list. And they’ve not stopped phoning, the way you think people might. You know what I mean: One phone call and there, I’ve done my duty. It hasn’t been like that. There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear.”
He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern—and what was worse, their expression of it—rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture. He’d left his home because of this, because on the coast path there was no one in March and few enough people in April and even if he ran across someone in his walk, that person would know nothing of him, of what he was doing trudging steadily forward day after day, or of what had led up to his decision to do so.
He said, “Mother . . .”
She heard it in his voice, as she would do. She said, “Dearest, I’m sorry. No more of it.” Her voice altered, becoming more businesslike, for which he was grateful. “What’s happened? You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve not been injured?”
No, he told her. He wasn’t injured. But he’d come upon someone who had been. He was the first to come upon him, it seemed. A boy. He’d been killed in a fall from one of the cliffs. Now the police were involved. As he’d left at home everything that would identify him . . . Could she send him his wallet? “It’s form, I daresay. They’re just in the process of sorting everything out. It looks like an accident but, obviously, until they know, they won’t want me going off. And they do want me to prove I am who I say I am.”
“Do they know you’re a policeman, Tommy?”
“One of them, apparently. Otherwise, I’ve told them only my name.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.” It would have turned things into a Victorian melodrama: My good man—or in this case woman—do you know who you’re talking to? He’d go for the police rank first and if that didn’t impress, he’d try the title next. That should produce some serious forelock pulling, if nothing else. Only, DI Hannaford didn’t appear to be the sort who pulled on forelocks, at least not her own. He said, “So they’re not willing to take me at my word and who can blame them. I wouldn’t take me at my word. Will you send the wallet?”
“Of course. At once. Shall I have Peter drive it up to you in the morning?”
He didn’t think he could bear his brother’s anxious concern. He said, “Don’t trouble him with that. Just put it in the post.”
He told her where he was and she asked—as she would—if the inn was pleasant, at least, if his room was comfortable, if the bed would suit him. He told her everything was fine. He said that he was, in fact, looking forward to bathing.
His mother was reassured by that, if not entirely satisfied. While the desire for a bath did not necessarily indicate a desire to continue living, it at least declared a willingness to muddle forward for a while. That would do. She rang off after telling him to have a good, long, luxurious soak and hearing him say that a good, long, luxurious soak was exactly his intention.
Here we have a scene in which two people of the same social class—Lynley and his mother—are speaking to each other on the phone. Because the narrative is in Lynley’s POV, some scene setting can be done, which I handle through his imagination: his mother is somewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse; she’s standing, her hand to her lips as she hears his voice for the first time in several months; she glances at whoever else might be in the room with her when she takes the call. Then comes a speculation about his mother from Lynley’s mind: It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.
Their dialogue needs to be specific to each of them, illustrating not only who they are as individuals but also what they are to each other. They have a checkered past that includes a sixteen-year estrangement. But tragedies have touched both of their lives, giving them a bond that I want the reader to see.
There’s a formality to their patterns of speech. This grows out of their social class as well as the nature of their relationship and the circumstances of Lynley’s departure from the family home to engage in the long trek on the South-West Coast Path. We see this formality in lines like “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders . . .” and “There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear” and “So they’re not willing to take me at my word and who can blame them. I wouldn’t take me at my word. Will you send the wallet?”
Lynley calls the dowager countess the formal Mother. He doesn’t use Mum or Mummy, and throughout the scene he keeps himself under a determined kind of control so that he can get through the conversation and state what he needs: his wallet, which contains his police identification. We know what he’s enduring in the scene because it’s told from his POV, and we see the excruciating nature of his suffering in his brief reflection: He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern—and what was worse, their expression of it—rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture.
So throughout, the reader is presented with Lynley’s attitude and his emotional state, and both his reflections in the narrative and his dialogue indicate this. At the same time, the reader sees his mother’s dialogue, demonstrating her voice, which is one of love and understanding and a desire to support her son. There’s an exposure to their restrained emotions, and throughout his mother’s dialogue we also see her attitude: She will indeed do anything for her son whose anguish touches her so deeply.
If you think about the character Barbara Havers and how her voice and her dialogue have been depicted in the readings so far, you can, I hope, conclude that she would not have approached a conversation with Lynley in the manner in which his mother approached it. As members of completely different classes, everything about the way they speak is crafted to show who they are.
The development of a character’s voice comes from the writer’s knowledge of the character. The more the writer knows about a character, the more easily the writer can develop the character’s voice. Daidre Trahair, for example, like all the other characters, was created in advance of any writing of the novel. Among other things, I knew that she is the oldest child of a tin streamer (someone who tries to make a living by extracting tin from river stones) and that she was removed from her home at thirteen years of age along with a brother and a sister. At the time of their removal the children were unkempt, uneducated, and badly taken care of. I knew that they were taken into care, and I knew that while Daidre ended up with a good family who saw to her needs and her education and who thought of her as their own child, her brother and sister were not so lucky. I also knew that until recently she had been estranged from her birth parents and her siblings. During the time of the novel, her mother is dying but persisting in the belief that a miracle can occur.
This is what Daidre sounds like in her own POV, her background allowing her some knowledge of mining that other characters might not share:
This part of Cornwall was completely unlike the vicinity of Casvelyn. Here, Daidre parked her Vauxhall in the triangle of pebble-strewn weeds that served as a meeting point of the two roads, and she sat with her chin on her hands and her hands on the top of the steering wheel. She looked out at a landscape green with spring, rippling into the distance towards the sea, penetrated periodically by derelict towers similar to those one found in the Irish countryside, the domiciles of poets, hermits, and mystics. Here, however, the old towers represented what remained of Cornwall’s great mining industry: each of them an enormous engine house that sat atop a network of tunnels, pits, and caverns beneath the earth. These were the mines that once had produced tin and silver, copper and lead, arsenic and wolfram. Their engine houses had contained the machinery that kept the mine operational: pumping engines that rid the mines of water, and whims that hauled both the ore and the waste rock in bucketlike kibbles up to the surface.
Like gipsy caravans, the engine houses were the stuff of picture postcards now. But once they’d been the mainstay of people’s lives, as well as the symbol of so many people’s destruction. They stood all over the western part of Cornwall, and they existed in inordinate numbers particularly along much of the coast. Generally, they came in pairs: the tower of the mighty stone engine house rising three or four floors and roofless now, with narrow arched windows as small as possible to avoid weakening the overall structure, and next to it—often soaring above it—the smokestack, which had once belched grim clouds into the sky. Now both the engine house and the smokestack provided a nesting place for birds above and a hiding place for dormice below and, in the crannies and crevices of the structures, a growing place for herb Robert’s pert magenta flowers that tangled with yellow bursts of ragwort as red valerian rose above them.
Daidre saw all this at the same time as she did not see it. She found herself thinking of another place entirely, on the coast opposite the one towards which she now gazed.
It was near Lamorna Cove, he’d said. The house and the estate upon which the house sat were together called Howenstow. He’d said—with some evident embarrassment—that he had no idea where the name of the place had come from, and from this admission she’d concluded—incorrectly or not—his ease with the life into which he’d been born. For over two hundred and fifty years his family had occupied both the house and the land, and apparently there had never been a need for them to know anything more than the fact of its being theirs: a sprawling Jacobean structure into which some long-ago ancestor had married, the youngest son of a baron making a match with the only child—the daughter—of an earl.
“My mother could probably tell you everything about the old pile,” he’d said. “My sister as well. My brother and I . . . I’m afraid we’ve both rather let down the side when it comes to family history. Without Judith—that’s my sister—I’d likely not know the names of my own great-grandparents. And you?”
“I suppose I did have great-grandparents somewhere along the line,” she’d replied. “Unless, of course, I came like Venus via the half shell. But that’s not very likely, is it? I think I’d have remembered such a spectacular entry.”
So what was it like? she wondered. What was it like? She pictured his mother in a great gilded bed, servants on either side of her gently dabbing her face with handkerchiefs soaked in rose water as she laboured to bring forth a beloved son. Fireworks upon the announcement of an heir and tenant farmers tugging their forelocks and hoisting jugs of homebrew as the news went round. She knew the image was completely absurd, like Thomas Hardy meeting Monty Python, but stupidly, foolishly she could not let it go. So she finally cursed herself, and she scooped up the postcard she’d brought from her cottage. She got out of the car into the chilly breeze.
She found a suitable stone just on the verge of the B3297. The rock was light enough and not half buried, which made its removal easy. She carried it back to the triangular juncture of the road and the lane, and at the apex of this triangle she set the stone down. Then she tilted it and placed the postcard of the gipsy wagon beneath it. That done, she was ready to resume her journey.
The first two paragraphs fix Daidre in place. We see what she sees and we learn what she knows about the mines in Cornwall and what they produced. We touch on her attitude with the smokestack, which had once belched grim clouds into the sky, and then we suddenly step away from the countryside with its ruined mine machinery as Daidre finds herself thinking about a conversation she had with Lynley in which she learns a bit about where he is from. She finds this intimidating, and her imagination presents her with an image of Thomas Lynley’s birth. She knows the image is ridiculous—like Thomas Hardy meeting Monty Python—but her own background makes it impossible for her to let that image go.
The end of the scene puts a period to her mental wandering, but it also adds another layer to the mystery of Daidre while laying down dramatic questions about why Daidre does what she does, about who she is, and about how she feels.
To illustrate how a POV character needs to have a voice dissimilar to other POV characters, consider the following introduction to a scene with Cadan Angarrack.
The rain stopped in Casvelyn not long after midday, and for this Cadan Angarrack was grateful. He’d been painting radiators in the guest rooms of Adventures Unlimited since his arrival that morning, and the fumes were causing his head to pound. He couldn’t sort out why they had him painting radiators anyway. Who was going to notice them? Who ever noticed whether radiators were painted when they were in a hotel? No one except perhaps a hotel inspector and what did it amount to if a hotel inspector noticed a bit of rust in the ironwork? Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. And anyway, it wasn’t like the decrepit Promontory King George Hotel was being taken back to its former glory, was it? It was merely being made habitable for the hordes interested in a holiday package on the sea that consisted of fun, frolic, food, and some kind of instruction in an outdoor activity. And that lot didn’t care where they stayed at night, as long as it was clean, served chips, and stayed within the budget.
So when the skies cleared, Cadan decided that a bit of fresh air was just the ticket. He would have a look at the crazy golf course, future location of the BMX trails, future site of the BMX lessons that Cadan was certain would be requested of him once he had a chance to show his stuff to . . . That was the problem of the moment. He wasn’t quite sure to whom he would be showing anything.
Indeed, he hadn’t been certain he was even supposed to come into work on this day, as he wasn’t sure that he had a job after what had happened to Santo. At first, he’d thought he simply wouldn’t show up. He thought he’d let a few days roll by and then he’d phone and express whatever condolences he could come up with and ask did they still want him to do maintenance work. But then he reckoned a phone call like that would give them a chance to sack him before he’d even had a chance to demonstrate how valuable he could be. So he’d decided to put in an appearance at the place and to look as doleful as possible round any Kerne he might run into.
Cadan’s voice needs to reflect his age and his attitude, and through a selection of details from his working life at Adventures Unlimited, we have a demonstration of both, supplemented by character-specific word choice. He’s been taxed with painting all the radiators in the decrepit Promontory King George Hotel, and he asks himself the pertinent question, What did it amount to if a hotel inspector noticed a bit of rust in the ironwork? Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. We learn that the hotel was merely being made habitable for the hordes interested in a holiday package on the sea and that these hordes didn’t care where they stayed at night, as long as it was clean, served chips, and stayed within the budget.
Cadan isn’t certain how he is supposed to be acting now that Santo Kerne is dead. At first, he’d thought he simply wouldn’t show up. He thought he’d let a few days roll by and then he’d phone and express whatever condolences he could come up with . . . But he goes to work instead and intends to look as doleful as possible round any Kerne he might run into. The selection of words and the arrangement of thoughts make it clear that Cadan is no mourner of Santo Kerne’s death. They also show his agenda—future site of the BMX lessons that Cadan was certain would be requested of him—and the frustration with which he daily greets the tedious work he’s been doing since being dismissed from employment at his father’s surfboard enterprise.
Compare Cadan’s POV voice to Ben Kerne’s POV voice in this scene with his wife, Dellen, in extremis over the death of their son:
He finally entered their bedroom at midmorning. Dellen lay diagonally across the bed. She breathed a heavy, drug-induced sleep, and the bottle of pills that had sent her there was uncapped on the bedside table, where the light still burned, as it had likely done all night, Dellen too incapacitated to turn it off.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She did not awaken. She hadn’t changed out of her clothing on the previous night, and her red scarf formed a pool beneath her head, its fringe fanning out like petals with Dellen its centre, the heart of the flower.
His curse was that he still could love her. His curse was that he could look at her now and, despite everything and especially despite Santo’s murder, he could still want to claim her because she possessed and, he feared, would forever possess the ability to wipe from his heart and his mind everything else that was not Dellen. And he did not understand how this could be or what terrible twist of his psyche made it so.
Her eyes opened. In them and just for an instant, before awareness came to her completely, he saw the truth in the dullness of her expression: that what he needed from his wife she could not give him, though he would continue to try to take it from her again and again.
She turned her head away.
“Leave me,” she said. “Or kill me. Because I can’t—”
“I saw his body,” Ben told her. “Or rather, his face. They’d dissected him—that’s what they do except they use a different word for it—so they kept him covered up to his chin. I could have seen the rest but I didn’t want to. It was enough to see his face.”
“Oh God.”
“It was just a formality. They knew it was Santo. They have his car. They have his driving licence. So they didn’t need me to look at him. I expect I could have closed my eyes at the last moment and just said yes, that’s Santo, and not have looked at all.”
She raised her arm and pressed her fist against her mouth. He didn’t want to evaluate all the reasons why he was compelled to speak at this point. All he accepted about himself was that he felt it necessary to do more than relay antiseptic information to his wife. He felt it necessary to move her out of herself and into the core of her motherhood, even if that meant she would blame him as he deserved to be blamed. It would be better, he thought, than watching her go elsewhere.
She can’t help it. He’d reminded himself of that fact endlessly throughout the years. She is not responsible. She needs me to help her. He didn’t know if this was the truth any longer. But to believe something else at this late hour would make more than a quarter century of his life a lie.
“I bear the fault for everything that happened,” he went on. “I couldn’t cope. I needed more than anyone could ever give me and when they couldn’t give it, I tried to wring it from them. That’s how it was with you and me. That’s how it was with Santo.”
“You should have divorced me. Why in God’s name did you never divorce me?” She began to weep. She turned to lie on her side, facing the bedside table where her bottle of pills stood. She reached for them as if intending another dose. He took up the bottle and said, “Not now.”
“I need—”
“You need to stay here.”
“I can’t. Give them to me. Don’t leave me like this.”
It was the cause, the very root of the tree. Don’t leave me like this. I love you, I love you . . . I don’t know why . . . My head feels like something about to blow up, and I can’t help . . . Come here, my darling. Come here, come here.
Ben’s choice of the powerful word dissected in reference to Santo’s autopsy acts as a means of shocking Dellen to move her out of herself and into the core of her motherhood, even if that meant she would blame him as he deserved to be blamed. Through this means, our storehouse of knowledge about these two people increases as the reason for his commitment to her becomes clearer to the reader. At the same time, the reader comes across that reference to blame, which prompts another dramatic question.
Once again, we see Dellen in manipulative mode as she asks why he never divorced her, as she weeps and turns from him, as she reaches for the pills she takes to relieve her of having to live with her mental illness and dysfunction. And with her words, “Don’t leave me like this,” we see the history of her marriage to Ben. His excruciating sense of responsibility has tied them together for more than twenty-five years, and she’s managed to keep that sense of responsibility strong in him, both immobilizing and imprisoning him.
Ben Kerne’s POV voice is nothing like Cadan Angarrack’s. His vocabulary is different, as is his attitude. Cadan’s use of idioms is absent in Ben’s speech, and the tone that grows from their two points of view is—or should be—completely different.
You’ve previously created an analysis of a character. Now create a scene, an opening for a scene, or a partial scene told from that character’s POV and using a minimum of dialogue. Your effort should demonstrate your character’s voice and should rise from your analysis of her or him. It should contain the character’s attitude and tone. Subtext will enrich the scene as will dramatic questions.
What you’re attempting to do is to show more about your character and your character’s attitudes through your choice of words. Word choice is always going to be an essential key to giving a character a narrative voice. Carefully selected adjectives (I call these attitudinal adjectives), adverbs, verbs, and nouns are critical here. So is the turn of phrase (like Thomas Hardy meeting Monty Python) that declares more about how a character is thinking and feeling than would full paragraphs of explanation.
A character’s POV voice adds color to the narrative. Getting to a character’s voice requires you to get inside that character’s skin and, as Atticus Finch would say, walk around in it for a while.
Using the list below, alter the words into attitudinal words or attitudinal phrases, all of which should reveal something about a character whose POV we’re in.
ADJECTIVES
Pretty . . . as scum on a pond.
Overweight
Ignorant
Bucktoothed
Ramshackle
Smelly
ADVERBS
Quickly
Fastidiously
Slowly
Awkwardly
Simply
Foolishly
VERBS
Break
Enter
Speak
Run
Burn
Cook
NOUNS
Mother
Dog
House
Boat
Teacher
Girlfriend