POV basics podcast—Plot Blueprint Podcast
Main types of POV:
--
1. 1st person
2. Omniscient
3. Third person
--
POV considerations—Genre= some genres have a conventional POV. YA is often in first person, Children’s is often in omniscient. Why? Historical fiction often omniscient (many characters, settings, long time range, distance seems to confer some authority).
Mystery--- traditional usually in omniscient. Detective usually in single third or first person. So the genre point of view depends on the SUB-genre!
Romance—dual third.
How close/distant is the perspective? How deep? Does the narration sound more like the character or the author?
How many POVs, and how often is there a shift?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of your approach?
---
Each POV approach has a single and multiple option.
Examples:
First-person— (I/we)
1st person-- Single: Rumpole of Old Bailey: I suppose, when I was young, I used to suffer with my clients. I used to cringe when I heard their sentences and go down to the cells full of anger. Now I never watch their faces when the sentence is passed. I hardly listen to the years pronounced and I never look back at the dock.
--
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding:
Sun 26 Feb
8st 13, alcohol units 2 (excellent), cigarettes 7, calories 3,100 (poor).
2pm Oh why hasn’t Daniel rung? Hideous, wasted weekend glaring psychopathically at the phone, and eating things. I cannot believe I convinced myself I was keeping the entire weekend free to work, when in fact I was on permanent date-with-Daniel standby.
Multiple first person-
Cashelmara: Susan Howatch
Edward: THERE WERE TWO SUBJECTS I never discussed: my dead wife and Cashelmara. So when Ifirst met a woman with whom I could discuss both subjects with ease, it was hardlysurprising that I should once again flirt with the idea of marriage.
Marguerite: No race on earth is as clever at being strangers as the British. They wrap themselves in formality, they withdraw behind veil after veil of exquisite politeness, they hide cunningly behind a bewildering array of carefully chosen façades—
--
Which Brings Me to You: Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott
John- “My own kind. I'm not sure there's a name for us. I suspect we're born this way: our hearts screwed in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we're deeply sentimental. Low-grade Romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music.
Jane- “You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.”
Consider a “Frame” for first person—why is this person telling this story- Joy Fielding, Missing Persons
It’s quiet in the house in the morning, what with everyone gone. I have lots of time to tape my report. I call it a report, but really it isn’t anything so clearly defined. It’s more a series of reminiscences, although the police have asked me to be as specific and as orderly as I can, to be careful not leave anything out, no matter how insignificant something may seem. They will decide what’s important, they tell me.
A Cask ofAmontillado (Poe)—Montresor is dying, confessing to a priest, but actually bragging.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled --but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity.
Poe was a master of the “unreliable I” == the first-person narrator who is lying to you and can’t be relied on for the truth.
First-person narrator now is usually the main character, but a narrator observing the main character was common in the 19th and early 20th century.
Moby Dick (told by a seaman, not Captain Ahab)
Dr. Watson, not Sherlock
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby- narrator (“I”) is Nick, main character is Gatsby, and we see him only through Nick’s perspective:
He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was
lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it or
choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt
his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't
something a little sinister about him after all.
"What part of the middle-west?" I inquired casually.
"San Francisco."
--
Multiple first-person POV=
Different purposes== The Rich are Different- Susan Howatch—to give audience the inside view on characters, so the first character hates second POV character—you identify with 1, and then with 2—the power of POV. Perspective
Incident at the Fingerpost (Iain Pear)= each narrator has a different contradictory view of what happened—an argument—Like Rashomon film.
My The Year She Fell by Alicia Rasley—there is a mystery, and each narrative tells an essential piece so only at the end can the reader put it all together.
---
Third Person (he/she/they/it)
Omniscient – 3 main options: Omniscient “god of the book” narrator-
Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen-
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Atonement by Ian McEwan:
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way—toward their owner—as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled.
Obtrusive Ironic narrator who talks directly to the audience-
At this point in the story, I feel obliged to interrupt and give you one last warning. As I said at the very beginning, the book you are holding in your hands does not have a happy ending. It may appear now that Count Olaf will go to jail and that the three Baudelaire youngsters will live happily ever after with Justice Strauss, but it is not so. If you like, you may shut the book this instant and not read the unhappy ending that is to follow. You may spend the rest of your life believing that the Baudelaires triumphed over Count Olaf and lived the rest of their lives in the house and library of Justice Strauss, but that is not how the story goes. Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
Contemporary Omniscient—
David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars:
Limited omniscient -Amity Harbor, the island’s only town, provided deep moorage for a fleet of purse seiners and one-man gill-netting boats. It was an eccentric, rainy, windbeaten sea-village, downtrodden and mildewed, the boards of the buildings bleached and weathered, their drainpipes rusted a dull orange.
Variation—Mixed- The Book Thief- First person/third
Third person- Multiple (within a book)
(within a scene)
Getting Hers by Donna Hill, see how the POV is “passed” from one character to another and each has a little bit of new information to contribute:
Kim’s alabaster complexion was dutifully shielded behind the black veil that dipped down dramatically from her wide-brimmed black hat. She brought a white handkerchief beneath the veil and dabbed at her dry eyes. Bastard, she muttered.
The reverend droned on about what a wonderful man Troy was while an endless stream of grievers marched up to the grave to toss a rose or utter words of sorrow and condolence to Kim. ...
On the far side of the proceedings, Tess McDonald desperately wanted a cigarette. Funerals, cops, pre-dawn phone calls, hot sex and situations out of her control always elevated her craving. Casually she looked the crowd over. Nothing particularly unusual, except that someone in attendance murdered Troy Benning.
From the opposite side of the hole, beneath the shadow of a spanning oak, Nicole Perez murmured Amen, along with the mourners. And good riddance, she added under her breath. ... No one could ever find out what really happened—or didn’t. She swallowed hard and tugged in a deep breath. This would all be over soon and the three of them could move on with their lives—whatever that may be.
= Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
Harry had the best morning he’d had in a long time. He was careful to walk a little way apart from the Dursleys so that Dudley and Piers, who were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime, wouldn’t fall back on their favorite hobby of hitting him. They ate in the zoo restaurant, and when Dudley had a tantrum because his Knickerbocker glory didn’t have enough ice cream on top, Uncle Vernon bought him another one and Harry was allowed to finish the first.
Harry felt, afterward, that he should have known it was all too good to last.
Single- Traditional third person—Hilary Mantel—Wolf Hall.
“Men, it is supposed want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows.”
Dean Koontz’s novel Mr. Murder --
Curiously, he has no recollection of having seen, let alone studied, a map, and he can’t imagine where this detailed information was acquired. He doesn’t like to consider the holes in his memory because thinking about them opens the door to a black abyss that terrifies him. So he just drives. ... At times like this, he desperately needs a mirror. His reflection is one of the few things that can confirm his existence. ...
He doesn’t know his name, only the names he will use while in Kansas City. He wants so much to have a name of his own that is not as counterfeit as the credit cards on which it appears. ... In a profound way, he does not know who he is. He has no memory of a time when his profession was other than murder.
Game of Thrones, George RR Martin:
The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement. This was the first time he had been deemed old enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the king's justice done. It was the ninth year of summer, and the seventh of Bran's life.
--
2nd person--- Bright Lights, Big City- Jay McInerney- You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again it might not.
Email to plotblueprint@gmail.com, and we will send free POV ebook—be warned. It’s long and sometimes technical and sometimes tediously detailed. But there are good examples and exercises.