Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Point of View

 Raiding Melissa Donovan's Writing Forward blog, again; specifically, her Narrative Point of View in Storytelling

The narrator of a story is the in-world storyteller, the voice that imparts the story events to the audience. Narrative point of view, often called POV, determines the position of the narrator, relative to the story. Points of view include first person, second person, and third person.

If readers envision the events of a story as a movie playing in their minds, then the narrative point of view is best described as where the camera is sitting at any given time. In the case of first-person point of view, the camera is inside the narrator’s head; we see the story through their eyes. In limited third-person point of view, the camera sits on one character’s shoulder; that character is not telling us the story, but we’re close to their perspective of events. In omniscient third-person point of view, the camera is pulled back so it can capture everything in the story objectively.

She provides a good discussion and examples of first-, second -, and third-person POV. She does not discuss head-hopping - a complaint KH relayed to me that was made of one of his stories, and one he made of me in "Best of Intentions" - but I think her post explains the different POV strategies to avoid head-hopping. 

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