Minerva Spencer's kitchen in Taos - isn't it gorgeous? I'm up here visiting for the weekend and she wants me to tell you it's normally much tidier than this but we've been having an eating, drinking, talking writer's bacchanalia.
Our topic this week at the SFF Seven, to continue the contentious cycle of last week's one vs. two spaces throw-down, is: First Person POV vs. Third – or Second – Which Do You Like to Read?
I've blogged about this topic a fair amount and discussed it on my podcast. And I've been asked there to explain the difference between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, so I think I'll kick this topic off in part by defining some terms.
POV = Point of View
Point of view, commonly referred to as POV (Pee-Oh-Vee), is how the story is told, from what perspective. You can think of it like a camera recording the scene - it can be close up on faces or panning over the landscape. We refer to close up as "deep POV" and the most distant focus as omniscient, where the story is told by someone who knows everything that's happening and that everyone is thinking. Who is telling the story gives you the POV.
One way to look at the type of POV is like you may have learned in grammar or if you learned a foreign language. You learn to conjugate verbs according to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, singular and plural. For example:
Singular
|
Plural
|
|
1st
|
I am
|
We are
|
2nd
|
You are
|
You are
|
3rd
|
He/She* is
|
They are
|
*"They" is also appropriate for a gender-neutral 3rd person singular, though the verb conjugates as the plural.
Most writing is going to have instances of both singular and plural POVs, but whether the author chooses 1st, 2nd or 3rd person to tell the story - or a combination of those - affects a great deal about it.
First Person
First person POV, the "I" perspective has the camera very close, essentially inside the character's head, viewing the world through their eyes, knowing only what that person knows. It's the deepest POV.
Example: I was at the store the other day and saw the strangest thing.
Second Person
Second person POV is kind of funky but also hip, especially in more literary efforts. It speaks to "you," drawing into into the story as the character and telling you how you're behaving and feeling. This is also a deep POV, though I find it also has a distancing quality, like a game or a dream. It's almost always done in present tense (that I've seen).
Example: You're at the store and you see the strangest thing.
Third Person
Third person is the most traditional storytelling style. It can range from deep - though never quite as deep as first person - to omniscient. This is telling a story that happens to someone else.
Example: She went to the store last week and saw the strangest thing.
With all that established, what do I prefer, as a reader? I actually don't really care what POV a story is written in. I read for character and story and don't pay much attention to POV. That said, I don't love second person and it often reads as pretentious to me. And it's a flag that the story is meant to be more literary and I rarely enjoy something deliberately designed to feel erudite. Just me.
