POV Invitation

The beasts have breached the sanctity of the bed! It's adorable, but it's also slightly short on sleep. Still. They have a hard time working out that bed means sleep. This picture to the contrary notwithstanding. They seem to only want to sleep in the bed when the humans aren't in it. If the humans are in the bed, then it's a playground. Oh. And the elder girls are horrified by this development.

All righty. Why were we here? Oh yes! POV. You've had definitions. You've seen arguments regarding which POV goes with which genre. Some of us have expressed our preferences regarding which POVs we prefer either to read or to write.

Here's my slightly out on the fringe rant about Point of View.

It's an invitation. Point of view is my engraved invitation to you to enter into an emotional journey. How I word that invitation dictates how you'll experience the emotional arc of the story and the characters. First person asks you to step into the roll of main character. Third person puts you at a slight remove from that, but it allows you to slip on the masks of multiple characters rather than just the protagonist's. It's my job to decide how deeply I want to immerse you into the feelz of a book. If I'm writing Women's Fiction, deep emotion is the expectation and first person is going to make it easy for me to pull you in. Not to say that Women's Fiction can't be third person. It  can and often is. It's just that deep POV in third person is harder work.

Summary on that: POV is a tool that dictates how readers will experience emotion in a story. Know your story, your genre expectations, the limits of your toolset and then go forth and break all the damn rules about POV and story just to see if you can make it work.

Why do I say that? I have distinct opinions about what POVs I prefer. Distinct. Opinions. And every single time I voice them, someone comes along and writes a POV I profess to hate. They do it so skillfully that I end up loving it. So maybe I am finally learning to say, 'hey, with enough vision, skill and drive, you can make anything work.'

Another note on POV - I draft in first person and then (if the story calls for it) rewrite to third person. It's a tip an editor gave me back at the dawn of time. It was one of those things I shrugged figured I'd try once and discard, but it stuck. It forces me to really immerse into a character and connect with what's going on in a story. Does it make rewrites a pain in the kazoo? Absolutely. And yet if I try to skip it and write straight to third person, my beta readers throw things at me because half of the emotion is missing. So there you are. I write weird, I guess.

I'm sorry I don't have great golden wisdom to impart about point of view and how to pick which one is best. Emotion governs the decision for me - not mine. The reader's. Once I know what and how much I want readers to feel, I can make a POV choice. And like Jeffe said. No one wants to notice POV. They just want that invitation slipped into their hands so they can edge into the story and lose themselves  in it.

In keeping with the incredible shit storm that has been today, I'll tell you that I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for super early this morning. No problems right? Imagine my surprise when I check in on the blog tonight and my post is nowhere. Uhm. Blogger? Oh look. My SFF Seven THEMED post went live on some other random blog site. Nice. I'm comfortable certain those people think I am out of my damned mind. They may well be right. 

1st, 2nd, 3rd POV: Which Is Preferred By Me

When reading, which Point of View do I prefer? It depends on what I'm reading. Jeffe defines POV in her Sunday post, so I won't repeat it.

95% of novels I prefer told from a 3rd person deep POV because I like character-driven stories. 3rd omniscient steps up for epic adventures, but too often I feel that deliberate wall between me and the narrator. Choose Your Own Adventure novels totally need to be written in 2nd. I haven't tried RPG Lit yet, but I suspect those also lend themselves to 2nd.

1st Person--if done well--can be delightful, particularly in horror and thrillers, but it takes me longer to sink into the story. The two genres I can't--just can't--abide in 1st are Romance and Erotica. Makes me feel like I'm reading a phone sex script or having a TMI conversation with a creepy couple. That's not to knock the authors who write Romance & Erotica in 1st; there are a lot of readers who like R&E in 1st. I'm just not one of them.

If you're writing in 1st, I penned a cautionary post a few years ago about When the Kaiyaiing Beast Takes Over Your Writing.

Now, if you thought I was going to chat about multiple POVs (multiple characters) telling the story, well, I've got a post for that too: So Close To Perfection...If I Was A Hydra.  TL;DR:  I will wall bang a book at page 2 if there's head-hopping (changing which character is telling what part of the story without clear transition such as a scene or chapter break).

What's Your Favorite - First, Second, or Third Person?

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.