Point of View in the Writing Process

Once I have committed myself to expanding that initial moment of creative fascination into the hard work of actually writing a book, or even a short story, the most critical thing is to choose what point of view I am going to write in.

In my early twenties I went to the old Charles Scribner store which was still on Fifth Avenue then, and bought John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.”

I then went to Japan to teach English and, in my spare time, begin to teach myself the craft of writing.  I read Gardner’s book avidly and, indeed, it was – although at times overly critical and even a little pompous – a wonderful introduction to how to write a novel.

I have never forgotten his summary of points of view: 1. First Person (the “I” saw, I heard etc.) 2. Third Person Subjective (where the “I’s” are changed to he’s or she’s and the story is told through what they see and hear) 3. Authorial-Omniscient where the author is, in effect, a kind of all-seeing god. She sees everything that is happening and describes it as she sees fit, she moves in and out of the characters thoughts as she likes and as she thinks the reader will like. In many ways this is the most liberating form of writing, but it is also the hardest to get right.

There are other points of view, particularly the second person, for example: “You are walking down the street and you see your ex-lover walking towards you. You feel . . .” etc, etc. And there are experimental narrative techniques that a number of writers use, more, or (often) less successfully, but I’m not going to look at those for this article. I’m going to stick to the basics.

Each story has its own point of view that will come to you either immediately, or with some effort.  At times, it’s worth rewriting part of the story you are working on in another point of view to see how that works to capture the drama and emotion that you want to get across to your reader. 

So, let’s look at point of view in different books which you’ve probably read. And if you haven’t, they certainly are worth reading.

 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a clear example of the First Person style. Nick Carraway, the narrator takes us into the world of 1920s fashionable, rich New York, and we go along with him on this fascinating and, ultimately disturbing, journey.  The trick that Fitzgerald uses to keep us reading is that he makes us trust Nick from the very beginning. “I’m inclined to reserve all judgements,” he tells us about himself in the first 10 lines of the book. This, he explains, comes from his deep but reserved communication style with his father.  We all have fathers, and we all know how they have influenced us in one way or another, so we can relate to Nick and we believe the story he tells us is worth listening to.

One of the most powerful examples of Third Person Subjective is Can Themba’s story The Suit which he wrote in 1963 and was banned by the apartheid government.

In this sad story Philemon and his wife Matilda live in Sophiatown and we see the world through his eyes – almost as if he had a camera on his forehead recording what he sees and hears. Very early in the story we see, through his experience, how Philemon loves his wife: “Breakfast! How he enjoyed taking in a tray of warm breakfast to his wife, cuddled in bed. To appear there in his supreme immaculacy, tray in hand when his wife came out of ether to behold him. These things we blacks want to do for our own . . . not fawningly for the whites for whom we bloody-well got to do it.”

This point of view gives us a deep intimacy with Philemon. We feel his love for his wife, and his desperate anger over the injustice of apartheid and how it distorts his life. It works to take us directly into Philemon’s head in a way that a First Person narrator could never do.  However, when you read the story you will see that we never get inside Matilda’s head properly. We never really understand how she feels and how she is hurt too. So, this is a danger with this technique, it can become too limiting in telling us the world of the story outside the main character.

One of the most sophisticated and skilled writers to use the Authorial-Ominiscient point of view is Jane Austen in her classic Pride and Prejudice. She has access to all her characters minds, and to their thoughts and feelings. She tells us what they say, and, very often, even comments on why they are saying it. Often, she limits the point of view to her main character Elizabeth Bennet, but when she feels like broadening out to tell us something else she does so. 

To get a sense of her doing this we need a slightly longer extract. This is a discussion between Mr Bennet and his wife over their daughters’ marriageability and begins with Mrs Bennet:

“You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor

nerves.

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves.
They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consid-
eration these last twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of
four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will
not visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit
them all.”

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind
was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get
her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”

Jane Austen is completely in control of her story and her characters. Reading Pride and Prejudice in comparison to the other two examples is like moving from listening to a beautifully-expressed solo instrument played by geniuses like Fitzgerald and Themba, to listening to the varied glory of an entire orchestra of sounds, voices and colourful scenes – and no one has ever conducted such an orchestra of emotion better than Jane Austen!

There is one more example I would like to consider: that of the famously difficult genius Fyodor Dostoevsky.  In his – famously difficult – novel The Brothers Karamazov he varies his viewpoint so widely and so inconsistently that it is sometimes almost impossible to understand exactly who is telling the story and to work out where one narrator leaves off and another. He starts off the novel with a preface “From The Author” where he tells us immediately that his hero Aleksey Fyodorovich is in “no way a man of greatness.” And then goes on to pose the question we must all ask ourselves before attempting a huge brick of a Dostoevsky novel: “Why must I, the reader, expend my time in the study of the facts and events of his life?”

There is no good answer to this question – except that for those of us who love reading and storytelling, Dostoevsky presents the same kind of challenge that running a marathon does to an athlete. It is simply extraordinary to work one’s way through the labyrinth of Dostoevsky’s wild and absolutely courageous mind. Be warned: not everything about him is praiseworthy. He was a terrible anti-Semite and had an arrogantly flawed vision of Russian superiority which is deeply troubling in today’s world considering the bloody invasion of Ukraine. However, he did things as a writer that very few, if any, other writers have ever dared to do. His work is like an orchestra, a circus, and a series of passionate philosophical debates all taking place within a blood-stained murder scene where the evidence has been hopelessly trampled over, like the confusing shifts of understanding in the quote below:

“Well, in that case it was the Devil who killed my father!” suddenly burst from Mitya, as though until that moment he all the time been wondering: “Was it Smerdyakov or was it not?”

In another quiet, placid scene where he describes a Russian garden, he tells uncertainly about a beautiful summer house that will become crucial as evidence to the murder. He tells us it “had been built God only knows when, some fifty years ago according to local legend.”

You’ll have to read the book to understand this fully, but as a narrator he is unique. He leads us all around the world he creates, seldom settling on one incontrovertible fact and never allowing us to believe in one unwavering truth. Despite his flaws as a human being, as a writer, he shows us the world as we ourselves try, and often fail, to understand it and then explain it. He gambles that the more he openly doubts himself on the page, the more we will trust him as a storyteller.

I’m not convinced it always works and, for myself, I choose to stick to the traditional ways of telling a story from a particular point of view. However, these too, have their limits, and, like Dostoevsky, we should never stop trying to find new and different ways to fascinate our readers.

When I start a book I usually start with an idea – a memory, an image, or something sparked off by an anecdote I have read that makes me think: “What a great idea, I would love to write a book about that!” Of course, there’s a long way between the initial idea and the final printed book, and some ideas never make it beyond that first, unexpected flash of interest.

Once I have committed myself to expanding that initial moment of creative fascination into the hard work of actually writing a book, or even a short story, the most critical thing is to choose what point of view I am going to write in.

In my early twenties I went to the old Charles Scribner store which was still on Fifth Avenue then, and bought John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.”

I then went to Japan to teach English and, in my spare time, begin to teach myself the craft of writing.  I read Gardner’s book avidly and, indeed, it was – although at times overly critical and even a little pompous – a wonderful introduction to how to write a novel.

I have never forgotten his summary of points of view: 1. First Person (the “I” saw, I heard etc.) 2. Third Person Subjective (where the “I’s” are changed to he’s or she’s and the story is told through what they see and hear) 3. Authorial-Omniscient where the author is, in effect, a kind of all-seeing god. She sees everything that is happening and describes it as she sees fit, she moves in and out of the characters thoughts as she likes and as she thinks the reader will like. In many ways this is the most liberating form of writing, but it is also the hardest to get right.

There are other points of view, particularly the second person, for example: “You are walking down the street and you see your ex-lover walking towards you. You feel . . .” etc, etc. And there are experimental narrative techniques that a number of writers use, more, or (often) less successfully, but I’m not going to look at those for this article. I’m going to stick to the basics.

Each story has its own point of view that will come to you either immediately, or with some effort.  At times, it’s worth rewriting part of the story you are working on in another point of view to see how that works to capture the drama and emotion that you want to get across to your reader. 

So, let’s look at point of view in different books which you’ve probably read. And if you haven’t, they certainly are worth reading.

 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a clear example of the First Person style. Nick Carraway, the narrator takes us into the world of 1920s fashionable, rich New York, and we go along with him on this fascinating and, ultimately disturbing, journey.  The trick that Fitzgerald uses to keep us reading is that he makes us trust Nick from the very beginning. “I’m inclined to reserve all judgements,” he tells us about himself in the first 10 lines of the book. This, he explains, comes from his deep but reserved communication style with his father.  We all have fathers, and we all know how they have influenced us in one way or another, so we can relate to Nick and we believe the story he tells us is worth listening to.

One of the most powerful examples of Third Person Subjective is Can Themba’s story The Suit which he wrote in 1963 and was banned by the apartheid government.

In this sad story Philemon and his wife Matilda live in Sophiatown and we see the world through his eyes – almost as if he had a camera on his forehead recording what he sees and hears. Very early in the story we see, through his experience, how Philemon loves his wife: “Breakfast! How he enjoyed taking in a tray of warm breakfast to his wife, cuddled in bed. To appear there in his supreme immaculacy, tray in hand when his wife came out of ether to behold him. These things we blacks want to do for our own . . . not fawningly for the whites for whom we bloody-well got to do it.”

This point of view gives us a deep intimacy with Philemon. We feel his love for his wife, and his desperate anger over the injustice of apartheid and how it distorts his life. It works to take us directly into Philemon’s head in a way that a First Person narrator could never do.  However, when you read the story you will see that we never get inside Matilda’s head properly. We never really understand how she feels and how she is hurt too. So, this is a danger with this technique, it can become too limiting in telling us the world of the story outside the main character.

One of the most sophisticated and skilled writers to use the Authorial-Ominiscient point of view is Jane Austen in her classic Pride and Prejudice. She has access to all her characters minds, and to their thoughts and feelings. She tells us what they say, and, very often, even comments on why they are saying it. Often, she limits the point of view to her main character Elizabeth Bennet, but when she feels like broadening out to tell us something else she does so. 

To get a sense of her doing this we need a slightly longer extract. This is a discussion between Mr Bennet and his wife over their daughters’ marriageability and begins with Mrs Bennet:

“You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor

nerves.

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves.
They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consid-
eration these last twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of
four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will
not visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit
them all.”

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind
was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understand-
ing, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discon-
tented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get
her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”

Jane Austen is completely in control of her story and her characters. Reading Pride and Prejudice in comparison to the other two examples is like moving from listening to a beautifully-expressed solo instrument played by geniuses like Fitzgerald and Themba, to listening to the varied glory of an entire orchestra of sounds, voices and colourful scenes – and no one has ever conducted such an orchestra of emotion better than Jane Austen!

There is one more example I would like to consider: that of the famously difficult genius Fyodor Dostoevsky.  In his – famously difficult – novel The Brothers Karamazov he varies his viewpoint so widely and so inconsistently that it is sometimes almost impossible to understand exactly who is telling the story and to work out where one narrator leaves off and another. He starts off the novel with a preface “From The Author” where he tells us immediately that his hero Aleksey Fyodorovich is in “no way a man of greatness.” And then goes on to pose the question we must all ask ourselves before attempting a huge brick of a Dostoevsky novel: “Why must I, the reader, expend my time in the study of the facts and events of his life?”

There is no good answer to this question – except that for those of us who love reading and storytelling, Dostoevsky presents the same kind of challenge that running a marathon does to an athlete. It is simply extraordinary to work one’s way through the labyrinth of Dostoevsky’s wild and absolutely courageous mind. Be warned: not everything about him is praiseworthy. He was a terrible anti-Semite and had an arrogantly flawed vision of Russian superiority which is deeply troubling in today’s world considering the bloody invasion of Ukraine. However, he did things as a writer that very few, if any, other writers have ever dared to do. His work is like an orchestra, a circus, and a series of passionate philosophical debates all taking place within a blood-stained murder scene where the evidence has been hopelessly trampled over, like the confusing shifts of understanding in the quote below:

“Well, in that case it was the Devil who killed my father!” suddenly burst from Mitya, as though until that moment he all the time been wondering: “Was it Smerdyakov or was it not?”

In another quiet, placid scene where he describes a Russian garden he tells uncertainly about a beautiful summer house that will become crucial as evidence to the murder. He tells us it “had been built God only knows when, some fifty years ago according to local legend.”

You’ll have to read the book to understand this fully, but as a narrator he is unique. He leads us all around the world he creates, seldom settling on one incontrovertible fact and never allowing us to believe in one unwavering truth. Despite his flaws as a human being, as a writer, he shows us the world as we ourselves try, and often fail, to understand it and then explain it. He gambles that the more he openly doubts himself on the page, the more we will trust him as a storyteller.

I’m not convinced it always works and, for myself, I choose to stick to the traditional ways of telling a story from a particular point of view. However, these too, have their limits, and, like Dostoevsky, we should never stop trying to find new and different ways to fascinate our readers.

When I start a book I usually start with an idea – a memory, an image, or something sparked off by an anecdote I have read that makes me think: “What a great idea, I would love to write a book about that!” Of course, there’s a long way between the initial idea and the final printed book, and some ideas never make it beyond that first, unexpected flash of interest.

Once I have committed myself to expanding that initial moment of creative fascination into the hard work of actually writing a book, or even a short story, the most critical thing is to choose what point of view I am going to write in.

In my early twenties I went to the old Charles Scribner store which was still on Fifth Avenue then, and bought John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.”

I then went to Japan to teach English and, in my spare time, begin to teach myself the craft of writing.  I read Gardner’s book avidly and, indeed, it was – although at times overly critical and even a little pompous – a wonderful introduction to how to write a novel.

I have never forgotten his summary of points of view: 1. First Person (the “I” saw, I heard etc.) 2. Third Person Subjective (where the “I’s” are changed to he’s or she’s and the story is told through what they see and hear) 3. Authorial-Omniscient where the author is, in effect, a kind of all-seeing god. She sees everything that is happening and describes it as she sees fit, she moves in and out of the characters thoughts as she likes and as she thinks the reader will like. In many ways this is the most liberating form of writing, but it is also the hardest to get right.

There are other points of view, particularly the second person, for example: “You are walking down the street and you see your ex-lover walking towards you. You feel . . .” etc, etc. And there are experimental narrative techniques that a number of writers use, more, or (often) less successfully, but I’m not going to look at those for this article. I’m going to stick to the basics.

Each story has its own point of view that will come to you either immediately, or with some effort.  At times, it’s worth rewriting part of the story you are working on in another point of view to see how that works to capture the drama and emotion that you want to get across to your reader. 

So, let’s look at point of view in different books which you’ve probably read. And if you haven’t, they certainly are worth reading.

 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a clear example of the First Person style. Nick Carraway, the narrator takes us into the world of 1920s fashionable, rich New York, and we go along with him on this fascinating and, ultimately disturbing, journey.  The trick that Fitzgerald uses to keep us reading is that he makes us trust Nick from the very beginning. “I’m inclined to reserve all judgements,” he tells us about himself in the first 10 lines of the book. This, he explains, comes from his deep but reserved communication style with his father.  We all have fathers, and we all know how they have influenced us in one way or another, so we can relate to Nick and we believe the story he tells us is worth listening to.

One of the most powerful examples of Third Person Subjective is Can Themba’s story The Suit which he wrote in 1963 and was banned by the apartheid government.

In this sad story Philemon and his wife Matilda live in Sophiatown and we see the world through his eyes – almost as if he had a camera on his forehead recording what he sees and hears. Very early in the story we see, through his experience, how Philemon loves his wife: “Breakfast! How he enjoyed taking in a tray of warm breakfast to his wife, cuddled in bed. To appear there in his supreme immaculacy, tray in hand when his wife came out of ether to behold him. These things we blacks want to do for our own . . . not fawningly for the whites for whom we bloody-well got to do it.”

This point of view gives us a deep intimacy with Philemon. We feel his love for his wife, and his desperate anger over the injustice of apartheid and how it distorts his life. It works to take us directly into Philemon’s head in a way that a First Person narrator could never do.  However, when you read the story you will see that we never get inside Matilda’s head properly. We never really understand how she feels and how she is hurt too. So, this is a danger with this technique, it can become too limiting in telling us the world of the story outside the main character.

One of the most sophisticated and skilled writers to use the Authorial-Ominiscient point of view is Jane Austen in her classic Pride and Prejudice. She has access to all her characters minds, and to their thoughts and feelings. She tells us what they say, and, very often, even comments on why they are saying it. Often, she limits the point of view to her main character Elizabeth Bennet, but when she feels like broadening out to tell us something else she does so. 

To get a sense of her doing this we need a slightly longer extract. This is a discussion between Mr Bennet and his wife over their daughters’ marriageability and begins with Mrs Bennet:

“You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor

nerves.

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves.
They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consid-
eration these last twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of
four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will
not visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit
them all.”

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind
was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understand-
ing, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discon-
tented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get
her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”

Jane Austen is completely in control of her story and her characters. Reading Pride and Prejudice in comparison to the other two examples is like moving from listening to a beautifully-expressed solo instrument played by geniuses like Fitzgerald and Themba, to listening to the varied glory of an entire orchestra of sounds, voices and colourful scenes – and no one has ever conducted such an orchestra of emotion better than Jane Austen!

There is one more example I would like to consider: that of the famously difficult genius Fyodor Dostoevsky.  In his – famously difficult – novel The Brothers Karamazov he varies his viewpoint so widely and so inconsistently that it is sometimes almost impossible to understand exactly who is telling the story and to work out where one narrator leaves off and another. He starts off the novel with a preface “From The Author” where he tells us immediately that his hero Aleksey Fyodorovich is in “no way a man of greatness.” And then goes on to pose the question we must all ask ourselves before attempting a huge brick of a Dostoevsky novel: “Why must I, the reader, expend my time in the study of the facts and events of his life?”

There is no good answer to this question – except that for those of us who love reading and storytelling, Dostoevsky presents the same kind of challenge that running a marathon does to an athlete. It is simply extraordinary to work one’s way through the labyrinth of Dostoevsky’s wild and absolutely courageous mind. Be warned: not everything about him is praiseworthy. He was a terrible anti-Semite and had an arrogantly flawed vision of Russian superiority which is deeply troubling in today’s world considering the bloody invasion of Ukraine. However, he did things as a writer that very few, if any, other writers have ever dared to do. His work is like an orchestra, a circus, and a series of passionate philosophical debates all taking place within a blood-stained murder scene where the evidence has been hopelessly trampled over, like the confusing shifts of understanding in the quote below:

“Well, in that case it was the Devil who killed my father!” suddenly burst from Mitya, as though until that moment he all the time been wondering: “Was it Smerdyakov or was it not?”

In another quiet, placid scene where he describes a Russian garden he tells uncertainly about a beautiful summer house that will become crucial as evidence to the murder. He tells us it “had been built God only knows when, some fifty years ago according to local legend.”

You’ll have to read the book to understand this fully, but as a narrator he is unique. He leads us all around the world he creates, seldom settling on one incontrovertible fact and never allowing us to believe in one unwavering truth. Despite his flaws as a human being, as a writer, he shows us the world as we ourselves try, and often fail, to understand it and then explain it. He gambles that the more he openly doubts himself on the page, the more we will trust him as a storyteller.

I’m not convinced it always works and, for myself, I choose to stick to the traditional ways of telling a story from a particular point of view. However, these too, have their limits, and, like Dostoevsky, we should never stop trying to find new and different ways to fascinate our readers.