In a new post, Kristen Lamb says that the rules of POV have a purpose: to orient the writer towards the reader and bring them together. While new writers might fear the rules inhibit creativity and experimentation, Lamb explains that the rules are for the reader. Mastering them allows the writer to build a story that won’t collapse on itself and drive readers away. She learned that lesson the hard way in her early writing efforts.
“While my ‘novel’ made sense in MY head, everyone else was lost,” she says. “No matter how much wordsmithery I put into that manuscript, it didn’t matter because I confused my audience.”
As an example, Lamb examines the rules of POV and perspective. “POV is the most fundamental ‘writing rule’ we must understand if we want readers to not only want to set out on a journey, but finish it and love the experience,” Lamb explains. “We must ‘follow the reader’ in that we need to think through their perspective not just ours.”
Some questions to ponder: How is the reader being fed information? What details are important? Whose story is it?
Readers follow your story through the POV you choose, all of which function differently and have their own pitfalls. In first person, writers can mix up tense. Are you telling a story that already happened or bringing the reader along in real time? It’s easy to start in past tense and switch to present.
In third-person locked, your POV is through the eyes of a single character. If you’ve described something your character couldn’t possibly have seen or heard, you’ve broken POV. You might think a shifting third-person POV would handle that, but now you need to be careful of head-hopping: moving from one character’s POV to another without signaling the reader of the change.
Finally, there’s omniscient POV, where the writer can drop info a character could not know, but the reader should. “Which takes mad skills to do well,” Lamb warns. It is imperative we understand the writing rules of how, why, and when to use this POV. We can’t just do a bunch of head-hopping and claim it’s omniscient.” Another problem is that omniscient POV puts distance between the reader and your characters and can sound cold.
Second person POV is rarely used and Lamb says it’s creepy. [ed. note: agreed.] “The audience feels either lectured, attacked, or invaded,” she says. But done well, with an understanding of why it works and when it doesn’t, it can be an effective device for horror or unsettling literary fiction.
