Elements of Fiction

Focus on

POINT OF VIEW

Enhancing Your Understanding

Who’s telling this story anyway?

1Tellingthe Story

2I Spy

1st Person

3He said,

She said3rd Person

Telling The Story

What and Why

1

What is it?

What is it?If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.

Henry Ford

Why it Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view."

Noam Shpancer

(The Good Psychologist: A Novel)

Matters

“The choice of point-of-view will largely determine all other choices with regards to style, diction, characteristic speed of sentences and so on. What the writer must consider, obviously, is the extent to which point-of-view, and all that follow from it, comments on the characters, actions, and ideas.”

John Gardner

The Choice DOES Matter

2 First Person Point of View

Seeing it through my eyes

I

“I like to write first-person because I like to

become

Wally Lamb

the character I’m writing.”

“As I walked down the aisle to introduce myself to the teacher and get my slip signed, I was watching him surreptitiously. Just as I passed, he suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face – it was hostile, furious.”

From Twilight by S. Meyer

1st Person

EVERYTHING ABOUT ME

“All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the characters. In fact I am behind everything that happens and that is said.”

Pedro Almodovar 

ALL THAT I SEE AND HEAR

Mystery is another name for our ignorance; if we were omniscient, all would be perfectly plain.

Tryon Edwards

THE PERSONAL EFFECT

How 1st Person Narratives Affect Us

"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream."

Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness)

INTIMACY

“…intimate and immediate with no gulf between audience and action…”

Ted Pappas

YOU KNOW WHAT I KNOW

UNRELIABLE

“My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating”

Ashleigh Brilliant

3 Third Person Point of View

He said, She said, what?

he

he

s

het

y

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry… It’s like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”

Diana Abu-Jaber

It makes all the difference

The main advantage of the omniscient approach is that it's the easiest to handle. That's the major reason so many writers select it.

Arthur Herzog

OMNISCIENT

The All-Knowing Narrator

The old man was too quick for him. He sprang to his feet and leaped to the top of a large rock. There he stood, grown suddenly tall, towering above them. His hood and his grey rags were flung away. His white garments shone. He lifted up his staff, and Gimli’s ax leaped from his grasp and fell ringing on the ground…

The Two Towers by JRR Tolkein

Before long they saw the marching line approaching: the Ents were swinging along with great strides down the slope towards them. Treebeard was at their head, and some fifty followers were behind him, two abreast, keeping step with their feet and beating time with their hands upon their flanks…

THE GOD-LIKE EFFECT

How 3rd Person Omniscient Narratives Affect Us

“Writing is a form of personal freedom.”

Dan Delillo

FREEDOM

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

Cormac McCarthy

IN OUR HEADS

UNCONSTRAINED

"Time is an illusion."

Albert Einstein

THIRD PERSON LIMITED

“The third person [limited] narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.”

Andrew Vachss

LIMITED

3rd Person

As to where I am, I was, admittedly, lost for a moment, between Charing Cross and Holborn, but I was saved by the bread shop on Saffron Hill. The only baker to use a certain French glaze on their loaves - a Brittany sage. After that, the carriage forked left, then right, and then the tell-tale bump at the Fleet Conduit. And as to who you are, that took every ounce of my not-inconsiderable experience. The letters on your desk were addressed to a Sir Thomas Rotherham. Lord Chief Justice, that would be the official title.

Who you really are is, of course, another matter entirely. Judging by the sacred ox on your ring, you're the secret head of the Temple of the Four Orders in whose headquarters we now sit, located on the northwest corner of St. James Square, I think. As to the mystery, the only mystery is why you bothered to blindfold me at all.

Sherlock Holmes (the movie)

Limited

THE MOST COMMON EFFECT

How 3rd Person Limited Narratives Affect Us

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."

John Berger(Rondezvous)

FOCUS

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

Oscar Wilde

FORGIVING

COMMON

"Distance lends enchantment to the view."

Mark Twain

"Seeing things through a different set of eyes

the whole picture."changes

Cameron C. Powell

What’s Your Message?FOCUS ON FICTION