Characterization through Point of View

My last couple of posts have looked at the challenges of viewpoint. But point of view is also a great tool, and one that can be fun. You can let your readers know more about your character, and how he or she sees the world. This is especially helpful if you’re writing about an unusual time or place, as in historical fiction, fantasy or science fiction. Regardless of genre, viewpoint can help your readers get to know your main character. 

Here’s an excerpt from The Well of Sacrifice: 

Feather was beautiful even as a child. She had reddish-brown skin, smooth and glossy like wet clay. Her dark, slanting eyes were crossed, and her high forehead was flattened back in a straight line from her long nose. ... Her only desire was to marry a noblemen so she would be allowed to wear gold and jade and to inlay her front teeth with bits of jade. ... I knew that I would never come near Feather in beauty....

This passage shows the narrator’s envy of her sister’s beauty, and therefore her feelings about her own looks. It also gives the reader insight into Mayan standards of beauty, so different from our own. Here’s a place where it’s okay to “tell” the reader that a character is beautiful, rather than simply “showing” it through the description. Description alone might make readers think that Feather was unattractive, so we need Eveningstar’s opinion for balance.

You can reveal both characterization and cultural information in third-person viewpoint as well. Here’s a passage from Jesse Owens: Young Record Breaker, in Alabama around 1920:

    J.C. heard a shout. He turned to see one of the landowner’s sons, Lawrence Cannon.
    “What are you looking at?” Lawrence said.
    “Nothing,” J.C. said. “I was just looking.” He smiled. His father had told him, always smile when you talk to white people. Be careful what you say.

And here’s a third-person example from my contemporary novel The Mountain (not yet published):

    Soon the river widened and water swirled slowly in a deep pool along one side. Surely a few fish would be hanging out there, where the swimming was easy but the water moved fast enough to bring in lots of fresh food. Jesse dropped to his hands and knees and crawled forward, keeping out of sight of the river. Trout were smart; if they saw your shadow or your silhouette they wouldn’t bite.
    He sat on a sunny boulder, ran the fishing line from the reel out through the ring at the end, and tied on a hook. He started to tie on a fake fly, then stopped. It was illegal to use live bait for trout fishing, because it made catching them too easy. But Jesse wasn’t fishing for sport; he was fishing for dinner. And suddenly he didn’t want to spend all day at it. He was always the good kid, the one people hardly noticed. What did he ever get for it?

I hope we learn a lot about Jesse from this passage. We see that he’s comfortable in the outdoors, and a good fisherman, even though I don’t say so outright. We also learn something about his personality, and a change he might be starting to go through.

Whatever point of view you use, try to show your readers how your main character sees the world. The following exercises can help you explore characterization through point of view. Feel free to post your results in the comments!

Exercises:
•    Describe a character from the POV of his or her best friend. Now from the POV of an ex.
•    Describe someone sitting in a field, lonely and sad. Then describe someone sitting in a field, enjoying the day.
•    Write about a time when your health altered your senses, such as a bout of vertigo, or a cold that interfered with your senses of smell and taste. 
•    Describe a heavy rain from the point of view of two or more of the following: a farmer during a drought; a child who wants it to snow; a thirsty flower; a pet dog who is outside and wants to get in; a weather reporter; someone driving home on dark roads.

Staying in Point of View

Last Friday I shared links to Anna Staniszewski’s explanations of point of view. Choosing a point of view is a major decision. After you’ve chosen, you have to stay in that point of view. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Be careful not to state what any other character sees, hears or thinks. If you want to share that information, you have to show it through the other character’s action, expression or dialogue. For example, here’s a scene from Haunted: The Ghost on the Stairs. Tania has fainted, and Jon is trying to comfort her:

    I sat in the chair next to the bed. I cleared my throat. “How are you feeling?”

    She didn’t look up as she whispered, “All right.”

    She was mad at me. I said, “I’m sorry. Really, really sorry, I mean it.”

    She looked at me then, her eyes wide. “Sorry? What for?”

    “For letting you fall! You were right next to me and I should have caught you.”

    She shrugged. “Oh, that. It doesn’t matter.”

    I stared at her. Something was bothering her, but what? She looked down again, and I could just see her cheeks getting red through her fringe of hair. But now that I looked closer, she didn’t look angry. She looked … embarrassed?

    “Hardly anyone saw you,” I said. “Just Bruce and me and a couple of people behind the desk.”

    “That’s good.”

    OK, so that wasn’t it either.    

Here Jon can guess what Tania is thinking and feeling, by how she behaves – but he may be wrong. 

Staying within one point of view is typically easier in first person, because any jumps to another viewpoint will be obvious. And when the narrator tells us how someone else feels, we’ll assume we’re getting the main character’s interpretation, and they may be mistaken. Just be careful about having your narrator correctly understand what everyone else is thinking and feeling, unless she’s highly empathetic or psychic.

Close third person is one of the other most common points of view – you show things through one character’s eyes. (Having multiple viewpoint characters is essentially the same, if you’re showing the scene through only one character’s eyes at a time.) Here’s where I see writers slip out of viewpoint most often, in order to tell us what another character is thinking or feeling. Make sure you’re showing only what your main character can see and hear. 

Beware also about slipping out of viewpoint to describe the setting, or action that the main character doesn’t notice. Phrases to watch out for (when “she” is your viewpoint character):

• She didn’t notice as he...
• The day was lovely, but she didn’t notice.
• Wrapped in her own thoughts, she didn’t see...

You can’t tell us what your viewpoint character is not noticing. You can have her barely notice something, or notice but not pay much attention. In a similar vein, you can’t have your viewpoint character fall asleep or go unconscious and then continue telling us what other people are doing or saying. You can have her fall asleep as someone is speaking, but forget the words by the time she wakes up again. But your main viewpoint character MUST be able to see, hear and/or feel whatever you share (or guess at it based on her observations).

And personally, I can’t stand foreshadowing with phrases such as She didn’t know it yet, but... or If she had known then what would happen.... It’s not only a viewpoint shift, it’s lazy writing. Don’t promise me that things will get more exciting in the future – make them interesting now.

Finally, be careful also about describing your main character’s appearance. For example, “Her blue eyes widened.” Granted, she knows she has blue eyes, and she may realize when she’s widening them. But would she really be thinking about the color of her eyes? That’s authorial intrusion, where the writer is trying to shove in some character description. To really stay in your character’s point of view, you have to show the world as she experiences it. You should be able to switch to first person, and still have it feel natural. For example, “I pulled my hair back into a ponytail” sounds natural. “I pulled my shoulder-length, blonde hair back into a ponytail” doesn’t quite, unless your MC is obsessed with her appearance.

Some beginning writers are tempted to use the omniscient viewpoint in order to avoid these complications. But true omniscient has its own problems. First of all, it’s less common today, especially in children’s literature, and can sound old-fashioned. (Writing as an outside, omniscient character can work for fables, folk tales and fairytales, which are traditionally in the storyteller’s voice and are supposed to feel a little old-fashioned). Second, the distance can keep your reader from feeling close to any one character. And third, most people who try it actually write in shifting third person, jumping between characters – which is probably the most difficult viewpoint to pull off successfully.

Exercises:
•    Review a recent piece of yours, checking carefully for subtle point of view shifts. Fix them.
•    Rewrite a short story, or a scene in a novel, from a different viewpoint. How do things change?

Making Sense of Point of View

Many of my published works of fiction—The Well of Sacrifice and the Haunted series—are written with a first-person narrator. In The Well of Sacrifice a young Mayan girl tells her story as she tries to save her city from a power-hungry high priest. In the Haunted series, 13-year-old Jon narrates his struggles with the pressure of parents, a crush on an older woman, and the outrageous demands of a little sister who is determined to help ghosts. In both cases, the voices just appeared in my head—even though I have little in common with a ninth century Mayan girl or a 13-year-old ghost hunting boy. The mind is a mysterious thing.

I wrote several novels in the third person that didn’t sell. Does that mean I’m better with first-person? Not necessarily, but I think that when I write in the first-person, I know my main character well. I can hear his or her voice, and I know how he or she thinks. I can’t even start until I know the character. 

Third person allows a bit of distance, as if I’m talking about someone rather than being them. This lets me write a book focused on plot, even if I haven’t fully developed the characters. The result can be a well plotted but lifeless book. 

Still, third person isn’t always a mistake, even for me. My middle grade mystery in ancient Egypt, The Eyes of Pharaoh, is in third person. Rattled, my first romantic suspense for adults, is in third person with two viewpoints, although Whispers in the Dark and my-work in-progress are first person. I’ve also used third person with success in the fictionalized biographies Jesse Owens: Young Record Breaker and Milton Hershey: Young Chocolatier (Childhood of Famous Americans series, written as M.M. Eboch).

Sometimes third person is the best choice. Maybe you want that extra distance. Maybe your main character wouldn’t make a great first-person narrator. I have one manuscript about a 12-year-old boy who’s not that talkative, so writing in his voice would make for a very short book. (having multiple viewpoint characters doesn’t matter, though, as you could switch between first-person narrators in different chapters.)

I find point of view choices interesting, but I hate trying to teach point of view. Fortunately, I found a great blog that already has summaries of the basic viewpoints! I’m passing you over to Anna Staniszewski this week. Click out her point of view posts through the links below, or start at her main blog page and either search for "point of view” or browse through her interesting posts. Next week, I’ll go into a little more detail about some of the subtle point of view mistakes I see. 

Anna Staniszewski on POV:

Choosing a Point of View 
Choosing the best POV for your story is an important step, but often people’s definitions of the different POVs vary so it can be tricky to know what you’re choosing and why you’re choosing it. Here’s my attempt at a simple breakdown of the most popular types of POV, with the pros and cons of each.

How POV Affects Character 
Last week I did a breakdown of the most popular types of POV and stressed how important the right POV is to a story. Today, I wanted to elaborate on that a bit more, specifically on how POV affects character.

Examining Omniscient POV 
Last week I looked at how POV affects character, specifically in first person and third person limited narration. Today I wanted to do one last post on point of view, focusing on third person omniscient, specifically involved omniscient POV since detached omniscient is pretty rare these days.

And here's a link to children's book writer Molly Blaisdell's Seize the day blog, with her Reflections: POV First Person, on the advantages and disadvantages of the "first person shooter" viewpoint, Third Person Limited, and omniscient viewpoint.