By Brad
R. Cook
Having
seen some movies over the holiday season, including the really big one, and
then reading the backlash online, I wanted to talk about how writers use POV –
Point of View. This isn’t a post about the differences of First Person and
Third, or if Omniscient is better or worse than Limited, I want to talk about
how writers use POV to tell stories.
1 – POV limits the storytelling to one or a
couple of characters.
It
doesn’t matter if you use First Person and switch characters from chapter to
chapter, or if Third Person is used in limited or omniscient. By selecting one
of these storytelling techniques, the writer is choosing to tell the story from
a certain character’s point of view. Every story needs a main character, or
maybe an ensemble of central characters. But every person in your story, even
the poor side character that only walks into the scene with a glass of water,
has a story, a life, or actions that take place off page, or off screen.
2 – Point of View filters all information
to the reader
Locking
in a Point of View causes the reader to see and feel the story through that character.
What would Star Wars be without experiencing everything for the first time like
Finn, or through the hope Rey sees in the galaxy around her? We experience the
horrors and pain of the hunger Games through Katniss, and her interactions with
the other tributes. As writers, we control the emotional journey of the
readers, and that’s a good thing. We take the reader on a roller coaster through
our books, leading them through the low moments and raising them up to heights
of tensions and joy.
3 – Readers might think they want
everything but they really don’t
Readers
or movie goers might think they want to know what every character is doing when
not in the scene, or every character’s back-story, but in truth, they don’t.
Victorian novels, the really thick ones that everyone had to read in school,
but really we just watched the movie. The ones we tell people we’ve read, but
only really paid attention to in class. Except for some of us – I love those
novels, as well as a small group of professors and literary types. Victorian
novels are notorious for including characters that didn’t matter, or jumping
into elaborate back-stories that made readers wonder where the plot went. The
world has moved on from that kind of story telling – writers don’t get paid by
the word anymore. Readers want the plot, the action, and the emotion, in a
refined and polished story.
The
trick is to give a reader everything they need. A main character may not be
able to see everything a villain does, or every little moment of the story, but
the challenge for us as writers is to find ways to impart that information to
the reader. There are right ways (POV switches) and wrong ways (Info Dumps) to
include what can’t be directly experienced, but that is something for another
day.
I liked
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Sure it was overly nostalgic and made me ask a
thousand questions as I left the theater, but part of that is a time and pacing
issue, and part of it is that Rey, Finn, and Poe didn’t have all the answers.
Brad R.
Cook, author of the YA steampunk series, The
Iron Chronicles. Iron Horsemen - http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Horsemen-The-Chronicles/dp/0989207951 and Iron Zulu - http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Zulu-Book-Two-Chronicles/dp/0989207978.
He currently serves as Historian of St.
Louis Writers Guild after three and half years as its President. Learn more at www.bradrcook.com, on
Twitter @bradrcook https://twitter.com/bradrcook,
or
on his blog Thoughts from Midnight on tumblr http://bradrcook.tumblr.com/
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