Beginning writers often come to fiction with ideas about point of view (POV) or perspective taught to them by film, television, and nineteenth-century fiction. In most films, you follow several characters around from room to room to abandoned warehouse to restaurant. Writers try around to imitate this technique, adding, without thinking too much about it, the big advantage fiction has over film: thoughts, the perspective from inside a character. Film is basically dramatic, with rare exceptions. In a play or film you hear a character speak, see his facial reactions and body language, and watch interactions, but you are not privy to the inner feelings of the character except through the technique of voice-over or soliloquy. Fiction can enter deeply into a character’s mind and senses. Then you choose to write from more than one character’s POV (which is discouraged for new writers) you may think you are treating a scene cinematically, but you are not. Be careful not to jump willy-nilly from mind to mind. If you’re intent on head hopping make sure your reader knows whose mind you’re in, by clearly marking off switched (use a line space between sections as well as clear reference to the new character’s name or tag soon after you change POV). Keep a balance of perspective as well. Do not write ten pages of a story from the female teenage cheerleader’s POV, then in the last two pages of the story from multiple points of view.
Remember that omniscience and multiple perspectives rob you of the writer’s most important tool, which is suspense. If you and your reader know what all the main characters are thinking, how do you maintain suspense? Omniscience died out as a common narrative device when cities became the predominant habitat for humans. Omniscience was possible in villages and tows. In the city, it was no longer plausible to imagine a whole group’s POV. (I wonder if murder mysteries, spurred on by Edgar Allen Poe, would have found a home in a world of villages.) Of course, metafiction and postmodern experiments have resuscitated a wide variety of readerly or historical approaches to omniscience.
Where there is a story, there is a storyteller. Traditionally, the narrator of the epic and mock-epic alike acted as an intermediary between the characters and the reader; the method of Fielding is not very different from the method of Homer. Sometime the narrator boldly imposed his own attitudes; always he assumed an omniscience that tended to reduce the characters to puppets and the action to a predetermined course with an end implicit in the beginning. Many novelists have been unhappy about a narrative method that seems to limit the free will of the characters, and innovations in fictional technique have mostly sought the objectivity of the drama, in which the characters appear to work out their own destinies without prompting from the author… Seeking the most objective narrative method, Ford Madox Ford used, in ‘The Good Soldier’, the device of the storyteller who does not understand the story he is telling. This is the technique of the “Unreliable observer.” The reader, understanding better than the narrator, has the illusion of receiving the story directly… The careful exclusion of common denominator, the paring of style to the absolute minimum- these puritanical devices work well for Ernest Hemingway… but not for a novelist who believes that, like poetry, his art should be able to draw on the richness of word play, allusion, and symbol. For even the most experienced novelist, each new word represents a struggle with the unconquerable task of reconciling all-inclusion with self-exclusion.
--BRIAN KITELEY
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