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Recently someone someone wrote to say they missed the feature called "what I was writing a year ago today," which had got lost in the move to the new webserver. So I put it back into the right hand column, but I just realized that it's not working, though I can't figure out why. So, I thought it might be a good idea to repost certain early posts, now and then, especially as the number of daily visits has increased by about a thousand fold. So here is an early post on POV.
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POV is one of those things that beginning students of creative writing find hard to understand. The simplest way to determine POV (the one that I use when I'm confused in my own writing) is this: who's got the camera? We're seeing and experiencing this scene through somebody's eyes -- who is it?
For a long time it's been fashionable to write in limited third person POV, which means simply that only one character at a time is holding the camera. You're inside Joe's head, watching a car accelerate toward a brick wall; then you're in Jane's. The contrast between how two characters experience the same event is one of the ways to use contrast to build tension. Mostly my work is in limited third person POV. Here's Albany in 1794 seen through Elizabeth's eyes:
The roads were crowded with housemaids swinging baskets on red-chapped arms; peddlers hawking sticky peaches, sugar-sweet melons, wilted kale; young women in watered silks with feathered parasols tilted against the sun; River Indians dressed in fringed buckskin and top hats; slaves hauling bales of rags and herding goats. It was not so dirty and crowded as New York had been, that was true. There was a pleasing tidiness to the brick houses with their steeply tiled roofs and bright curtains, but still the humid air reeked of sewage, burning refuse, pig slurry and horse dung. Elizabeth swallowed hard and put her handkerchief to her nose and mouth, wondering to herself that she had forgotten what cities were like in such a short time. Three months in the wilderness had changed her, stolen her patience for the realities of a crowded life.
And now from Nathaniel's POV
Because they did not have any other molds, Run-from-Bears had melted down about twenty pounds of the Tory gold in a makeshift forge and cast a fortune in bullets. These Nathaniel had been carrying in double-sewn leather pouches next to his skin since they left Paradise, ten pounds on each side. In Johnstown this unusual currency would have caused a stir, but Albany was a town built on some two hundred years of high intrigue and trading shenanigans. Comfortable Dutch and British merchants had made large fortunes running illegal furs from Canada, reselling silver spoons stolen in Indian raids on New England families much like their own, and bartering second grade wampum and watered rum for all the ginseng root the native women could dig up, which they then traded to the Orient at an outrageous profit. A sack of golden bullets would raise nothing more in an Albany merchant than his blood pressure.
It used to be that authors wrote almost exclusively in first person POV (David Copperfield, for example) or in omniscient third. Jane Austen is a good example of the latter case: the author sees all, knows all, and tells all. She sees simultaneously into the heart and mind of of Jane, Darcy, and Miss Bingley and understands each of them perfectly. She is, in other words, their god. Along with what they are thinking and doing, Austen gives us a running editorial (and a sharp-edged one) on the greater society in which this is all happening.
I have wondered if I'm even capable of writing a whole story or book in omniscient POV, and I think the answer is that it would be a great deal of hard work. Like learning to write with my left hand, almost. There are a few writers now who are moving back toward omniscient POV; take a look at Ann Patchett's most recent novel, Bel Canto (which won the Orange Prize and a lot of other critical awards last year), or the novels of Patrick O'Brien or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
And to state it clearly: I have over-simplified here. For a more detailed look at POV and the way it can be carved up, have a look here.
February 19, 2005 05:34 PM
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Comments
It used to be that authors wrote almost exclusively in first person POV (David Copperfield, for example)
David Copperfield starts off with quite a lot of detail about the day he was born, tho, with a lot of detailing of his mother's thoughts and other people's reactions, and he doesn't enter the narrative properly as a character for a number of pages -- it's much closer to the omniscient POV of Austen you describe above, even though it is in first person. Dickens rarely writes limited straight first-person narrative as we would identify it today.
Posted by: Moira at February 19, 2005 10:54 PM
true. I was oversimplifying; mea culpa.
Posted by: sara at February 20, 2005 06:50 AM
This has nothing to do with your post, because that's not why I am here. I just read your comment on Grrl's blog about the drive by, and I wanted to "shake your hand" as it were. Because you are the woman who SAID what those busybodies need to hear. You said to her! You told her to keep it to herself! I am in great admiration and awe of you for that, and I HAD to tell you. So thank you for sharing that on her blog, because YES!
Posted by: chasmyn at February 21, 2005 11:28 PM
chasmyn,
why, thank you. Kind of you to trek over here to tell me so. There were plenty of times when the right thing to say didn't come to me at the moment I needed it, though. Just for full disclosure.
And for those of you wondering: this has to do with a discussion at chezmiscarriage on the way mothers are given unwanted, undeeded, and often insulting advice and commentary -- that kind of drive-by. Nothing to do with guns.
Posted by: sara at February 22, 2005 07:11 AM