{"id":5245,"date":"2016-01-29T08:27:10","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T13:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5245"},"modified":"2016-04-14T16:14:01","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T20:14:01","slug":"whose-point-of-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5245","title":{"rendered":"Whose Point of View?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"onion,

(photo: Steve McFarland, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

Point of view is one of those tricky concepts for writers that is easier to talk about than to accomplish. I\u2019ve recently spent a lot of time in p.o.v. purgatory in my own writing and seen a heavenly example, as well.<\/p>\n

It is, of course, possible to write with an omniscient p.o.v. \u2014with the narrator \u201cthe voice of god\u201d that sees all, knows all, and can delve into anyone\u2019s and everyone\u2019s thoughts at will. I\u2019m very comfortable writing in the omniscient p.o.v.<\/a>, moving my characters around like chess pieces. Unfortunately, the omniscient p.o.v. is out of style these days, and the closer in to a single character the writer is (though that character may change from scene to scene), the happier readers are thought to be.<\/p>\n

I see the scenes in my novel unfold in front of me like a movie. And like in a movie, I \u201cknow\u201d what each of my characters is thinking and why they say and do what they say and do next, and I have a bad habit of writing that down. Fortunately (for me), my talented editor is a bear on p.o.v. and dings me for all sort of infractions I would have thought, \u201cHey, that\u2019s OK.\u201d And fortunately, I cannot peer into her mind when she\u2019s had to flag a p.o.v. problem for the umpteenth time. I can only guess what she\u2019s thinking\u2014and it ain\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n

Here are a couple of examples, from obvious to more subtle. For all of them, imagine you\u2019re writing a scene in which the p.o.v. character is a chef named Tony:<\/p>\n