A Different look at Viewpoint

One of the most interesting things, to me, about reading old (like, 1930s or earlier) how-to-write books is the way they look at viewpoint. Modern writing texts focus mainly on who the viewpoint character is, or on the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person) and how that affects what the writer can and can’t do.

Older texts have a different – and, I think, instructive – perspective. They’re less concerned with “who” and “how” and more concerned with the angle from which readers get story-significant information.

They start with the idea that, no matter who the viewpoint character is or what person the story is written in, there are two arenas in which story-significant things are happening.

The first is the actual physical world that the characters inhabit – the external world in which characters see things, hear things, do things. Unless you’re playing games with a character who has synesthesia, or with some kind of multiple-level reality, all the characters are moving through the same hard landscape. When George and Jenny walk into the dining room, and Jenny comments on the rug while George eyes the table, the reader assumes that the room contains both a rug and a table. Each character may have noticed different things, but what’s there is there.

Except in obviously surreal-reality stories, readers expect the external world of the story to be like the real world in that it doesn’t change arbitrarily. They also expect to see any key details somewhere, just as they would if they were looking at a photo or watching a movie. The author can play up some features and play down others (it’s a frequent tactic in mystery novels), but readers expect that if they missed a clue along the way, they are the ones who missed it.

The other viewpoint arena is the interior world – the world of emotions and reactions inside each character’s head. Some of these leak out into the exterior world through the character’s actions: Sam’s overconfidence makes him take unreasonable risks; Jenny’s fear of strangers makes her act cold or awkward when she’s meeting new people. The interior world is intangible, made up of beliefs and emotions which may or may not be true.

Regardless of who the viewpoint character is or what person you’re writing in, every single character in the book has their own individual interior landscape, which differs in various ways and various degrees from the interior landscape of every other character in the story.

How much of this interior landscape the reader gets to see directly depends on who the POV character is, what type of viewpoint the writer is using, and which bits of the character’s internal world the writer chooses to reveal. In a first-person stream-of-consciousness viewpoint, the writer gets to show the viewpoint character’s internal world in depth, but very little of anyone else’s. In omniscient third-person, the writer gets to show bits of any character’s internal world as long as it fits the narrative. In third-person camera-eye, the writer doesn’t get to show any characters’ internal world directly – cameras don’t have an internal world. In a tight or limited third-person viewpoint, the writer can show the POV character’s thoughts and emotions directly, but nobody else’s. In a multiple-viewpoint structure, the writer can show several different characters’ thoughts directly, but only the ones who are viewpoint characters and only in the scenes we see from their viewpoint.

The interior landscape – the thoughts, reactions, and emotions – of the non-viewpoint characters can only be revealed through their actions: what they say and how they say it; their facial expressions and body language; and of course the physical actions they take. Some are fairly obvious: one can be fairly sure that Gregory punched Sam because he was angry at what Sam just said. Others are unclear, at least initially: when Jenny gives the glass of orange juice a suspicious look, it isn’t clear whether she has something against orange juice or whether she just hates anything that reminds her of mornings, especially when she’s had to get up early for the third day in a row. If we get to see Jenny over several mornings during the course of the book, we may be able to figure out which it is.

Looked at this way, viewpoint is mainly about the different constraints the writer can choose to place on when and how they reveal the various characters’ internal worlds. It is about the possible levels of characterization of every person in the story, and revealing how the characters’ internal worlds differ, rather than just about “whose eyes do we watch the action through?”