First, an announcement of sorts: my webmaster has gotten the handout I use on viewpoint put up on my web page. It’s accessible through the “links” page, or directly from here.
That handout covers some (not all) of the types of viewpoint – first person, epistolary, stream-of-consciousness, second person, tight-third person, camera eye, etc. Plus multiple viewpoint, which I consider a structure, rather than a type of viewpoint, but which there’s so much confusion about that I felt I needed to include it.
One of the things I did not include is something I ran across years ago in a how-to-write book that I think raised some interesting points, while also totally missing the boat when it came to what was actually going on.
The author was discussing uncommon viewpoints, starting with second person (“you do this”) and stream-of-consciousness, both of which were well and good. But then he got into what he called “combined viewpoints,” things he said were mixtures of first-person and second- or third-person, and I wanted to throw the book across the room.
Because “I thought of you” is not a combination of two viewpoints (as the author claimed); it’s solidly first-person. It does something unusual in fiction by dragging the reader directly into the story as the character “you,” but “you” is not a second viewpoint, any more than John would be if the sentence were “I thought of John.” The story is presented by the “I” character; that’s whose eyes it’s seen through, and no matter how convoluted and lovely the sentences addressed to “you,” “you” never becomes the viewpoint.
The second example, which was supposed to be a combination of first- and third-person, was muddled enough that I couldn’t tell whether what he had was a first-person narrator telling a story (“Let me tell you what happened. Bob walked up to the house…”) or whether it was a true mid-story change in viewpoint type (“I fell asleep. Jenny slept until midnight…” where “I” and “Jenny” are the same character). Even if it was the latter, I still wouldn’t call it a combined viewpoint, though, because the types of viewpoint aren’t ever truly combined. They come one after the other; it’s a shift, not a combination.
But the whole thing has been nagging at me for years, and I finally figured out that it’s because some stories do change viewpoint type and/or viewpoint character one or more times in mid-story. These aren’t combined viewpoints, though, any more than stacking two Lego blocks together makes them somehow a new, single Lego block. They’re stuck together as a unit, which is useful, but they’re still the same two blocks you started with. What these stories do is nesting viewpoints, one inside another, for different parts of the story.
Foremost among the viewpoint-shifting techniques is the frame story, which has largely gone out of style these days. In a frame story, the author starts with one viewpoint character, who at some point meets another character who tells the original POV character the main story. Frequently, there’s a shift in viewpoint type when the storytelling starts; if the frame was in third-person, the body of the story will be in first-person, for instance. This helps set off the “frame” part of the tale from the rest of the story.
But there are also tales-within-tales; the Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights Entertainment) is probably the best known and most complex of these, but you see the same sort of character-telling-a-story-to-other-characters in many other novels. This can range from the detective’s summing-up at the end of a murder mystery to one character bringing the others up to speed on a critical incident they haven’t heard about to someone reading a book or newspaper clipping to a character telling bedtime stories. Sometimes, the viewpoint and/or voice of the tale-within-the-tale is the same as that of the main story; sometimes it’s not.
There are also times when the writer wants to shift the viewpoint type just slightly – from a standard first-person to epistolary when the POV character writes a letter, or from standard first to something closer to stream-of-consciousness for an action scene. Usually, the reason is to show the reader exactly what was said in the letter, or provide more of a feel for the internal chaos the POV character is going through in a fight.
Multiple-viewpoint is another angle of approach. While the most common type of multiple-viewpoint uses an ensemble cast of viewpoint characters, one per scene, all in tight-third-person or camera-eye third-person, it is equally possible to give one or more characters a different viewpoint type, so that the main character’s scenes are all in tight-third, the sidekick’s viewpoint is a series of letters to his sister, the love interest’s viewpoint is in first-person, etc. This has to be handled with care, or it gets confusing, but done right, it can be extremely effective.
Once in a while, I’ve run across a story where the author either couldn’t make up his/her mind whether to write in first-person or tight-third, or else started it one way and switched to the other somewhere during the writing process…and missed a line or two in the middle of the story somewhere, so that you have “He swung the sword” in the middle of a first-person narrative, or “I just couldn’t do it” in the middle of a tight-third one. This always jars me right out of the story, because it’s a mistake, and an obvious one at that.
On the other hand, I’ve run across one or two stories where the author deliberately shifted viewpoint type in mid-story, and made it work. Every time, they’ve done it by including some sort of transition, making it obvious that the change was deliberate and easing the reader quickly into the new viewpoint. Again, this is something that has to be handled carefully to avoid confusion.
I was reading a series where the author did some “head-hopping” that was obviously a mistake. It only happened occasionally and it was enough to jar me out of the story. the first book was the worst, but luckily, the editor’s got better as the series went along and it became more popular in the US (The Ranger’s Apprentice).
It took me a long time to wrap my head around what I would call first person omniscient – the kind of narrative that is in first person, but told from a distance and filled out with things the character could not know at the time.
So there I was, sleeping in my bed, while twenty miles away the army gathered for its big battle, but I knew nothing about that, of course. None of my friends had told me – they all came up with various excuses, most of them being ‘we wanted to get exclusive photos’, they *know* I’m the best in the field – when the phone rang. “I’ve got a story for you,” whispered a familiar voice. […]
I don’t see a problem with “first person omniscient” so long as it’s in the past tense and it’s clear that the narrator is summing up what was going on elsewhere at the time the narrator hadn’t a clue.
And as long as it’s written coherently — no writing the elsewhere-scenes in a way that could be mistaken for a dream. Unless you *want* the character to dream something that later comes true in one way or another. But in that case, make it clear it’s a dream.
And as long as the narrator never, ever says “Had I but known….” 🙂
So, viewed in this light, would quoted thought count as a mixing of viewpoints? Something like:
She tripped over the stairs and cartwheeled into the driveway, landing on her back with a thump. I have got to stop wearing mismatched shoes. She groaned and sat up.
I was raised on and believe in the stricture of “one scene, one viewpoint”, but a friend of mine, with several successful published books under her belt, frequently changes viewpoint character within a scene—often within a single paragraph or even sentence. It always throws me out of the story and makes it difficult to read despite her otherwise evocative style.
Is this something editors don’t care about anymore, or is this writer’s case an exception?
I’ve started a reread of the complete Saint-Germain works of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and she is a master (mistress?) of mixed viewpoint types. Both plot and character development are served by epistolary communications between major (or completely minor or one-off) characters, and usually just with a single document, not an exchange.
You can learn a lot, reading those books. (And, besides, he’s my favorite vampire.)
LivV, I would say that yes, it is. It is good for emphasis, but I think that it could very easily be overdone.
Wow, I never considered the 1st person address to 2nd person to be an available type of writing style, but on thinking about it, I’m going to disagree about it not being any different than first person. Certainly the viewpoint is first person, but secretly the viewpoint is always first person because all speech has a speaker, it just depends on how much the author allows the speaker/narrator to participate in the story.
First person, then, can come in a spectrum of types, where the narrator is either the main focus of the story, a character relating the story, a minor character relating a story going on nearby, a god informing us of what is occurring, and look, now we’re in 3rd omniscient. Strict 3rd is just a first person recording daemon riding along in someone’s head, perhaps. 🙂
Second person is actually the most peculiar one. Because it’s an address style, it feels like the story isn’t being told, it’s being commanded. But the mixed first/second is actually not just first, it’s just second with the narrator participating in the story. I think one reason why people can write second is because people often talk to themselves in second. Being ordered around by yourself is less offensive than having someone else do it.
Just some thoughts.
@LivV, that’s not a mixed viewpoint. It just contains a thought quotation. You’ve even marked the quotation with italics. Anything inside a quote has it’s own speaker-hearer relation, so it does not impinge on the viewpoint.
OK, so does anyone else want to know what happens in that story in the viewpoint handout? What’s Jililt up to???? 🙂
One Lawrence Watt-Evans Ethshar novel is a little weird with POV : the Vondish Ambassador has 29 chapters, all from the POV of Emmis, a dockworker-guide to the ambassador of the title.
But the 19th chapter is from the POV of Ithinia, a senior wizard known to the readers of the series but this is the one time she has a POV in the whole series.
At the reflexion, it’s not really jarring for me, but for others?
Another thing on POV, but different. Lois Bujold in her last Barrayar novel has two POVs : Ivan and Tej, a refugee of Jackson’ Whole, and if Ivan is always Ivan in his POV, in Tej’s he is called Ivan Xav.
At times, I was irritated by this. On the other hand, it was an easy identifiant.
Excuse me for he length of the comment and the bad English.
I once read, in a workshop, a story where a woman was cloning her dead sister and telling her sister’s life to the clone, as “you.” All the actions in the story were the “you”, not the “I.” (Except the final decision of the sister: her sister’s entire life had been deeply involved in genetic engineering, and she was deciding whether to engineer anything into the clone. Finally she tweaked one gene to prevent her sister’s bad back.)
@Gene – True, but then anything can be bad if overdone.
@Cara – Yes, but if you switch from standard first-person to epistolary, the letter is usually marked off in its own formatting, too. So if one’s a shift in viewpoint, albeit minor, why not the other?
(Not that it matters for actually using it; I’m just having fun playing with definitions and analysis.)
And, on a side-thought… Scherazade was the ultimate pantser?
I am in the middle of reading Middlemarch (ha,ha,ha, in the middle…), and it has an interesting viewpoint; it’s clearly third-person omniscient, but occasionally the narrator speaks directly to the reader in her own voice. It doesn’t bother me, but I’m pretty sure no author of the 21st century could get away with that style.
I usually think of second person as the choose-your-own-adventure format, but I am wondering now why it is so often (always?) in present tense? It seems that it would work just as well in past (an older person narrating a younger person’s early childhood, for example), which seems pretty standard for other viewpoints.