Irvine Valley College

Online Creative Writing Workshop

Writing 10 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Spring 2012 - Ticket # 64580

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Instructor

 

Week 7:

Online Lecture for Point of View I.

Point of View is the most important tool of the Creative Writer. 

Point of View I.

Point of View is the secret that Writers talk about only with other Writers, for the most part.  Even literary critics are prone to looking only at the Pronoun case when they want to refer to the POV.  If a work is told using "I" as the subject/narrator, it is considered FIRST PERSON.  If the Pronoun form is "You," it is considered SECOND PERSON.  If the Pronoun is "He" or "They," it is called THIRD PERSON.  

Of course these Pronoun identifications are correct and useful as far as they go - but they don't go very far for writers.  Writers are concerned with a much deeper level of character identification and viewpoint!  For example, THIRD PERSON can cover a wide range of positioning.  THIRD PERSON generally means someone (the author persona) other than the central focus character is telling the story.  But that Third Person can be very distant from the action or so close that we are essentially inside the head of the focus character, even when the Pronoun is still he/she.  Your reading assignment this week illustrates this quite well.  Stephen Crane begins his story:  "The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion . . . ."  Now, here we are being asked to watch the train from across a stretch of prairie, really, so that we can see the sweep of motion, the dignity.  And this is fitting, too, because this is a story about how a place changes, as much as anything (note the Time Clue of the Pullman - a modern intruder on the plains of horses and cattle and rummy cowboys!)  We do move in closer as the story proceeds, this first look is much like an "establishing shot" in a film.  But we are never really inside the characters - we get most of our information about them through reported dialogue.  

On the other hand, the Kafka story would seem to be of the same POV, Third Person.  The pronoun is HE.  But almost immediately we are inside his head:  "What's happening to me, he thought?"  And then we go quickly to having access not only to thought, but even to physical sensations from inside (an even more intimate sense of being "in" the character).  The Kafka story is very interesting in its use of the Third Person.  In the first place, the average reader would balk, no doubt, at having to jump right into the "I" narration coming from a cockroach!  On the other hand, the story is entirely about his sense of alienation, his inability to connect, so it is important that we have access to his thoughts and feelings.  

The phenomenon of a Third Person narration that comes to seem like a First Person experience is actually very common.  Go back to some works that you have liked and take a look at the actual use of the Pronoun.  I think you will be surprised to see that many stories which have seemed to be so immediate that they had to have been First Person in your memory were, in fact, Third Person.  This is partially because the Third Person distance can change (something that can't happen in First Person, where the narration has to be centered in the narrative "I").  Thus, Third Person gives the author more latitude, a chance to establish the scene at the beginning of a chapter, for example, and then close in on the main character - maybe move away again at the end of a chapter.  

The most common use of the Third Person can be envisioned as a "Third Person Over the Shoulder" - it is a distance between the narrator and the character that seems like the narration is coming from a camera on the narrator's shoulder.  It is the most easy to construct, and it is also the least interesting - more likely to be seen in poor writing.  The reason is that, again, POV is the most important tool of the writer.  If the narrational POV sits there on the shoulder of the character, never coming into a real intimacy with body sensations, we tend to feel detached, too, from that character.  Also, a static Third Person narrative POV misses the opportunity to comment on the characters, plot, and story through observation.  You will note in Yellow Sky, for example, that the narrator can tell us things that the characters do not know about themselves - the bride "wore a dress of blue cashmere, with small reservations of velvet here and there."  Now, "small reservations of velvet" is NOT a phrase that our red-handed cowboy or his lady love would use - but it is a telling bit, illuminating briefly the shy and reserved character of the bride.  Similarly, even in Kafka's story, we are told that Gregor is a traveling salesman, not something that he would be able to reveal to us in his present state - and so needing to have the distance of the Third Person narrator.

**  Note here: While the key to understanding Third Person narration is in understanding how to move it around - the key to First Person narration is noting that it needs to be static and limited. 

And, while the beauty of Third Person is that it can range from Infinite (think of the last line of Tess of the D'Urbervilles - where Hardy says:  "The gods had finished their sport with Tess.") -- to intimate (Gregor Samsa) -- the writer needs to make sure that the reader can follow any movements of POV BODILY !!  That is, you need to think of Third Person POV like a camera dolly.  If you have asked the reader to take a long view across the prairie to see a train going by, you need to keep to that POV in that sentence, and pretty much in that paragraph.  You will notice that when Crane wants us to shift our vision from the wide prairie and the horizon, he starts a new paragraph and moves us closer to the train to watch the couple get on in San Antonio.  Then we move to the man's face, and then to the details of his anxious hands, their attire.  I sometime see openings where the sequencing is jumpy and impossible for the reader to follow, assuming that the reader is using the sensory, real-life apparatus we all have to see things in the real world.  The imagination is just the same as the real world, and if we have asked the reader to be looking across the prairie, we don't want, at that point, to ask them to see the blue cashmere!!!

I don't want to burden you with too much of this - POV is the one thing that writers continue to study and discuss and worry about through an entire lifetime of writing and reading books.  The first thing is to develop an awareness of POV - to begin to see that every narrative strategy has a POV (some of them well done, some not so well done).  Once you begin to SEE the POV, you will be able to make better judgments about your own work - make decisions about which POV you want to use!!!

Best thing now is to try it - and take a look at what the others in the Workshop do!

Next week we will take up First Person POV :-))

 

Return to Week 7.

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California