Learning design

Sample Project: Point of View in Fiction

Discussion

Point of view (POV) is both fundamental and oddly specialized. The first thing a new writer should know is that point of view doesn’t mean opinion, as in, “In his point of view, spitting on the sidewalk was unacceptable.” Rather, it’s about the way the writer orients the reader within the piece. Who is telling the story, or through whom are we perceiving it?

Point of view choices affect every bit of a piece. But when fiction workshops talk about point of view, they use specialized terminology that isn’t always self-explanatory. New to workshops, I wondered how people who depend upon precision and legibility in language could use the oxymoronic term “limited omniscient.” Answer: a limited omniscient point of view sees and perceives everything, but only everything with regard to one character, or one character at a time.

I designed a point-of-view flowchart to help newer writers find their way through the language of point of view. You can start on the left side of the chart and answer questions about point of view in a piece you’re reading, or you can start on the right with a POV term and work backwards to explore its rules. So I might discover that Madeleine Thien’s novel The Book of Records uses a first-person point of view. Or I might look at “first-person plural” on the right and find that this POV is characterized by the use of a community or family we.

The interactive version is below. I used Powerpoint to make it accessible to a wider range of people.

My explanations are based on the terminology in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. You can consult any edition, though a course might require one in particular.

Point of view choices shape fiction, in subtle and less-subtle ways. For practice in writing from different points of view—and for fun—you can give the point of view spinner a try. Recasting a passage or chapter in a fresh point of view will almost always teach you something about your work in progress.

These tools provide practice in identifying point of view and increase familiarity with the range of points of view a writer might use. We often make POV decisions intuitively; a background knowledge of the options gives your intuition something to work with.