First: I love my writing workshop. The eight writers who gather with me once a week bring vibrant insights, questions and pages of surprising, engaging work. The stories are alive. I want to shout out in their honor: Keep going!
Thank you for being who you are, writers, and bringing in your pages, working at odd hours I’m sure, building worlds through words on the page alongside managing the rest of life. It’s no easy task, on so many levels. Taking the time to pursue writing is an exceptional thing, and I’m here for it.
One craft question that we circle back to, as a group—which is complicated, both abstract yet practical—concerns point-of-view.
First-person, or third, and how does a writer make the decision, anyway? It’s a fundamental, ever-expanding question.
We’ve spent less time considering the use of second-person, which is also an option.
Then there are also more experimental approaches, like a first-person plural, a collective voice, a body of narrators speaking as a chorus. The first short story I ever published, so long ago, was a collective first-person POV, following an instinct, before I’d taken any writing classes, because I liked the sound of a voice as emanating from a psychologically unified yet undefined group…For a high-profile example of first-person plural, you might look at The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides.
The other day…I may have proclaimed the use of an omniscient narrator to be “dead,” history, gone the way of the Victorians, but of course in the same breath I’d definitely challenge myself about such a confident assertion. I’m sure there are prize-worthy novels still being written from the POV of an omniscient narrator. Probably many of them.
In the moment, I was looking for a swift, time-efficient way to say that one of the drawbacks of crafting a truly omniscient or all-knowing, all-seeing narrator, who can dip into the minds and motivations of all the characters in a cast, is that it removes the tension and creates a sense of distance between the narrative voice, and the poor, pathetic individual characters who know so much less. It’s too easy, granting too much access. It can become condescending quickly, a chess game, a dissection.
Now, after making such a bold assertion, I’m left carrying this thought, talking back to myself:
Is the use of an omniscient narrator really dead, gone the way of the Victorians?
Who knows?
Or should I say, God only knows!
Ha!
A truly omniscient narrator is essentially a god, standing back, witnessing and able to relay, reliably, the internal and external world of the characters. At the far opposite end of the continuum, one might find a first-person narrator who only knows what they themselves think, feel or witness. That’s how most of us live our lives. A little further out, on that same continuum, we might find an unintentionally unreliable first-person narrator, who doesn’t even have a handle on their own particular experiences, motivation or reliability.
The question guiding these narrative choices is one of emotional effect. What emotional result does a writer want to create, for a reader? How much distance is beneficial? POV is a tool, not a rule.
The beauty of a first-person narrator is that the words can invite a reader to inhabit a character’s life and struggles, to know their idiosyncrasies and live through their worldview, whatever that might be.
A close third-person point-of-view might serve as essentially a first-person POV, while keeping a slight bit of narrative distance.
If you’ve taken a craft seminar with me, it’s possible that I’ve handed out a poem by Raymond Carver, “Your Dog Dies.” There’s so much to consider in this single, short piece. In terms of POV, the title, which serves as the first line of the poem itself, is presented as though in a second-person POV, offering a direct address to the reader: Your Dog Dies.
Almost right away though, we come to realize the dog isn’t “yours”—or ours—but the narrator’s daughter’s dog, making it third-person: her dog dies. Then the narrator buries the dog, deep, deep.
As the poem unfolds, we come to realize it isn’t really about the daughter at all, either. It’s not even about the dog. It’s about the narrator’s ability to write poetry in the face of mortality. “You wonder how long this can go on.”
It’s a first-person voice, which walks through second-person to third-person, while revealing a first-person—under the premise of second-person, “you” but really?—and then lands. Boom.
Or do you, reader, continue to read the “you” of the poem as second-person? (I do not…)
This shifting POV moves us closer and closer to the actual subject, until we are alone with the poet, writing, actively ignoring intrusive other voices.
In the process, the poet/narrator lets us know that he is a little psychologically predatory, finding his material through somebody else’s pain, while inviting “you” to identify with him.
We are with him, and perhaps appalled by him, and we’re left to question the terrain of art. To me, it raises questions about the role of the arts in the face of death, in the same way that, for example, award-winning war photography raises this question implicitly.
If you haven’t read it, here goes:
Your Dog Dies
it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you’re almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you’d never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you’re writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.
—Raymond Carver
More about POV later. For now—your thoughts?
Cheers, and take care of your dogs!
xo
-M
Once I discovered first person POV, I couldn't go back. I have a hard time reading anything else and a harder time writing anything else.
That poem is devastating. And the POV is such a powerful component of the poem’s effect. Thank you for this wonderful example.