Forgive me, y'all, I'm dead tired tonight. Very busy day! This might be very incoherent, and if it is, I apologize.
Anyway, tonight we'll be talking about something a lot of you will know about: the matter of point-of-view. But each different POV serves a different purpose, and there are different ways to use them. I'll tell you about some of these ways:
First Person
A story in first person, as most of you know, is narrated by a character in the story, and characterized by the pronouns I and me. A famous first person story you might be familiar with is Moby Dick, and this is apparent right from the opening sentences:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
So we instantly know that Ishmael is someone intimately involved with the events of the story to follow. In rare cases, the narrator is not involved in the story at all, and is only a bystander, or someone spreading a rumor. But in most cases, the narrator is the protagonist, though he is not always the hero.
The benefits of first person narrative are clear. It injects immediacy and personality into the story, and ensures that the reader will form a bond with the narrator. But it also adds a twist: the narrator is now human, and therefore fallible. The reader can no longer trust everything the narrator says. In a story that implies or outright states that the speaker is lying to the reader, the speaker is referred to as an unreliable narrator.
First person is a common POV, but it is a tricky one to keep consistent. The writer must be so familiar with the narrator that they can write fluidly in the narrator's voice rather with their own.
Second Person
Second person is characterized by the pronoun you; in other words, putting the reader in the position of the protagonist.
This is a very uncommon POV, usually reserved for the Choose Your Own Adventure form of storytelling. But recently I came across second person in mainstream science fiction literature that used it quite effectively.
The first few chapters of Warchild, by Karin Lowachee, are written in second person. They detail the early childhood of the young protagonist, Jos, as a pirate kills his family and friends, and he becomes the pirate's personal slave. Here is the first paragraph of the book:
You didn't see their faces when you hid behind the maintenance grate. Smoke worked its fingers through the tiny holes and stroked over your nose and under your eyes, forcing you to stifle breaths, to blink, and to cry. Footsteps followed everywhere that smoke went on the deck -- heavy, violent footsteps -- and everywhere they went, shouts went with them. Screams. Pulsing fire.
The second person continues through Jos' imprisonment, and so does the tense, clipped narrative. The last event written in the second person marks the end of Jos' imprisonment, and set off from the second person is a single line in first person spoken by Jos: that these are the last of his memories with his captor, and those are enough. The rest of the book is in first person.
Lowachee finds a chilling use for the second person: Jos uses it to separate himself from the trauma and abuse he endured, and in his place, he puts the reader in captivity. Second person is an underutilized form with many possibilities. The writer just has to be as creative as Lowachee was!
Third Person
Third person doesn't need much explanation. It is characterized by the pronouns he, she, and they.
But there are two different kinds of third person. Omniscient third person, meaning that the narrator of the story is privy to the thoughts and ideas of every character. Or limited third person, in which the narrative closely follows the POV of one character.
The latter can be close to first person in some respects. The Harry Potter series is an excellent example of limited third person -- there are barely any scenes in the series in which he is not present. Otherwise, he is in almost every scene. Even when he is not present in a scene, he might see the events through a vision or memory.
Since most fiction is a blend of the two, it can be difficult for writers to find a method to third person. When I'm writing a scene, I always ask myself this question: which character in the scene knows the least about what's going on? And when I decide which character that is, I write from that character's perspective. It gives the scene a focus, and allows the character to act as a stand-in for the reader, learning information when they do.
... and that became much longer than I expected. I hope it was coherent!
