Point of View, like chess, is the simplest and most complicated pleasure yet devised for just the kind of mind that would take Creative Writing online. If Character is the casting call and Plot is what happens next, then Point of View is how you set up the camera angles and which lenses you’ll use.
—Diane Orsini, Professor of English and Creative Writing
While earning my MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, one of my instructors conducting a class on point of view suggested that we write the first draft of our stories or novels through the point of view in which receive them. This instructor also, and quite eloquently, stated that writing is the mind on the page. While I still find it a challenge to write outside of the point of view of third person limited, I continually hear Jeanne Mackin’s voice and often repeat her words that, “…writing is the mind on the page.”
The mind on the page.
Wandering the pyramids of a character’s thoughts.
Reading her or his ideas.
This is the unique gift of books, what stories delivered on screen cannot relay.
What Jeanne Mackin taught me in her statement about writing being the mind on the page is that in so being the vessel of thoughts, words must and do establish a lens into not only the character about which they speak, but also the writer who behind the character has created the character.
If you want to understand someone, visit their thoughts, then read their writing.
In psychology we say that a person’s ability or inability to tell a clear and concise story reveals their level of ego function or mental illness, ultimate their state of mind.
Sol Stein states and reiterates in his book, Sol Stein On Writing, that the writer’s primary goal is to entertain. For those who also seek to educate, I offer that, A relaxed mind absorbs knowledge like a sponge.
Hence the writer must choose a character and a point of view to tell her or his story in a way that both entertains and engages the reader. After having chosen the protagonist or character that will relay the story, and the point of view she or he will narrate from, the writer must then stick with that point of view, unless otherwise indicated.
I add the last three words because as will all things there are exceptions to any rule. Many books today are told not only from the eyes of more than one character. Those characters can and sometimes do reveal their contribution to the story from one point of view while another character tells her or his contribution to the same to story from a differing point of view. That is, character A speaks from a 1st person point of view while characters B, C, and D tell the scenes they narrate from a 3rd person point of view.
Writers who accomplish this very well are masters of their craft. More succinctly they also honor the rule of only one point of view for each scene.
Novice writers would do well to adopt one point of view for their major character that spans the entire book. The very nature and structure of short stories limits them to one protagonist with one point of view.
One sign of a naive writer who has not read sufficiently, novels that is–a person who chooses movie watching over reading fiction–is their inability to establish at the outset of their story or novel a major character with a particular point of view and hold to that chosen point of view from scene to scene.
While studying movies can and does improve a fiction writer’s ability to establish plot, movies are not the best art form to study for character and development of personality of protagonist.
Reading the masters such as Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Yasunari Kawabata, Alice Munro Richard Yates, W. Somerset Maugham and many others are more applicable for assistance in achieving and mastering this task.
The roving eye of a movie camera provides a varied perspective on the story being told. That is the gift and strong point that movies contribute to relaying the plot of a story.
The steady and consistent narration of a story, filtered through the consciousness of the character through whose point of view conveys the story is the unique gift of the art form of fiction–that is a story told through writing, the mind upon the page.
How consistent is your character’s narration of a story?
What state of mind were you in when writing your novel?
How did all of this come to bear on your subsequent revisions?
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