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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28350
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28350
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I just hate the common categorization scheme for point of view and voice. It is so misleading and causes so much unnecessary anxiety, not to mention awkward narration.

To begin with, point of view and identity of the narrator are different things. You can have a character as narrator or the storyteller as narrator, but this has no necessary impact on point of view. The narrating character can choose to tell you of events they did not witness or report the thoughts of characters other than themselves. The narrating storyteller can choose to report only the things seen and thought by a single character.

In other words the choice to stay inside the head of one character is orthogonal to the choice to have one of the characters be the narrator.

Second, grammatical person has nothing to do with either of these choices. While a character as narrator necessarily speaks of themselves in the first person, most of what they narrate will not be about themselves and will be written in the third person.

> Dave and I want to the Beach. Dave bought a hot dog and then went swimming.

That second sentence is in third person. QED.

Third, the whole notion of "omniscient POV" is bogus.

> Dave and I want to the beach. Dave spent most of the day brooding about Laura.

How does our character/narrator know what Dave was brooding about? Are they God? Or are they, perhaps, simply a friend of Dave's who knows his history and his moods and can read him pretty well?

This is not to say that the novelist cannot have access to the private thoughts of a character, even those that his best friends could not guess at, but this is not a God-like power, it is simply the narrative privilege, and there is no inherent reason or rule why the the character as narrator cannot exercise the narrative privilege.

So, when you have problems in these areas, I think the first thing you should do is ask yourself is whether you have actually done something jarring, or if you are just in technical violations of these nonsensical POV categories. If you have not done anything jarring, you are golden. None but the most doctrinaire reader is even going to register any of these categories unless they are first jarred out of the narrative by jarring narrative flaw.

If you find you have done something jarring, then ask yourself, is this jarring because I have followed these nonsensical POV categories in a way that produces a jarring result. If so, violate the categories willfully until the result ceases to be jarring.

What you can never do successfully is decide if any narrative device is jarring or not based on this or any of the other paint by numbers writing rules, such as show don't tell. It is jarring if it is jarring. Studying narrative conventions is indeed a good way to train yourself not to be jarring, and to develop techniques that help you avoid being jarring. Unfortunately many of the paint by numbers writing rules actually force you into being jarring rather than keep you from it.

Original score: 2