One school of thought has it that book narrators are honor-bound to reveal all they know as they know it over the course of a book. This “rule” applies in particular to first-person narrators who can only avoid it by deliberately misleading the reader. The key word here is deliberate. It is what prevents these […]
Recently, we found ourselves empathizing with a plastic bag, the unlikely protagonist in an 18 minute film that has gone viral on the Internet. Directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by German film director Werner Herzog, “Plastic Bag” follows the endless life cycle of a super market plastic bag as it is first employed in […]
Some writers choose to write from multiple points of view. There are reasons to do this if say a personal perspective is needed along with a third person overview to describe events at which the first person narrator is/was not present. In Edith Wharton’s ETHAN FROME, a first person narrator speaks in a prologue and […]
Many classic novels were written from the omniscient third person point of view, an all-seeing God-like perspective. Jane Austin, Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy all wrote this way. While it was commonly used historically, it is a less comfortable form for today’s writers. Here is an excerpt from PRIDE AND PREJUDICES that illustrates this: “Mr. […]
The third person point of view is the most commonly used in literature. It gives the author the most flexibility. It uses the pronouns, he, she, it and they. If you are writing along in third person and find yourself breaking into an I, me or you, you have broken the third wall of literature […]
In the second person, the narrator tells the story to another character using you and the action is experienced through the you’s point of view. Few books and stories are written in the second person. But you may know songs that are sung from the you viewpoint. An often cited example of a book written […]
We all live our lives in the first person. And in many ways we narrate our lives, when we tell stories about things that have happened to us or when we simply report the day’s events to our spouses or friends. Some of us engage in internal narration: I put on my red pea coat […]
So you are going to write a novel. Will it be from the narrative point of view? Epistolary? First person, third person or the seldom-used second person? Alternating viewpoints? Subjective or omniscient? You really, really do have to make a decision about point-of-view before beginning to write or writing much anyway. It is intrinsic to […]