Katherine sent in this heartfelt plea for help on the
subject of point of view perspective: I
just can’t seem to get my head round this issue of point of view and
head-hopping. I understand about first person and third person and that side of
it, but when I ask for feedback on my writing it seems I always get the same
comments – that I’m head-hopping. I just don’t understand where I’m going
wrong. Writers in my online group keep trying to explain it to me and I’ve also
looked on the internet for help, but it all seems so complicated. Do you have
an easy way to demonstrate it, so that I can finally understand what everyone
else seems to find so easy to grasp?
First of all, Katherine, you are not alone. Many writers
find it difficult to get to grips with staying in point of view. Before I give
you my tips on keeping within one character’s thoughts, feelings and
observations, I would just like to explain (for those who aren’t sure) the
viewpoints available.
First person –
this is where we remain in the narrator’s
head at all times, observing all others from that one perspective. (I went to the cliff and wanted to jump,
but I was pulled back by Sarah).
Second person –
this is where the narrator is talking to a person throughout the story about
that second person’s actions (you went to the cliff and wanted to
jump, but you were pulled back by
Sarah).
Third person –
this is where the story is told from the perspective of the character or
characters.
Third person can be
broken down into three groups
Limited: readers
are only privy to the thoughts of one
character. Everyone else in the scene is shown through that character’s eyes,
thoughts and feelings. (He went to
the cliff and wanted to jump, but he
was pulled back by Sarah.)
Limited is the most popular and easiest to master.
Objective: there
are no inner thoughts or feelings. Readers only see what happens and what is
said. (He went to the cliff to jump.
Sarah pulled him back.)
Objective can leave readers without any emotional
involvement in what is going on.
Omniscient: here
the readers are privy to everyone’s thoughts, feelings and observations –
head-hopping from one character to another within a scene. (He went to the cliff and wanted to
jump. Sarah wanted to save him and
pulled him back).
Omniscient is hard to pull off unless the writer is
extremely experienced and a master storyteller.
From your email it seems to me that you are using the
omniscient point of view, but it isn’t working for you because you haven’t
quite mastered it. For many writers, it is impossible to get right because
(unless you are very careful) the reader loses track of who is speaking, whose
thoughts we are sharing, whose eyes we are looking through and so on. It becomes
tedious to and leaves the reader confused and unwilling to continue.
Regardless of which point of view you choose, you need to
know how to deal with writing from that perspective. There is a simple exercise
you can carry out to help with this.
Imagine someone in a restaurant. He’s there because he’s had
a massive fight with his wife. He observes a couple at another table. He can
hear the dialogue, but he doesn’t know the people. He has no other background
knowledge outside of what they look like. This means he can only judge them on
how they look, what they do and what they say. He is our point of view
character and it’s his life we are involved with. The other couple are not
important to the story. They are simply there to bring out the point of view character’s
thoughts and emotions. We are looking at this scene through his eyes. We’ll
call him Jake.
Jake put down his newspaper,
eyes drawn to the next table where a middle-aged couple were studying menus. He noted they were both wearing wedding
rings, but by the way they avoided eye contact, he didn’t think this was a celebration. Picking up his own menu, he was about to decide on a starter when a whispered exchange drew his attention back to the couple.
“You know how I feel
about this, Carol.”
“Yes, John, I do.
You’ve never made any secret of it.”
From the above dialogue it is impossible for the reader to
know whether the dialogue is friendly, unfriendly, intimate, angry, or any
other emotion. Because we can only know what Jake is thinking and feeling, we
have to discover the emotions of the couple – and how it impacts on Jake’s own
situation – through his eyes and ears.
Let’s see the dialogue again, this time with Jake’s
observations included.
Jake glanced across in
time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.
“You know how I feel
about this, Carol.”
“Yes, John, I do,” she
said, snatching her hand away. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”
Jake wondered what the
man had done to make the woman so angry. He sighed. His wife always
seemed to look at him like that
these days. If they were still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed. He imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not
to think of Sarah and the fight he’d
walked out on.
It’s tempting at this point to slip into the woman’s or the
man’s point of view and let the reader know what thoughts and emotions are
being felt, but this is where staying in point of view comes into play – we are
only interested in Jake’s life – what he thinks and feels. What if Jake had
seen something different? What would Jake think?
Jake glanced across in
time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.
“You know how I feel
about this, Carol.”
“Yes, John, I do,” she
said, taking his hand in hers. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”
Jake sighed. His wife never looked at him like that these days. If they were
still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed. He
imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of
Sarah and the fight he’d walked out
on.
As you can see from the above, because we are in Jake’s
point of view, we can only experience the event from his perspective. Using Jake
as a first person point of view would be the same.
I glanced across in time
to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.
“You know how I feel
about this, Carol.”
“Yes, John, I do,” she
said, taking his hand in hers. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”
I sighed. My wife never looked at me like that these days. If we’re still
together when we reached that couple’s age, I’ll be amazed. I
imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of
Sarah and the fight I’d walked out
on.
And here is the same scene, this time head-hopping to use
the perspective of all three characters.
Jake put down his
newspaper, eyes drawn to the next table where a middle-aged couple were
studying menus. He noted they were both wearing wedding rings, but by the way
they avoided eye contact, he didn’t think this was a celebration. Picking up
his own menu, he was about to decide on a starter when a whispered exchange
drew his attention back to the couple.
Jake glanced across in
time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.
“You know how I feel
about this, Carol,” the man said, wishing she would be more understanding.
“Yes, John, I do,” she
said, snatching her hand away. He was so selfish, thinking that a nice dinner
made up for all the rest. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”
Jake wondered what the
man had done to make the woman so angry. He sighed. His wife always seemed to look at him like that these days.
If they were still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed.
He imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of
Sarah and the fight he’d walked out on.
From a reader’s perspective, we have lost touch with Jake.
There is no reason for us to know what John or Carol are thinking and the scene
is weakened as a result of having their thoughts intrude.
Lorraine
Mace is the humour columnist for Writing Magazine and a competition
judge for Writers’ Forum. She is a tutor for the Writers Bureau, and is
the author of the Writers Bureau course, Marketing Your Book. She is
also co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam of The
Writer's ABC Checklist (Accent Press). Lorraine runs a private
critique service for writers (link below). She is the founder of the Flash 500
competitions covering flash fiction, humour verse and novel openings.
Writing as Frances di
Plino, she is the author of crime/thriller, Bad Moon Rising, featuring
Detective Inspector Paolo Storey. The second in the series, Someday Never Comes, was
released on 16th August 2013.
Thanks for this, Lorraine. A very useful post that I'm sure all beginner writers like me can learn from.
ReplyDeleteWhile Lorraine has explained what 'head-hopping' is, I'm afraid I am
ReplyDeletestill as bewildered as Katherine, in her original email, as to why so
many people apparently find it such a problem. 'Head-hopping' - or,
the Omniscient Point Of View - is not only the most natural way to
write, but the most comprehensive way to explain the story to the
reader. If a story is limited to a single POV, then only a single protagonist can ever be 'fleshed-out' and feel 'real'. By definiton, if all
other characters cannot be explored, then they will appear 'cardboard-
cut-out-ey' and flat; cliches and stereotypes, in fact, but in any case,
boring and uninvolving. Life is never like that, so why should anybody
be expected either to write or to read a story like that? My own writing
uses Omniscient POV, and has received just the same criticism as
Katherine's from would-be editors/agent etc. I am told that this style
of writing is 'old-fashioned', which evidently means it was indeed used successfully by best-selling authors of the past (such as Jane Austen). But not only that, all the current best-sellers: Child, Cornwell,
Harris, Hornby etc, suspiciously also STILL seem to use Omniscient POV. Which leads me to infer that this modern criticism of Omni-
scient POV is simply a device for the publishing industry to justify not publishing the thousands of hopefuls (like myself & Katherine) when
the practical reality is that there are simply so few publishing slots
available for us each year. I would thus like to reassure Katherine that
there is probably nothing inherently wrong with her writing-style, and
that she may simply be a victim of the modern publishing environment
(like myself). It seems that there really was never a worse time to try
to get published, as the competition for available spaces has never been as severe :-) Regards, Mike Weatherley
Hi Mike and Jan, thank you both for commenting.
ReplyDeleteMike, you will see in the post that my point wasn't that you shouldn't use it, but that it is incredibly difficult to master. I agree with you, used properly, it works very well. Unfortunately, used badly, it becomes a chore for the reader and will prevent the reader from identifying with any of the characters.
No one has ever said you can only use one point of view - full stop. The point being made was that you should only use one point of view per scene - unless one is a very gifted writer and able to pull off omniscient. The writers you've named are all at the top of their game, which is why they are so successful.
Hi Lorraine, thanks for taking time to reply :-) And I was taking the opportunity to voice a general impression of the modern publishing industry's attitude to new authors, rather than only
Deleteresponding to what you said in your article. Another big bug-bear of mine is 'show-don't-tell', which, of course, the industry
is always berating us for not using; despite the fact that the current crop of best-sellers seem to manage getting by very well by mostly 'telling', themselves (but that's another story :-)
But to return to POV, it seems harsh to criticise any author for using Omnipotent most (if not, all) of the time. I mean, as far as any story is concerned, the author IS its creator; putting them in the position of 'God', if you like. If the author is not entitled to know what's in the mind of ALL the characters in the story (and to impart that knowledge to the reader) then I
don't know who is expected to be. And I always like to (try to) explain as much of everybody's motivations in a story to the reader as possible. At least, that's the kind of story which I,
myself, would like to read... Regards, Mike