Since I've started out by complaining about story elements that annoy me when they don't lead to an interesting story, I think it's only fair to go on to some more positive conversation. )

Plumblossom explains it all:

Fun with Point of View

I'm writing this because I can tell that a lot of people are really, really confused about these. Person (as in first person -- I/we, second person -- you, and third person -- he/she/it/them) and point of view are not the same thing. Person is grammatical, and is all about the verb form and the pronoun. Point of view is storytelling, and is all about what can be known and what can be felt and what opinions can be expressed and whether the story is straightforward truth or unreliable or whatever.

So when you say your story is "first person point of view" you haven't told me anything. You should be telling me something about the grammar you're going to bring to bear -- verb forms, etc. -- but since you've given me garble I can't trust that. You can write from a particular character's point of view in first person (My name is Deke. I woke up in a white room), second person (Your name is Deke. You woke up in a white room), or third person (Its name is Deke. It woke up in a white room). (by the way, if your writing teacher told you never to write a story in second person and you feel rebellious, go ahead and try it, but I warn you: it almost never works out to be a good story. You might write the exception, though) And you can write about a particular character from many points of view. Over the years writers, writing teachers, critics, and fans have come up with a few ways to talk about these. But, you have to understand: these are ways of talking about ways to tell stories. They aren't rules. Also, you should know these are derived from observing, participating in, and talking about stories written in the "Western" story telling tradition. There's no reason why stories told in some other tradition wouldn't be vastly different in all these aspects, though my experience is that they aren't vastly different.

Let's talk about Deke some more. We can do it a lot of different ways.

Here's a first-person narrative from Deke's point of view, really tightly focused in that point of view, in "story past" (default verb tense, the best one to choose if you don't have a compelling reason or obsessive urge to use something else).

I'm used to waking up in unfamiliar places. I hate it, but I never make a scene. I just figure out where the hell I am, and how to get home, and get on with my life. Last Friday I woke up in a white room. I'm pretty sure it was Friday, because the last thing I remember was going to sleep in Angelique's decidedly green living room on Thursday night.

Here's a first-person narrative about Deke, from someone else's point of view (Angelique, to be exact).

I always get a chuckle out of Deke. He sleeps so soundly that it's really amusing to arrange practical jokes for him while he sleeps. Fortunately, he's a good sport. He has to be! Felicia's back room was kind of the last straw for him, though. It took him an hour to figure out where he was and at least three hours to calm down after that. So I have stopped having him moved in his sleep. We just stick to the standards -- wrestling him into inappropriate clothing, turning his shoes inside out, that sort of thing, these days.

Notice that talking about Deke from Angelique's point of view tells you something about Angelique as well as Deke. Also notice that a 1st person narrative about another person is pretty close to a 3rd person narrative, just as it is pretty close to a 1st person narrative about the speaker. By choosing the narrator carefully, you can make really different stories out of the same events. Different people know different things about the events at various stages of the story, and they have different interpretations of the same events, and they have different motivations for telling the story. Some people call it the "Rashomon effect" after a Kurosawa movie of that name in which different characters tell their versions of an event.

So that's a couple different points of view using normal 1st person narration. Most stories worth telling will have several different interesting points of view dangling around, and it's worthwhile sometimes, if the story isn't gelling, to try on a different point of view. It's popular for beginning writers to write from alternating points of view, in the first person. It's ponderous, and often doesn't work very well. If you find you have to label the sections in order to keep from losing the reader, chances are you haven't got the point of view method nailed. Either you're using the wrong one, or you're not embedding enough information, or maybe you really don't need to label he sections. I'll be returning to this particular problem later, because the alternating points of view issues also come up when you are writing in third person (remember that the person you write in does not necessarily determine the point or points of view). The two paragraphs up there could be put together as the beginning of an alternating point of view story. Or not.

Some unusual variations are possible. I can't remember seeing 1st person plural, but if someone did write that, it would look a little bit like this:

We came in as usual that Thursday night and found Deke crashed out on Angelique's couch. Hell, he knew what he was in for if he fell asleep there, so we figured he was asking for it. That time there were four of us. We were pretty much of one mind, though, and if it hadn't been for that incident back in May, we'd have hoisted him on our shoulders like good little pallbearers and hightailed it to the cemetery. But as it was, we'd agreed with Angelique, that the pranks were all about innocent fun and there was going to be no more transmigration since it had gotten to Deke so hard that other time. So we spent a good hour coming to a conclusion about what we were going to do to him.

It was really hard to write that paragraph without it simply becoming another first person singular narrative, which I suppose is probably the main reason you never see first person plural being done.

Usually second person a kind of a variation on first person. Or it can be, like in those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that started coming out in the eighties, truly second person, where the reader is supposed to feel like they are the protagonist of the story. Outside of those books, though, I think it usually has the opposite effect: because second person is such an unusual occurrence in story telling, it makes the reader aware of it, enhancing the unreality of the experience, even distancing the reader somewhat, which may in fact be an asset to a story that has dream logic going on in it. It's often paired with present tense verbs, which are also used to good advantage in the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, and which also are usually thought of as bringing immediacy to a story but often actually create a dreamy, unreal feeling.

In any case, second person looks a bit like this (and in my experience, honestly, second-person present-tense stories are also often white room stories!):

You look around the white room. A pleasant light, bright but not glaring, suffuses the plain plaster walls and coved ceiling, and even the lushly-carpeted floor. You've been sleeping on a surprisingly comfortable narrow sofa with a high curved back and strategically-placed pillows: all white, smooth, the sofa firm and the pillows soft. And three lofty comforters are sliding off of you. White, too, of course. There's an ornately-carved low white table in the middle of the room, set with a white rattan tray on which there is a plump white tea pot, one large and two small white covered dishes, and silverware peeking out of a silver napkin.

The far corner is tiled -- white of course -- and fitted with familiar plumbing, though its existence in this room is a bit incongruous. A massive robe and towels clearly meant for Goliath are stacked on a white counter island at the nearer edge of the tiled area. Near to that seems to be a kitchen area, with scaled-down appliances. A bouquet of blue Japanese irises provides a tiny spot of desperately-needed color. There are two cabinets, one with long doors and two small drawers beneath, and the other with several ranks of smaller doors and drawers. It's possible that everything you need to survive is in this room

It had better be. Because the one thing definitely missing from the white room, aside from human company, is any kind of opening -- no window, no door, no crawlspace entry. You aren't locked in: you're sealed in.

This sort of thing is hard to sustain as a writer, and even worse, it's hard to sustain interest in it as a reader. So stories written like this tend to be short and to have really unusual and dramatic elements. I even read one that was second person, future tense: the tricky thing was that while it recounted the things the person who was being addressed would be doing in the future, it was really telling the story of what had happened to the narrator in the very recent past. It was in a science fiction magazine, but other than that all I remember is a detailed description of a graffiti run. I don't think that's the writer's fault: I read it something like forty years ago!

It looked a bit like this:

You won't investigate the food at first. First you will use the familiar-looking plumbing, taking this necessity as proof that you are in fact still alive. Then you will spend a long while circling the room, sure there must be seam or a crack or a line, some indication of the hidden door through which you were brought during your improbably sound slumber. You will investigate the cabinets. You will find clothing -- all white -- and an alarmingly complete first aid kit in a white enamel box, a stereo, and a computer which appears to be connected to a LAN: you will be able to navigate on it, but none of the places you can get to will be familiar or will seem to lead you to a browser capable of finding your webmail portal.

Okay, I'm done with second person now. Third person is much more interesting. It's the most flexible person to write with. It allows any kind of point of view at all: it can do anything the others can, plus some others. It also has the advantage of being transparent to the readers. That means it's so normal and expected that the readers don't waste any of their intellect interpreting what the verb forms and pronouns are supposed to mean and they can just get on with understanding the story itself. But you know what Marshall MacLuhan said: the medium is the message. He meant something a bit different by that, but you can take it to mean that the structure and form and texture of the story are the story. Or important parts of it anyway.

Sometimes people think that third person is more "distancing" than first person -- that it keeps the reader farther from identifying with the characters. That's not necessarily the case. If the first-person narrator has a distant, cold voice, or is a "just the facts, ma'am" monotone, it's going to be more distancing than a warm, rich, tight third person story. Also, if the first-person narrator is just hard to identify with, for whatever reason, that's going to be distancing.

There's a different sort of distance to be considered too. This is the location of the point of view. Above, when I was talking about the first person narrator, I showed you how you could tell Deke's story from different characters' points of view. When you work in the third person, you have more choices for the location of the point of view than just which character is telling the story. You can choose one character and climb right into that character's head, and everything that's said in the story is filtered through that character's perceptions and personality and prejudices, and limited by the condition of the character. This is what people mean when they talk about "tight third." It's a lot like first person usually is, but even as tight as it gets, it allows more flexibility in things like describing the character and picking details out of the surroundings, more fluid passage of time, and so on. You know those sometimes-annoying passages in stories where the narrator says something like this:

My name is Deke, and I'm kind of short but not at all small, and I have russet hair and eyes the color of overripe Newton Pippin apples -- green tending to brownish yellow. I don't think I'm all that good looking, but Angelique's friends have a way of saying things that make me suspect that I might be wrong. I have a mother still living, and a father, and two younger sisters named Heather and Jasmine.

Or worse yet, passages like this:

The white freestanding pillar sink had a plain mirror above it. I looked into it. I still looked the way I always did: hair that was meant to be short but needed a cut, lips Angelique called pouty, and the incipient signs of impending crow's-feet around my hazel eyes. I snuck a peek down my shirt. Yes, still covered in a soft brown pelt. So why did I feel so different since waking up in this white room?

Those examples show the kinds of gimmicks one sometimes has to resort to when writing in first person. In tight third, though, we can sneak those things in, while showing you mannerisms that it would be really awkward to have the character commenting on:

Deke ran his right hand thoughtfully through his russet hair, the ring on his little finger catching in the messy overgrown locks. He couldn't believe Angelique and her friends had done this to him again after they promised not to anymore after the time at Felicia's house. It was aggravating, and worse. He caught himself chewing on his large square thumbnail as a wave of anxiety overtook him. He had to get out of here quickly. But it didn't seem very likely that it would happen: he usually had Fridays off, Angelique and everybody knew that, but they didn't know he had important business today.

Remember from when we were thinking about first person narrators how we could tell Deke's story from another point of view? With a tight third narration, you can still do that.

Checker surveyed the scene at Angelique's house. It was shaping up to be the best prank ever pulled on sleepy Deke. And what made it best of all was that it wasn't even mean, not any way you looked at it. It would hardly even be embarrassing for a normal person, let alone Deke, whose sound sleep was only a reflection of his amazingly serene personality (well, except for the incident at Felicia's, but that was understandable, and everybody had learned from that one).

There was cute little Deke, sleeping like a baby on Angelique's big green couch, a cute little smile on his cute little face. He'd fallen asleep hours ago watching adventure movies with the gang. Checker himself had warned him, cocking his dark eyebrows at him in the way he always did when he was going to try, unsuccessfully, to wind Deke up: "you know, you always fall asleep watching movies on TV, and you know what happens when you fall asleep in company."

"Yeah, well, fuck you too," Deke murmured cheerfully, taking a swig of the beer he probably shouldn't be drinking. "Just don't make me wake up at Felicia's again, and it's all good."

"You said it," Checker said, smirking. "Don't complain tomorrow."

But he was very sure that Deke wouldn't complain when he woke up and found himself still on Angelique's couch, surrounded by the best that Moishe's Deli could provide. It was Checker's own idea. He'd even gone out and bought special covered dishes from the party supply store, cheap because they were in ridiculous designs nobody would use except at various holidays. When he'd seen that, the rest of the prank had just fallen into place. Streamers with bats and pumpkins on them: pink and blue baby shower balloons with pacifiers and storks on them: napkins with dreidels and six-pointed stars, Christmas crackers, New Year's noisemakers, and paper plates with Easter eggs, turkeys, and stars and stripes on them. Angelique's livingroom had been transformed into an all-purpose celebration with Deke as the centerpiece.

As with the first person example, telling Deke's story through another person's point of view in third person also tells you a lot about the person telling the story, not just about Deke.

You can play around with this quite a lot. You can do the Rashomon thing, if you want, or simply alternate a couple or a small handful of points of view . . . anything you want. BUT. There are costs to each of the choices you might make with this (which I will get into later, after we've talked a bit more about point of view location).

So. More about location. You can put the point of view right inside the character's head. You can also put the point of view, figuratively, on the shoulder of the point of view character. In this method, you see what the character sees, you hear what the character hears: you see what the character does, you hear what the character says, but you do not hear what the character thinks or feel what the character feels. Some people call this "camera-eye third," because it's as if you attached a cinema-verite camera to the character and made the story out of the film that resulted. It can be challenging to convey all the feelings and motivations and backstory that you want the reader to get, but it can be extremely effective when you are dealing with an emotionally intense story. It forces you to layer and nuance your story with clues to the interior that are both subtle and nuanced.

Checker came to Angelique's house early on Friday morning. He knocked on her door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Angelique's apartment had a foyer that opened on to the kitchen to one side and the living room to the other. Checker went through the kitchen to Angelique's bedroom. She was in bed, doing puzzles in a book.

"Have you seen him yet?" he asked.

"Haven't been out of bed yet," she said without looking up from the page. "Thought you'd want to be the first one to see his -- what did you say it would be? -- adorable reaction." She looked up at him and slowly allowed a smirk to spread across her face. Checker turned to the other door of the bedroom, the one that went through to the bathroom, but not before she winked.

"I didn't say that," Checker muttered, "I just said reaction. You said adorable."

Angelique snickered and Checker crossed through the tiny bathroom to the livingroom.

In a short sample like this you might not see the difference between this and tight-third, but if I had written that in regular tight-third, I would have had an emotion, a memory, or a thought in there somewhere. And it might have been more effective, and it might have been less effective. But you wouldn't say a story switches between camera-eye and tight third because some passages have thoughts, emotions, feelings, and memories in them, and some don't. You'd say that story was in tight-third. If there are just a few of those things, and it's otherwise purely descriptive, I'd say it was a spare tight-third, and then I'd be talking about writing style and point of view.

You can loosen and move the point of view a bit away from the character, so that you see the character from the outside and still see the inside a bit. I don't know a name for this kind of point of view, when it hovers close to the one character. If it's seeing the character from the outside well enough to describe them as others see them, but it's also seeing and feeling what the character sees and feels, and recording their thoughts, it's kind of omniscient, but if it's sticking closely to that character, it's also kind of tight-third. Maybe I should call it tight omniscient. The difference here would be that you're going to see what the character looks like to other people as well as what the character sees. You know, that stuff I showed you before that feels so awkward when people stick it into mirror scenes in first-person and tight-third stories.

Checker eased his large frame through the small doorway into the livingroom. It looked like he had gotten there just on time, or perhaps a bit early. Nothing had been disturbed. He'd sneak around the side to the front of the sofa and wait just quietly in the big armchair, and see every little detail of Deke's surprise when he woke up: the ultimate surprise, the prank-that-is-not-a-prank, the little crease of faint anxiety between his brows followed by the relaxation of relief. And finally, the jubilation, the actual jubilation, when Deke figured out just what was in those covered dishes. Everything to Deke's taste.

It was just early enough in the month that Deke wouldn't connect it with his birthday at first. Especially since Deke seemed to think nobody remembered what day his birthday was, since he had steadfastly ignored it for years himself. But Checker remembered. And he remembered that Deke had never gotten the one thing he had always asked his parents for on his birthday -- more of his favorite Moishe's deli food than he could eat, Which was not the reason why he had started ignoring his birthday, but maybe this would be enough reason for him to start paying attention to it again.

And maybe paying attention to Checker too. Not just regarding him warily as the architect behind the sound-sleep pranks. Not that anybody regarded Checker as much more than a genial joker, too large for the furniture, too loud for the theater, too clumsy for the kitchen. Least of all Checker. Anatomy is destiny, said Freud, though he was talking about something else entirely, but Checker thought it applied quite well to him. Nobody takes the big guy with the funny face seriously. He'd seen that his whole life.

What Checker didn't see was himself, moving through the crowded living room silently, surely, gracefully, his big hands in his frayed pockets, his face thoughtful, almost luminous. He didn't see the couch, either, as he was watching where he was going.

You see how subtle the differences are between these? That's because there's no statutory differences at all. This is a descriptive discussion (so far), not a prescriptive one.

You can move the point of view farther out still. You can do this by creeping up behind the character's backs and peering over the tops of their heads, and then lifting up like a crow, till you're as high and far away as it suits you. If you're quite far away indeed, and you're not seeing through the characters' eyes at all, but around and beyond them, you can call it a bird's-eye point of view. You can get sweeping vistas this way, in the manner of Michener or Rushdie, but it's going to be a challenge to get your reader really invested with a character's feelings. A criticism sometimes encountered by writers who write like this is that their writing is cold and analytical, not engaging enough. Maybe you want cold and analytical though. And maybe your writing will be engaging enough for people who care about the same things you do.

Sometimes people move the point of view out for parts of a story and in for other parts. This can be dizzying for the reader. Dizzying can be good. It can be breathtaking and exciting. Or it can be alienating and nauseating.

I'm not a virtuoso of the bird's-eye point of view, but let's see if I can pull it off for a paragraph or three:

At the moment that Checker came to his chosen vantage -- the armchair he had given to Angelique himself when it became apparent that her livingroom was going to be the foregathering place of their group of friends, and that she would never quite manage to produce more seating -- Deke was coming to the idea that perhaps his predicament was not merely another prank orchestrated by Angelique's friends. He began to worry about more than getting his business done on time. He was worried for his life. He paced, and gnawed on his thumbnail till it split, screamed till he was hoarse, fell silent again, sure that nobody would ever hear him again. Finally he settled on the white, white couch, and let himself stop thinking for a bit. That usually cleared the way for him to figure things out.

The first thing he thought of after he stopped thinking was his cell phone. It wasn't with him. He got up again and went through all the cabinets and drawers and looked under the white couch. No phone.

Angelique stretched luxuriously and flowed into her little rosy bathroom. Almost as large as Deke, she had a certain stately dignity that must have come from deep within because it certainly didn't come from her huge round eyes and absurdly round cherry lips. She had enough time for a shower, if she let Checker have all the glory of seeing Deke wake up to the best -- and probably final -- prank of his life.

Angelique was pretty sure that if Deke showed even a scrap of gratitude for the surprise awaiting him, Checker would turn all his scheming energy to overtly pleasing the object of his affections.

Checker eased himself slowly and delicately into the sturdy armchair. It was almost big enough to be called a loveseat, actually. He certainly thought he might love to seat himself in it with cute little Deke half in his lap scarfing up some of that Moishe's chopped liver on rye. Only after he had successfully settled in without making the slightest noise did he reward himself by looking towards the couch where Deke would be sleeping. His first glance didn't surprise him. Deke often looked like a mere pile of blankets when he slept, curled up with his toes tucked under himself and Angelique's heavy knitted afghans thrown over. But as he indulged his love of gazing at Deke, it slowly became quite clear there was no Deke there.

Well, see, I think I failed to produce a bird's-eye point of view there. Instead, I did something else -- something I think we've been calling head-hopping omniscient in our writerly conversations. The meaning of that label ought to be pretty clear -- it's a kind of omniscient point of view that hops around from head to head as it pleases the author or moves the story along. It's sort of easy, in a way, because you don't have to make a decision beforehand as to which point of view's going to carry the story, or even any section of the story, because you can always hop along to the next one if you can't see enough from where you're standing. The difference between the bird's-eye and the head-hopping is distance (the distance I just failed to establish) -- the head-hopping writer hops right into the characters's head and reports everything they feel like reporting.

So the advantage of head-hopping is that it's easy. It has disadvantages too. One is that it can be simply confusing, if the hopping is happening at too short or too long intervals. If the intervals are too short, there's not enough detail accumulating to let the reader see where they are at the moment. f the intervals are too long, the reader gets used to the current location and it's wrenching and disorienting to move. It also runs the risk of undermining the reader's engagement, attachment, and sympathy for the characters. And it runs the risk of preventing the story from developing a voice. Because everybody's point of view is not distinguished from nobody's point of view, see?

Voice is a nebulous thing. It's basically style, except that when we talk about style we're usually really talking about language use and imagery and everything: writing as writing. And when we're talking about voice, we're usually talking about a sense of there-ness and who-ness and the passion of the writer. It's where the writer's and protagonist's psychology and culture and politics and personality and prejudices and taste are expressed. It's all the same thing: specific words, specific events, images, characters, timing . . . but when you look at it one way, you get a sense of what style the writing is in, and when you look at it another way, you get a sense of what voice is telling the story. I think voice is maybe more integral than style: maybe style is more subject to the manipulations of the momentary urge the writer has.

I'm sure I could divide the subject of point of view into finer categories. I could possibly even do it in a way that might be of use to somebody. But I won't, this time anyway. I have another fish to fry. I want to talk about not screwing up with point of view.

So here comes the prescriptive part. Unfortunately, it's not one of those neat, easy-to-follow-blind prescriptions. I can't say "When the following conditions exist you must always use this kind of point of view, and you must choose this kind of character to carry the point of view." It doesn't work that way. I suppose it could, if there were only a small handful of story types and a small handful of character types and people's ideas about stories didn't change every five minutes. But it doesn't, and the prescription I'm going to give you is loose and wobbly and equivocal and mostly consists of "don't be annoying or boring." Yes, I know, that's ridiculous advice. It's meaningless and it's not even always what you want. It's pretty rare that you want the reader to be bored even for five seconds, but annoyed . . . it's risky, but maybe you could tell a good story with annoyance as one of the tools you use. Maybe. If you want my advice, though, don't try it. There's a world of other strategies that are more promising.

My first piece of advice is: pick a point of view strategy and stick to it. If you're going to hop around, start early. The last thing I want is to read a hundred pages in Max's point of view -- tight third, or first, either one -- and suddenly I've got some other asshole talking to me explaining stuff I supposedly didn't get from Max. If you've been doing your job, I either did get that stuff from Max, or I don't need to know it until (and unless) Max does. By this time, I'm thoroughly in Max's world and I don't need somebody invading my head and. I hope that right away your little gears are turning, thinking "I bet there's a way to turn that to my advantage in some kind of story . . ." Right. Some story, somewhere, needs that jolt, that disorienting shift after the point of view has been well established and the story has been playing itself out a certain way. But not most stories. Most of the time, if you write a story like this, and you go back and just cut out everything you wrote in the new point of view, you haven't lost a thing.

If you're one of the ten or so people who've gotten a review from me suggesting just that, you're not surprised to see this here!

I read a lot of romantic fiction and one of the favorite gimmicks is the strictly alternating point of view thing. with each section labeled and every important scene described from both points of view. This can be intensively fascinating . . . for the writer. Speaking as a reader, I have to say it gets boring. There are very few love scenes that are complicated and interesting enough to read through twice beginning to end. Here's where my "at least two things" rule can be helpful. It's one of my hard and fast rules about writing. Every little element of a story should accomplish at least two things for the story. It might move the plot: it might enhance the setting: it might clue the reader in about backstory: it might illuminate the characters: it might expose something technical the reader needs to understand the story: it might establish rhythm: it might build the world the story is set in: it might develop a mystery, explicate the language, drag a bit of necessary red herring across a path, or keep everything from happening at once. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter which, except that it must do two of them, and it must do them in the right way -- that is, in a way that couldn't be done better some other way. And if you're repeating the same events, it's kind of hard to be doing that. Better to overlap only as much as you need to between points of view shifts, and move the story along a bit faster. Don't give the reader a chance to get bored.

Something I run into a lot and usually hate, sometimes enough to stop reading a story, is a gimmick where some of the points of view are told in first person and some in third. This is weird and obnoxious behavior most of the time when it comes up. Often there's nothing at all to be gained from this mere grammatical toy. It just makes me stop and wonder what happened -- did the writer accidentally upload the next chapter to a different story here? Was this a dream? Is one of the characters actually a ghost? WTF? I can imagine where it might come in handy. A framing story in first person, where the narrator is also telling the story-within-a-story about another person, and that story-within is in third person (or -- cringe -- second person, if you must). But not usually.

My writing mentor said he thought beginning writers should probably stick to tight third, one point of view, in their early work. He said this because it's the most transparent, least gimmicky, easiest to write and read, and most flexible. I would say that too, but I'm going to qualify it, because I know that the most experimental writers are often the beginners, and they really need to kick up their heels while writing. So, cautiously, I say: go for it. But be honest when you assess your work to see if it succeeded in what you set out to do, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Something I hinted at repeatedly from the beginning is that the point of view and the person the story is mostly about are not necessarily the same person. Honestly, I don't even think the protagonist is necessarily who the story's about, even though strictly speaking that's what we're supposed to mean when we say protagonist. But I don't think a person's life is necessarily about themselves. For a while I went around asking people, if they were in a novel, whose life would it be about really? Most people said it would be about themselves. A few women -- like me -- said it would be about their mothers. I am no longer sure that is the case about me, but I have lived a kind of a long time since my mother died, so the subject of my life has had plenty of time to change.

A good example of a story told from the point of view of someone other than the protagonist is of course that staple of high school American Lit classes, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another lesser-known one (but very famous in its day) is The Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque. Of the two, the latter is more of a weeper, but it's also more uplifting.

So how do you go about choosing a point of view? You don't. usually. Usually you just start writing and you see that you're writing in a particular point of view and then work at fine-tuning that and making it as consistent as it needs to be for the needs of the story.

Often the choice is obvious. There's a person in the story who is in an ideal position to tell it. The new guy, the fish out of water who has to have things explained to him or make new discoveries. Or the guy who suddenly encounters the new guy and has his world turned upside down, and has to mull over old stories to see what they mean in the face of this newness. Often, the point of view is the most interesting person in the story. Other times, the story is best told by a person who is at least superficially less interesting: an observer.

Sometimes the point of view person is an unreliable narrator. Sometimes they lie, or they don't understand what they're experiencing or observing, or they're not who they say they are or think they are. Unreliable narrators can be children, or someone like Huckleberry Finn, who has been fed a passle of lies his whole life and tries desperately to believe them until [spoiler] ( read the damned book of that name if you haven't, don't be put off by racist language because {spoiler having to do with the unreliability of the narrator} -- if you haven't read Huckleberry Finn, you don't understand the first thing about United States politics and culture). The unreliable narrator is a beautiful device to layer in a lot of extra information to a story, but you have to be on your toes as you write, because the clues that the narrator is unreliable need to come early or you're cheating. You may want the reader to keep guessing for a while, but if they aren't even guessing that the narrator is handing them a crock of crap until the Big Reveal near the end of the story, it's just a game of gotcha and you have been unfair to the reader.

As a rule of thumb: be really, really consistent with whatever you find yourself doing. Most of the time if you think you need to break consistency in order to accomplish something, you don't, and the extra labor you put in to make consistency work will pay off in ways you couldn't even begin to imagine when you started wondering whether to go back and fix that breach. Because, in writing --

Constraint is freedom. I don't mean "censorship is freedom" or "inhibition if freedom" or anything stupid like that. I mean, until you make some definitions and rules for your story -- most of which you do without having to think about them consciously -- you don't have a story. Until your character is not-everybody-else-but-Deke, it's not Deke. Until your character has no hair but russet brown, slightly wavy, very messy, ought-to-have-been-cut-two-months-ago hair, your character has nothing but a pixelated fog up top its head: it's not even bald till you decide so. Obviously you don't have to decide every possible thing about the character and the world it inhabits -- hair is even dispensable, though you wouldn't know it from most people's writing -- but everything you do know is a rule that rules out all the things it isn't.

You can do whatever you want with point of view. But you need to be doing something in particular. It helps if at some point in the writing process you articulate to yourself what you're doing. Consistency means many things -- it doesn't mean being rigidly the same in every way from paragraph to paragraph and page to page and chapter to chapter, but it does mean having an overall rule in mind as you run through your changes.

So. Go write stuff, and instead of being annoying or boring, be amusing and engaging. I'll try to do the same.