How Do You Decide Who Tells Your Story?
A starter guide on 1st, 2nd and 3rd person point-of-view
You hold a camera in your hands. How much light do you let in? You adjust the aperture, oscillating between a teardrop and a flood of light. Shadow or blinding bright? You consider the options. How close do you get to your subject? Do you crouch down and hover over it, or do you step back and survey the landscape? Allow it to unfold, give it space to breathe. There are so many ways to tell a single story — it’s just a matter of determining how you find your way in.
Welcome to the complicated world of point-of-view. Defining your POV is instrumental because it determines who’s the gatekeeper of the narrative and how much control they exert over the reader’s access to the story and its characters.
Point of view is about how you exercise distance and freedom in your narrative.
There are many books you could buy that dissect POV in excruciating detail. Candidly, I’d rather gouge out my eyes with a spoon than regurgitate the nuts and bolts, so instead, I’ll focus on the perspectives I most often use in my work. And I’m going to keep it simple since this is a starter guide.
