There's been so much written on it that I wonder if I have anything fresh to say on the topic. And yet, I still meet writers weekly who struggle with POV. If you don't get POV, you are not alone. So let's discuss it.
First off, what is POV?
POV stands for point of view. Who is telling the story? Whose eyes are we looking through? Who is interpreting events for us?
This is important. We all interpret the world around us through our own life experiences. When I see a picture of a Nazi death camp I have a strong reaction to it. I hate what happened in those camps. But I don't have the same reaction that a concentration camp survivor would have. I can't do any more than imagine how horrible those camps were. The survivor has the actual memories.
So even if two people look at a thing with hatred, there are shades to the hatred—differing depths to the emotions. I may look at pictures of a concentration camp and be moved to go next door and tell the man who beats his child that if I see one more bruise I'll kill him. Because I want to protect the oppressed when I think of the atrocities of Hitler's Germany. A concentration camp survivor may very well see pictures of the camps and want to kill every blond-haired, blue-eyed person around. Or he may crawl into a closet and hide. He may curse God. We all look at the exact same events and interpret them through our own life experiences and our own emotional and spiritual make-ups.
To make this even clearer we can look at two people who come at a thing from opposite ends of the spectrum. In keeping with the Nazi Germany example, we can look at the concentration camps from the POV of a Nazi officer and the POV of a Jewish prisoner. These two people can experience the exact same day in the exact same camp but they will come out of it with completely different stories of what went on and why things happened as they did.
So the first thing to determine about POV is whose POV are you going to use. Who is going to tell the story?
Look at your characters. Who will best tell the story? The POV character may be the main character—the one who changes the most as the story progresses or the one who is faced with the problem that needs to be solved. Or he might be the sidekick. A character that watches the main character act and change—like Doctor Watson who chronicles Sherlock Holmes' adventures. Or he might not be one of the characters at all. He might be a storyteller who stands outside the story (look at the opening of Kate DiCamillo's delightful, The Tale of Despereaux).
We'll look more closely at the different types of narrators in future weeks.
