CREATIVE WRITING BUILDING BLOCKS
TENSE AND POINT OF VIEW: PART THREE
Look at using different types of the First Person PoV to allow varying persepctives in your fiction, with advice from author and tutor Ian Ayris
B
efore we continue our examination of First Person Point of View, I want to begin by restating a few takeaways from the last issue:
i) Movie Camera analogy
It can often help to write as if you are watching a moving of what you are writing. You are the Director, the script writer, the set designer, the dialogue coach. You are everything. In terms of Point of View, you are the Director choosing where to place the camera.
In First Person Point of View, the movie camera is placed inside the head of the chosen character, looking out through their eyes and deep into their soul.
ii) First Person is real
The real challenge in writing First Person is you are not convincing the reader a place is real or a situation, or an object or setting, you are convincing the reader a person is real. To help achieve this, First Person Point of View gives you access to all the character’s thoughts and feelings – enabling the most depth and intimacy of any of the Points of View.
Limitations of First Person
Although you have access to all the thoughts and feelings of the character – a veritable writing goldmine – you are also limited in how these are expressed. You are limited by the character’s intelligence – both mental and emotional – their memory, their ability to learn from situations, their ignorance (you cannot work out problems or see the obvious if the character is not at an intellectual level to be able to do this), their personality and even something as fundamental as their physical position (you cannot see round corners or through walls or teleport out of a difficult situation, for example). In short, you as the writer are imprisoned within the First Person Point of View. Imprisoned within the character and their psyche. But the best First Person writing is that where the writer embraces this imprisonment. Accepts this fate. It’s the only way. You cannot help the character at all. They have to help themselves. This is not your story. This is theirs. You are only there to write it down.