It’s common knowledge that one of the biggest challenges when it comes to writing is merely getting started. Sometimes the challenge begins with not even having an idea in mind before you start to write.
Story ideas can be a problem, not only because you don’t have a general concept but also because of all of those preliminary decisions you have to make at the forefront. One of those decisions includes which point of view to use.
Are you going to write in first, second, or third person? Are you going to write from one point of view or multiple? Will your reader be reading as if the story is being told to them as it happens, or is this a kind of uncovered artifact that chronicles an extraordinary event?
In college, I took an entire fiction writing course where every writing exercise we submitted to our workshop was based on a type of point of view essentially taken from the book Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. This book contained short stories written by dozens of famous authors from Margaret Atwood to Truman Capote. Using those stories as inspiration, we then wrote a story or scene from that point of view.
Having the point of view worked out in advance created a very nice foundation in which to lay down a short story, or at least the beginnings of one. You get to see the advantages and disadvantages that each point of view has to offer. No matter how limited or freeing, each point of view allowed creativity to shine through, whether it was one that created a problem to solve or one that opened you up to get as big and broad as possible.
Below I break down each point of view captured in this anthology and how it can help you to overcome writers block or at least get you on track to get started with your already established idea. Let me know your favorite point of view that you like to read and/or write in the comments!
Note: This post contains affiliate links, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
Interior monologue
Interior monologue is a very personalized point of view. It’s very limited in its viewpoint. So, it can be very restrictive.
Your narrator has to have a strong or at least unique voice in order to keep the reader’s attention. The fun part is getting to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, whether controlled or uncontrolled, depending on the state of mind of your narrator, but no matter what the spectrum of their mindset, you get to go off on tangents and build a character based on how they see the world and what they choose to share about their perspective of a situation or what that situation reminds them about in their past.
It’s also a great device for writing a character whose mental health is called into question. Getting into their mindset connects the reader to the character in a way that just seeing their actions play out might not make the most sense in terms of understanding those actions.
Interior monologue is very character driven, even if you have a very forward-moving plot. I tend to think of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and how he’s always getting off topic, even when he’s in the moment. He’s a daydreamer, and the reader gets swept away in those daydreams with him, even if his viewpoint turns out to be cynical or masking an underlying pain.
The Points of View book uses two very dramatic examples from Dorothy Parker and Tillie Olsen to make its point. The characters telling the story are in heightened emotional states and very anxious. They’re fast paced and build tension, perfect inspiration for someone in the mood to write in an anxious tone.
Dramatic monologue
Sometimes a writer will watch a play or a scene in a movie with a long, dramatic monologue and be inspired to want to write the same. Maybe they want to write their own version of the monologue they’re seeing or have a different topic in mind, and they want to put their own spin on this writing style.
Dramatic monologues are fun because they give the character a soapbox to speak for themselves aloud, whether it’s to the audience or to other characters. It’s like writing an essay where thoughts and admissions just pour out in a cathartic way.
We can get into all of the classic Shakespeare monologues, but they are a bit dated and not very easy to relate to. Points of View provides two examples that mirror the stream-of-consciousness that the interior monologue presents, only you know that it’s spoken aloud.
The cinematic example I tend to think of is the title character’s long monologue at the end of Ti West’s Pearl. It’s long and confessional and helps the audience to make sense of how her mind works and how she is both a tragic character and a villain at the same time.
Letter/diary narration
Have you ever stumbled over a collection of letters and been totally engrossed in their contents? Has it inspired you to write anything based on that exchange, or at the very least made you want to develop your own story based on this back and forth style?
Letters and diaries are a challenge because of how limiting they are. Even the most detailed writer is naturally going to keep the details to a minimum, so this style of writing has to mimic that by pulling back on the traditional tendency to really spell out descriptions or add tons of dialogue.
The fun, though, is working through the limitations and finding a way to tell a full story without those “crutches” of the fiction world. It’s a great muscle to stretch so that you don’t rely on telling versus showing. You also get to bury messages deep beneath the surface of the letters. You can choose to withhold responses to those letters so that the reader fills in the gaps from a single point of view only.
Points of View talks about how popular this point of view was in the 1700s because letter writing was so common, and this helped to work the way into the modern fiction genre. Today, it’s on par with so many text or video message monologues that we see in modern novels, particularly YA novels. It’s interesting to think how cutting edge it was, and now it’s associated with classic novels like Dracula and Jane Eyre. See my posts on epistolary fiction and nonfiction here!
Subjective narration
Subjective narration is where it gets interesting. Five people can witness the same event and remember it or retell it very differently. In this case, the author gets to choose the perspective(s) that is/are going to be relayed in the story.
Whether they mean to be or not, the narrator is essentially going to be unreliable. They’re going to use their memory, perspective, and desire to be painted or have others painted in a specific light in order to tell their version of the story.
For an unreliable narrator situation, the reader is going to need at least a subtle clue that triggers the true story or at least allows them to second guess the narrator’s version. That’s where the author gets to be creative and clever and work in these nudges to shift focus away from the central narration. This can be tricky because the author doesn’t want to come across as looking like they’re making unintentional continuity errors or not making sense.
I remember being excited to write a subjective narration piece for class. Once I got into it, though, I found it to be the most difficult of the bunch. It requires a lot of layering, and it played against my natural storytelling process.
The author has to embody the unreliable narrator and have a strong grasp as to why they’re unreliable, either due to needing to cover something up because they’re a compulsive liar or they are rewriting their own history because they can’t deal with the truth of the situation. It’s important to have a game plan before diving into this type of narration so that the technique works for the story. Once you pull it off, though, you’ll find that your writing muscles have strengthened that much more.
Points of View uses John Updike’s short story, “A&P,” as an example of this story. I don’t know if it still does, but this story used to come up as a frequently used short story example in college level classes. It’s a story that feels very mundane, but under the surface, it’s an eye-opening coming of age situation for the narrator. It also shows he has a lot to learn about the world. His inexperience makes him unreliable, and it’s not until the resolution of the story that we see how misguided his cockiness and viewpoint towards the situation at the A&P really was.
Detached autobiography
Detached autobiography is the exact opposite of subjective narration. This is a narration you can trust. It has the elements of a grounded narrator and the passage of time to allow it to basically tell it like it is.
The story lacks emotion, at least from the narrator’s point of view, allowing the events to shine rather than the narration itself. The narrator isn’t concerned with how they come across. They’re concerned with getting the facts to the reader.
The examples that Points of View give tend to be very dialogue heavy. This puts the reader in the room with the characters listening and taking it in as a scene or message is laid out in conversation. That’s where the character lies. The dialogue is the exact opposite. The sentences are short, straightforward, and uninteresting. It seeks just to hold up the frame of the plot, even though it’s written in first person.
Memoir or observer narration
This narration sounds like it would be for the nonfiction genre, but really what it’s doing is telling a story about one fictional character from another fictional character’s perspective. In doing so, you get a distanced point of view that allows for a unique collection of facts and observations to present itself.
The narrator can be unreliable, but they could also be ultra reliable, depending on their own character traits. They can bring their own history with the character to the situation and help the author to see how they are perceived by others more than how they see themselves. This is very effective when focusing on a mysterious or larger than life character, such as a celebrity.
The classic novel that comes to mind that uses this technique is The Great Gatsby. A more modern version that crossed my mind was Daisy Jones & the Six, which uses multiple points of view to create many versions of the events based on the specific and lack of knowledge of the characters involved. The novel Big Fish too gives you a father’s life story from the son’s point of view, though he mainly retells the fables that his father told him, only because he never learned the real stories.
I love how this technique elevates the subject into a kind of fable or legend based on how others remember them and the events that make their way into the story. It really romanticizes the story and makes it feel real, the way we do when we talk about historical characters, whether we knew them personally or not. They can come off as inspiring, tragic, or a cautionary tale based on rumor, legend, and the number of times the story has been retold.
Anonymous narration single/multiple/no character POV
Points of View breaks up these perspectives into multiple sections so that specific examples can be grouped together to illustrate this point of view. These versions are for those who love to write in the third person. They want their narrator to be omniscient so that they can maneuver through multiple headspaces, settings, and times. They also want to be able to change the tone to match the person at the forefront of the story from one scene to the next.
This perspective puts you on the shoulder of each character. It can even get into their head, but there’s always going to be a bit of a disconnect because it’s not in the first person.
At the same time, the third person narrator is usually pretty reliable. It also knows everything and can even also spoil some things for the reader if the author wants to. Stephen King does this a lot, sometimes to add shock value, sometimes to keep reading, or sometimes to prepare you for how upcoming events are going to play into the overall outcome of the story and the message the story is trying to convey.
This technique can also hide spoilers, particularly character deaths. In the first person, it’s typically safe to assume that whoever is telling the story will live through it till the end, or they’ll at least survive the events. They could be telling the story from the afterlife, but that’s difficult to effectively pull off and only works for certain types of stories.
Writers can add multiple narrators to this style of writing. They can even write it from no character’s point of view, making the narrator clearly omniscient without questioning who they are and how they fit into the story.
That’s the beauty of storytelling. There are so many situations that we can just accept in order to be entertained. Not everything has to be explained, and probably shouldn’t, so that the focus can remain on the entertaining aspects of it. Getting the point of view settled early on allows the writer to work within the parameters of that point of view and get to the meat of the story, the characters and the plot.
Pin it to Pinterest!
