Thoughts on POV

Apr 03, 2010 20:42

One of my classes this semester is on visual rhetoric, and one of the basic premises we've been talking about is how, as a society, we're much more visual than we used to be, thanks in part to movies, but more so, the Internet. Images flash by us constantly, and news sites, more often than not, provide video links for their stories. Music videos, movies, television shows, ads - all of these media use quick cuts and flash to grab our attention and tell a story in less than thirty seconds, because the creators can't be certain they'll hold our attention long enough to be able to tell us the entire story. American Express uses objects that look like sad faces or happy faces, and we watch and barely hear the message, because we're entranced by the sight of two door knobs and a hanger showing us a sad face.

Fandom itself has a visual component in the form of icons, fan art, videos, photo manipulations, screen caps and so on. I'm going to throw text into that list as well, mainly because it's how fen communicate with one another: our orality is in the choice of font, punctuation and emoticons. Text for our culture goes far beyond straightforward questions of literacy and straight into questions of how to express emotion when all we have is the arrangement of pixels to aid us.

All of this is a lead-in to a discussion about POV in our stories. I'm not going to get into a discussion about first-person POV vs. third-person limited, because those are questions of personal taste. Instead, I want to look at POV as a way to reflect the visual nature of fandom. I've seen it argued at various points and times that "good" stories have a single character's POV throughout the story or at least in a given section of a story, yet when I go back to read Lord of the Rings, for instance, Tolkein uses third-person omniscient, so we end up with a range of character thoughts, occasionally within a single paragraph. So the question is why did third-person omniscient become the bad boy of POVs?

For my money, I think it's because we have become so visual. We watch movies through the filter of the main characters as our stand-in, so that what they know, we know. The camera acts as our narrator, focusing in on specific details that are, we hope, relevant to the story being told. We watch Seven through the focus of the two main characters, discovering at the same time they do the meaning of the murders and trying like hell to catch a clue before the end of the movie, because who doesn't love a good mystery? Sherlock Holmes (2009) carried that a step further, with the Holmes voice-over at various times acting as the italics we use to show a character's thoughts within a story and the camera tightening up the POV even more than it already was.

The tight focus of the camera has become our guide as we tell our own stories. Rather than going all over the place and letting the reader know what God knows, we keep our "camera" on one or two characters and insist that the reader experience the story at the same time as the characters. As a story-telling technique, it's one that I favor, because seriously, I don't like giving up the ending before, you know, the ending. I find myself looking at third-person omniscient as a giant cheat of a narrative technique, because if I use that POV, then I don't have to worry about foreshadowing or leading the reader astray with a red herring or two. I can just lay it all out and concentrate on moving the plot from point A to point B without ever once having to work to show character development in the way that character behaves or believes or becomes.

Third-person limited and, occasionally, first-person POV, work for me both as a writer and a reader because the story isn't laid out for me like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Rather, these points of view allow for the possibility of an unreliable narrator even as they satisfy my need to tell a story that has the feel of a visual medium.

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