Character Driven Point of View

Depending On Your Point of View – Part One

When I first became serious about my writing, I thought that voice and point of view (POV) were basically the same thing.

Point of view in its most simplest term refers to who is telling the story and how it is told. From there, POV can be divided into two categories:

• Character driven POV is where the story unfolds from the POV of one or more of the characters in the story.
• Narrative POV is when the story is told through the eyes of a narrator who is independent of the story’s characters.

Within the character driven POV, you can have first person, third person or multiple person POVs.

First Person

First person POV is told from the viewpoint of one character in the book and you’ll see the use of the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon about an autistic teen with a penchant for math who tries to solve the mystery of his neighbor’s murdered dog and Richard Llewellyn’s tale of the harsh life in a Welsh coal mining community in How Green Was My Valley are examples of this POV. Chick lit is one genre where first person POV is predominant.

The person telling the story in first person may not necessarily be the main character as in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the reader meets Holly Golightly through the other person’s account.

Third Person

Third person POV is told through the eyes of one of the characters and employs the pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’. The best one that comes to mind is the Harry Potter series.

Multiple

Multiple POVs involve the unfolding of the story through two or more characters. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible illustrates this. The novel is about a missionary who takes his wife and four daughters to the Congo. Their tragic tale is told by each daughter: Leah, Ade, Rachel and Ruth May.

Multiple POVs can play out in chapters or individual scenes. The trickiest of all is the alternating POV within the scene. The key is to jump from the thoughts of one character to another within a scene as effortlessly and seamlessly as possible.

These are the basic character derived POVs. Next month, we’ll take a look at narrative driven POVs.