Problems with POV

Our decision about which point-of-view to write in is often subconscious, as is the choice for which tense. We have the kernel of our idea, we start clicking away, and there it is, third-person, past tense. Or first-person, present tense. We are feeling artistic and shy, and up pops second-person, present tense. Sometimes, there are those ninth-inning POV shifts, hard to do, but no matter what POV we pick, we need to stay true to it. As we write, we are always struggling for truth, for verisimilitude, and a faulty POV can tear away at our carefully created piece. POV can slip up when we are unsure of our characters our tone, or stories in general. But POV has to be "dead-on" or readers will be pulled out.

 

What genre we are writing in can effect our choices. It�s possible but more difficult to have multiple POVs in a four thousand word short story. A 500 page novel in one POV might be a bit onerous. A sonnet with a first person POV might seem discordant. However, nothing is really forbidden. It�s just all about keeping the reader tied to your work, no matter what you POV you choose. I�ve made all the mistakes I can POV-wise, and as a reader and teacher, I�ve seen them, too. So I'm going to list some of the problems that can arise as well as some solutions.

 

Problem One:

Your narrator is theoretically a child, but the voice of the narrator is clearly aware of ideas beyond what a child could know. So what to do with this? You have a five-year-old child telling the story in the first person, but somehow this child knows and understands much more than a five-year-old could or would about his world, the political situation, his mother�s inner strife.

 

Solutions:

One way to keep us vested in your child narrator is to keep the dialogue real. If the character�s voice reads like a five-year-old�s, it will bleed over into the exposition, which has to be older in terms of setting the stage and the scene. One of my favorite stories is My Oedipus Complex by Frank O�Connor. This story details how Larry is forced to adjust once his father returns from fighting in World War One. Here�s a snippet that shows Larry�s point-of-view:

 

One morning, I got into the big bed, and there, sure enough, was Father in his usual Santa Claus manner, but later, instead of a uniform, he put on his best blue suit, and Mother was as pleased as anything. I saw nothing to be pleased about, because, out of uniform, Father was altogether less interesting, but she only beamed, and explained that our prayers had been answered, and off we went to Mass to thank God for having brought Father safely home.

 

The irony of it! That very day when he came in to dinner he took off his boots and put on his slippers, donned the dirty old cap he wore about the house to save him from colds, crossed his legs, and began to talk gravely to Mother, who looked anxious. Naturally, I disliked her for looking anxious, because it destroyed her good looks, so I interrupted him.

 

Five-year-olds are not usually aware of irony. In fact, I think they have a protective cloak that shields them from it. Children do worry about their parents being anxious but not because anxiety ruins their good looks. They don�t want their parents being anxious because it affects their comfort and feelings of security. But such highbrow thought on Larry�s part is only apparent in the exposition. When Larry speaks about his inability to accept his father back, he speaks like a child: Mummy . . . do you think if I prayed hard God would send Daddy back to the war? He also asks the question Why? about twenty times during the course of the story. Just like a five-year-old.

 

Here�s another idea. You want to think about using present tense as a child has more of a streamlined experience. Unless children have been scarred by the past, they tend to have little use for it. Putting all of the action in the "now" will keep forward movement and reflect the narrator's action.

 

As your child speaks, watch your syntax and diction (more on this in a bit). Find a five-year-old (or whatever age) and listen. For my novel One Small Thing, I interviewed a ten-year-old I know well and listened to his words as well as perspective on school and girls and math. Without him, I wouldn�t have known that at that time, posters of Jennifer Aniston from Friends were really all the rage among boys his age. And being an English major, I would never have thought that math is easy because it makes sense. Because, to me, it doesn�t. (Mr. Forakis, I NEVER used Algebra in my real life, so there!)

 

Children are attuned to senses, especially smell and taste. If you can describe their experiences from those senses, you will bring us immediately into their worlds. Describing a room from the way it smells rather than how it looks is not only a nice tack to take but also shows how a child might identify what�s going on. Oatmeal steaming on the burner means breakfast. Cookies in the oven means Christmas, etc.

 

But children carry whole novels. Think of Holden, Scout, Alice, and Pi. If you are writing from a child�s perspective, be sure to read their novels and watch the balance of child/adult POV and how the authors mix enough so that we can believe the child is in charge.

 

Finally, read your work aloud to others and ask them to focus on POV slips. One of the members of my writing group is excellent for digging out spots that don�t sound real, and I count on her for it.

 

Problem Two:

You are writing about a particular time, and your narrator sounds out of place. Your Victorian Woman sounds like a Valley Girl. Your Surfer Dude sounds like an Oxford Graduate. Your Knight in Shining Armor sounds like Charles Dickens.

 

Solutions:

RESEARCH! I am currently reading At Swim, Two Boys and it is set in early 20C Dublin. The way the characters interact verbally and nonverbally feels very real to me (it may be real, but it's real enough that I don't quibble). If it didn�t sound real to me, I would probably put it down. For instance, I once was reading a novel set in prehistoric times. Everything was really flowing, but then the main character meets up with a likely Cro Magnon fellow, who happens to know where the G spot is. Now, I am pretty sure that cave sex was not informed by 20C physiological understanding. I was so irritated, I didn�t finish the book, even though the sex was in the next to last chapter.

 

Sometimes our reach exceeds our grasp, and we must face the fact that we have no idea what strange language Cro Magnons spoke or what Third Century Romans sounded like at all (especially in Latin!). Maybe it�s hard trying to be a teenager. I remember Anne Lamott telling a class about something she heard a young female server say, something to the effect of, �I have, like, twenty bucks in dimes.�

 

It�s the like and the dimes that makes it young. The emphasis on the like that makes it female. The fact of the dimes that makes her a server.

 

So other than doing field research, which you should, do your best. Again, Google can be your best friend. You may find yourself reading scholarly articles or being directed to certain books. You don�t have to have each and every object and cultural reference completely researched, but you do have to create a world that does not jar the reader out of the bubble your words are creating. You research terms, diction, syntax, manners, rituals to find out how your narrator would approach a scene. Through some or all around the scene, and we will grab onto them like rocks on a climbing wall.

 

Back to the cave sex: My thought is that a real Cro Magnon would take his opportunity with little fuss or muss. In and out, so to speak. Maybe slower the second time.

 

Then, again, try it out on readers and see what happens. You tweak. You revise.

 

Problem Three:

You get bored with your POV. You are sick of the I. You hate the SHE. The YOU is driving you crazy. Or you�ve decided that in any POV, you don�t want to tell the story through your main character�s experience. Along the way, a likely secondary character has shown up who is stealing the show.

 

Solutions:

Switch your POV. Move from first, to second, the third person. Does the switch give new life to your story or poem? Do you feel energized? Enlivened? Is there a new spark in your writing? Remember, if you feel bored while writing, your readers will feel bored while reading, and that you don t want. You may find that you can tell your story with alternating POVs. In the novel Bump by Diana Wagman, the story is told by three different characters. Two characters are brought to us by the third-person limited and one in the first-person. You may want to try something that creative.

 

Perhaps one of your characters or speakers might want to address the reader. In a short story or novel, you could employ a first-person narrative, or in a poem, you might want to speaker to address the reader directly. This perspective might be something to try throughout a longer piece.

 

Or it could be that you have simply worked too long and too hard. So take a break and come back to it and see how you feel. Are you still angry, crazy, bored, sick about what you are writing? If so, this might be one of the pieces you need to let hang in your C drive. Some writers insist you must finish everything, but I think there is a place for unfinished work. Each piece we write teaches us, even the unfinished, the botched, and the bungled. Don�t delete or erase or destroy either because you never know when a part of an unfinished piece will slip right in to a new creation.

 

Problem Four:

Your character/narrator/speaker lives in and speaks to us from a time that makes him or her act in a particular way that you hate.

 

Solutions:

Actually, consider that you need to hate your character. Perhaps this character is a horrible person. That�s okay. As we know, there are horrible people in the world, some without a glimmer of a redemptive quality. But if you like your character, admire him, but he is stuck in troubled, racist, classist, sexist, violent time, you can show his inner conflict through an internal dialogue or a shift in narrative focus.

 

For example, here is a section from Tim O�Brien�s famous short story The Things They Carried. In the excerpt below, you will find the characters in violent times, all of them doing violent acts. But in the midst of this violence, O�Brien brings his narrative eye (third person limited) on Lieutenant Jimmy Cross so we can see how he feels internally. While we might not like what Cross is involved in, we can begin to understand him and feel him as a person.

 

After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.

 

He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed five pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth.

 

He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.

 

All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.

 

Lavender was shot while Cross looked at his letter from Martha, and the above section shows the grief and guilt Cross will now carry. Even though he orders a raid on the village and lives are destroyed because of him, we feel him as a person and can to see the split between Cross and the setting of the story.

 

You can also let your character speak through letters or a journal entry. But to keep the verisimilitude of the piece and the POV straight, you need to keep your character and your setting and POV synchronous. Even a rebel has to deal with society somehow. A character can rebel, but must face the "real" situation of the times.

 

But what if you have, say, a serial killer, a person who does things you can never imagine but now have, right there, on the page. How to convince readers to move along? The example I�ve now used for years is Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. To tell the tale of QP and his spree of murder, she uses the first-person POV so effectively that at some point in the novel, I began rooting for QP. I began hoping he would, in fact, learn to successfully create a zombie so he could have a life-long friend. Creating a zombie, of course, means kidnapping and drugging an unsuspecting victim and then attempting an at-home pre-fontal lobotomy with an ice pick.

 

Passages such as the one below led me along and to this sympathy.

 

A true ZOMBIE would be mine forever. He would obey every command & whim. Saying, �Yes, Master� & �No, Master.� He would kneel before me lifting his eyes to me, saying, �I love you, Master. There is no one but you, Master.�

 

Sick, yes. But who doesn�t want unconditional love? Mostly, we don�t have to create zombies to get it, but I related. I saw how QP and I were similar. The first person POV did at least half that work.

 

POV mishaps are common, and one of the hardest things to learn to see in our own writing. Since the whole world of the story is in our writer brain, we can�t often spot when we�ve switched to another view for a sentence or paragraph. And sometimes worse is that there are writers who head-jump on purpose. Even more perplexing is that there are writers who do it well. But if you are trying to stick to one view and can�t, don�t despair. Whatever your POV dilemma, the solutions are usually truth, persistence, consistency, flexibility, and creativity. All or one can usually get you out of your writing jam.