https://countercraft.substack.com/p/there-are-more-than-five-povs
"Hello readers,
You may have noticed I didn’t post a
Counter Craft article last week, which
is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish
up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel
Haunted Hills. The process
of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind
my last two novels,
Metallic Realms and
The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just
the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to
write a book all over again. It’s quite annoying. But another reason is that I
challenged myself to write a novel in a rotating third-person point of view
instead of the first-person POVs of my first two novels.
This is my segue into a low-stakes (and probably overly pedantic) craft topic:
why I dislike the traditional POV taxonomy.
When I teach intro to literature classes to undergraduates, I open the first
class going over the five types of POV. (This may seem overly basic, but most
of my students are not humanities majors and are unfamiliar with such things.)
Each time I teach the traditional POV taxonomy, I feel it isn’t the most useful
one from a fiction writing, uh, point of view.
Here’s a quick refresher. The alleged five forms of POV are as follows:
First-person (“I do this”),
second-person (“you do that”), and
third-person (“he/she/they/it do the other thing”). However, third-person POV
is broken down into three types:
third-person objective (no interiority),
third-person limited (one character’s interiority and perspective),
third-person omniscient (unlimited interiority and perspective). Those are
your five.
There is more we could say, of course. First-person POV implies a character who
exists within the fictional story world while the various third-person forms
are narrated by a voice that usually exists outside of the story world. But,
that’s the gist. Most intro to literature guides will also say that
second-person POV and third-person objective POV are rare in literature,
meaning you’re left with only three common POV forms.
I disagree."
Via
Garbage Day: We spent a month hiding in a Kalshi clipping Discord:
<
https://www.garbageday.email/p/we-spent-a-month-hiding-in-a-kalshi-clipping-discord>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
