I Think, Therefore I Am: The POV Decision

There it is; a story idea. The idea may be as broad as a concept or as honed as a single image, but it showed up unannounced and begs you to run with it. Give me substance, it pleads, and you know what it’s really asking for: it wants you to decide who will be telling its story.

I would assume that many writers go through a process of slow deliberation over the major components of their stories before they even type the first word of their first draft, while others are struck square in the noggin by their muse and inspired to let their fingers fly as the story pours out naturally onto the (virtual) paper. I’ve taken both approaches, but more often than not I belong to the former group of planners rather than their impulsive counterparts. Someone asked me recently how I decide on the voice (ie first person, third person limited/omniscient, etc.) when I start in on a story, and I realized that for as much as I poke and prod an idea before I finally feel confident enough to begin the actual writing, rarely do I make a conscious decision whether my narrator will say things like, “I think, therefore I am,” or “S/He thinks, therefore s/he is.” I can only assume my answer at the time was disappointing, and although I’ve spent a bit more time thinking about motivations for voice, I’m still not sure I have come up with anything more concrete than before.

One thing I recall from early fiction workshops is that many new writers tend to write about themselves; the protagonist is an embodiment of the author, sharing everything from physical to mental traits (or possibly more accurate—philosophical traits). The blissfully unaware may even throw everything into a first person voice. Others may feel the subconscious urge to feign some level of separation and fall into third person for distance. If this is fiction we’re talking about, it makes sense to train writers to stop putting themselves into the story; if you want to talk about yourself, save it for your memoir. Then again, maybe not.

A common phrase for writers is to “write what you know.” Maybe it’s possible to be clueless about a subject and still write about it, but one thing that makes a story enjoyable—at least for me—is that the author sounds like they know what the hell they’re talking about. If it takes placing one’s self into the narrative to make me buy it, then I guess I can’t complain too loudly; although in a workshop setting this can be a little awkward if the protagonist is easily identified as the author, and especially so if the story ends up revealing a little too much about their personal lives—TMI, as the kids say. And since I mentioned memoir above, there’s still a danger that writing a really great story based too much on reality may blur the line; Tim O’Brien’s collection, The Things They Carried, seems like fairly good representation of that.

I would be lying if I said that I’ve never put myself in a story before, but I usually try to spread myself out a bit, or as Bilbo Baggins says, “…sort of stretched, like butter spread over too much bread,” and so one character may use one of my high-rotation phrases, or another may share one of my pet peeves—you see what I’m getting at. Another way to shake things up based on your personality is to take a character and allow them to embrace an opinion or outlook you don’t necessarily share, but there is a danger in taking on a condescending or judgmental tone—like a staunch anti-abortionist creating a protagonist who contemplates or goes through with an abortion—because the chances are high the finished product won’t resemble so much a story as it will a piece of propaganda bullshit. The character needs to be believable, easily mistaken for a flesh and blood person, because it’s a character, not a caricature.

Anyway, before I get too far into character development and lose sight of the POV question (can you see now why I say a story has to roll around in my head for a while and find a shape before I get going?), once I have a feeling who is going to be in the story, I have to figure out who is telling it. Great, now we’re right back to the first paragraph. But wait; now I’ve thought about who I want to be in the story, and if I’ve got that much, I probably also have a better idea of what the overall story will be about. So now a subconscious question occurs:

How closely do I want to reader to be involved with the protagonist?

If the answer is “very much involved,” then I’ll have a strong tendency to go with first person. With first person, I can write so that a reader becomes the protagonist, in a way. In a couple of my short stories, I have characters who aren’t even identified by name, and I did that purposefully because I want the reader to feel the urgency. With first person, perceptions and emotions can be immediate and brutal—and hopefully the reader is feeling as much ownership as the character experiencing them.

A sense of immediacy can be achieved with third person, but there’s always going to be a sense of distance as well. I can write:

“The door slammed on his hand, and after the initial explosion of pain, the resulting numbness as his body went into shock told him fingers were missing even though he could plainly see all five present and accounted for.”

Maybe a bit graphic for an example, and the time frame is anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, but the point is that there still exists some separation here—and I don’t mean body parts. The third person will always tell a reader that someone else is relaying the action, and yet another degree of separation is the element of time. I wrote this in the past tense on purpose, because this distance feels almost as if the narrator has become privy to these thoughts sometime between the actual event and the event of telling us. If I were to change the example to present tense with the third person, then it would feel as though we may be dealing with an unreliable narrator—at least in my opinion, because who could know someone else’s thoughts as they happen—or we’re dealing with a god-like omniscient narrator, and I think that would even further remove the reader from the protagonist, because it’s quite likely the narrator is able to look into one or more of the other characters’ heads whenever they feel like it.

For those writers who are planners like me, maybe there’s a similar process that goes on—unconsciously or not—while getting ready to begin a new project. Maybe the impulse writers do the same thing but much quicker, and if that’s the case, I’m officially jealous. And sometimes it just takes writing and writing and writing and then going back to realize that something in first person would sound better in third person, or vice versa.

So after all that, I suppose I’ll just fess up and say that I still don’t have a clue. I guess it all comes down to whether or not the story feels right and hope I can recognize if it doesn’t.