A Great Question About POV

Helen Kerner, a participant in the online critique group I'm currently running, asked an excellent question recently: If a story is from one character's point of view, or POV, how does an author relate information that character doesn't know about?

As a refresher, a POV refers to who's telling the story. Here are the most common choices:

• omniscient: an unnamed narrator floats above the action and drops into characters' heads to let readers know what the characters are thinking

• third-person close: a narrator stays inside one person's head so the readers see, hear, feel, taste and otherwise experience the story through that one character (authors can 1. stick to one character, 2. follow a different character in each chapter, 3. alternate between two characters, or 4. choose any combination therein)

• first-person: the narrator talks directly to the reader (i.e., "I knew my life was headed downhill when I failed the first day of kindergarten...")

In Helen's case, she gave a third-person POV to her main character, a woman in New York City who just fell in love. Helen wanted to know how readers could learn about a surprise the woman's boyfriend planned, a plan that fell through when tragedy struck. How could the woman find out what her boyfriend never intends to reveal?

Here are the suggestions I offered. The main character could:

• get the information from another character through an exchange of dialog (i.e., "He didn't want to tell you, but he was planning to propose to you that night.")

• find a document — letter, email, note on a calendar, message on the answering machine, etc. — that explains what another character intended.

• follow a list of clues — a phone number, a date circled on a calendar, the rental of a tux, a character's manner, etc. — that strongly suggests what another character had in mind.

But Helen threw me a nice curve by saying she never wants her main character to know about her boyfriend's plan. Given a character can't tell readers something she doesn't know, Helen realized she has to go with an omniscient POV that allows the boyfriend to reveal the information. The trick to making that choice work is to remember that whatever the secondary character reveals should push the main character toward the climax, as opposed to just offer an interesting aside.

If you're just learning about POV, here's some basic information:

Point of view, Wikipedia explanation

Point of View, the choices as listed on the New York University website

Points of View: Revised Edition by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny

Choosing the correct POV from which to tell your story is not only essential, but can be tough, not only to select, but implement, too. If you have any questions, let me know and we'll work out the choices.

Happy writing!

A New Animal

My dad in Connecticut likes to send me articles he clips from the Wall Street Journal. While eating my lunch today — toasted banana walnut bread with a healthy schmeer of peanut butter — I read yet another article about the coming, and irreversible, tide of change from the printed word to that of digital.

In this article, The Digital Future of Books by Gordon Crovitz, he refers to how new electronic gadgets have put us on a diet of info-snacking, whereby we nibble here and there at tasty, but nutrition-less content. He longs for a day when electronic readers like the Kindle allow us to once again absorb richer and more enduring literature.

But rather than be books in digital form only, Crovitz, and the experts he cites, predict the combination of digital literature and the Internet will create a new animal, one that will not eat us whole like T Rex by crushing what's left of our time and attention span with the grinding power of even more information. Rather, this new combination will blanket us in a Bambi-like charm by incorporating more of our senses. Some ideas bandied about involve the ability to store favorite passages, send them to friends and click on links that allow us to see videos and find more information regarding the subjects we're reading about.

While the last seems like more information glut, I do believe we're moving toward a place where reading will be an all-sensory experience, as evidenced by forward-thinking online journals that have gone beyond just posting stories you can read from a website. Instead, they pair stories with artwork, animation, mood music and the option to hear the author read the work.

One such online journal is Mad Hatters' Review, which besides standard material — short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and drama — accepts what the journal calls "Whatnots," or multi-genre work "including vispo (visual poetry), audio recitations, collages and texts that defy easy categorization."

Rather than find myself overstimulated, I was surprised by how much I liked the music that opens the issue, the video collages, video interviews with artists and the option to listen to the music that accompanies each story like that of Delvaux Centennial by Jason Everett.

Along the same lines, 2River View includes an audio option with each story, so if readers choose to, they can listen to the author read his/her work, like Mark Edmund Doten reading Bush at War: The Sea.

If you have other examples, I'd love to know, because these sites are the ones where you'll see our literary future unfold.

Happy writing!