Point of View Discussion

One topic that surfaces at every writer conference, writer retreat, writing meeting, writer get-to-gether, writing book, and every other writer event you can think of, is point of view.

Keeping point of view straight in a piece of fiction is tricky. It doesnt sound like it would be: You choose a main character and write everything from that character’s point of view. Or if you choose to use the narrative format, everything is from that point of view. Perhaps your choice is first person — that should be the easiest — everything is from the “I” point of view.

BUT IT IS NOT EASY.

And no one disagrees with that. Except …

We all have read works that we absolutely loved that, if broken apart meticulously, would be found wanting in the point of view department. Why are they published and, often, best sellers?

Because the single most important feature of any work of fiction is the story, with the strength of the characters coming in a close second.

Readers forgive easily if they are captivated by the story.

Summry: Make your characters great and your story greater. Most of the other stuff will be easily forgiven.

End of discussion.

 

Pat Meyers
www.PatriciaMeyers.com

 

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “Point of View Discussion

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s