Short Stories - Point of View

A shifting point of view confuses the reader and reveals inexperience in a writer. Finding the best approach for each story and maintaining it throughout marks a great step forward in becoming an accomplished writer.

Who is Telling the Story?

Is the narrator a protagonist, an observer or the ‘invisible’ storyteller who is not part of the events? Will the story be told in the first or third person?

Take Time to Explore the Options

Every point of view available to a writer has its pros and cons so, even though the story works very well in the first person, exploring it through the third person might just reveal something even better or vice versa.

First or Third person – What’s the Difference?

The first person, ‘I’ viewpoint, can only tell what the narrator can see or hear: ‘The first time I saw him, he was looking at my new car.’

This means that if ‘I’ cannot see it, feel it, touch it, taste it or hear it, then ‘I’ cannot reliably relate anything about it - the key word here being 'reliably'.

The third person, ‘he/she’ point of view, has several ways of working, but simply put, can reveal aspects of character and events that ‘I’ may choose not to: ‘Watching him examine her new car, she decided that they’d be married within the year.’

This can include key details the ‘I’ character wouldn’t know, ‘He hated spoilt rich girls, but it really was a great car, so he swallowed his jealousy and smiled at her.’

While the view-point can change during a story, this needs to be handled with great care especially in short fiction, where space to make it work is limited.

Exercises for Deciding on Point of View

Try using the opening paragraph to explore the possibilities. Even if the original version turns out to be the final one, it will have been proved to be the best by testing it against other options.

1. Take the story opening and, whatever point of view has been used, rewrite it from the opposite stance.

2. Compare the results – if the original version was in the first person, ‘I’ point of view, are any extra insights gained from using the third, ‘he/she’ perspective? Or, does this reveal too much? Maybe the limited view of the first person is essential for the story being told.

Similarly the other way round – if the first version was third person, does the personal view of the ‘I’ narrator offer closer engagement with the reader or the events of the story? Or does it restrict the story too much?

3. Play with the distance of the narrator – what if the ‘I’ point of view is not that of a protagonist but a witness to the events? Is the third person narration from the classic position of the storyteller narrator, who sees and knows all, or the closer perspective of one of the characters in the story?

Moving the Story On

Once the point of view is decided, the way in which the story can develop becomes clear.

Reading as research is always useful - genre anthologies can show how writers handle point of view for a particular style while more general collections offer insights into a broader range of starting-points.

For three very different examples of the way a single author handles the short form try:

Four Stories by Alan Bennett (Profile Books, 2006)

Daughter of Regals and Other Tales by Stephen Donaldson (Collins, 1984)

Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens (Wordsworth Classics, 1998)

Who is telling the story?

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