E49 – Editing Points of View

Show Notes

In this episode, Miss Catherine M.H. and V.E. Griffith discuss different points of view and the challenges in editing them.

Books Mentioned
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (series)
Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (series)
Kinsey Milhone Mysteries by Sue Grafton (series)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (series)
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (series)

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2459

Transcript

[V.E. Griffith]
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m V.E. Griffith, and I’m joined by my co-host from the other coast, Ms. Catherine M.H.

Miss Catherine M.H.

This week, we’re going to dive into editing different points of view.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So let’s start with the most basic question there is.

[V.E. Griffith]
Of course.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
What is point of view?

[V.E. Griffith]
I’m sure there’s a dictionary definition, but I don’t know what it is. What I do know is that point of view is the angle from which the narrator describes your world and your character’s interactions in that world. There are several different ones, and how you structure your world can depend on the point of view.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s a much better answer than I was going to give. What were you going to say? I was going to be like, point of view is the eyeballs you see the book world from.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s a good one too.

[Miss Catherine M.H.
Yeah, but yours sounded much more eloquent. Mine’s just like, here’s some eyeballs that you’re going to see the world from.

[V.E. Griffith]
So what kind of points of view do you typically see? What kind of points of view do you, are there? Can you describe those?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That is a great question. I have no idea. No, I’m just kidding.

I do know the answer to this. There are technically three different main points of view that people would use. Some of them have subcategories, some don’t.

So there is first person, second person, and third person. So why don’t we take a dive into each of them?

[V.E. Griffith]
Sounds good. So first person is where the narrator is the character. You see it a lot in memoir and in some kinds of fiction where sometimes in children’s fiction, I went to the store, I interacted with this other character, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I said, that’s first person. What you get is a very personal, internal description of the world and of the events in the world from a single character’s point of view. The problem with it is you need to pay attention and make sure that you are only interacting with the world from that one character’s point of view.

Otherwise you’re going to get your character knowing things that they shouldn’t know. For example, V.E. Griffith thought, wow, this is crazy, I realized. How can you know what I’m thinking?

If I’m in Catherine’s point of view and we’re in first person, Catherine can never know what I’m thinking. She can only know what I’m saying.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Whatever. All right. Maybe, maybe I want to know.

But yes, first person is that up close and personal viewpoint of you are in the character’s head. You are witnessing everything as they do it, as if they are you at that moment. So it’s always going to be, I’m doing this.

I say this. You won’t get a different viewpoint unless they’re reading minds. And then that’s totally different, but you’re not going to get another viewpoint.

And you’re going to be very connected to this character based on the fact that you are fully this character while you read the books.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah. It’s a challenging way to write because it limits, it doesn’t limit the interaction the characters can have with one another, but it limits the way you can describe them because you can only describe them the way the viewpoint character would know about them.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It’s much more realistic in the sense that we don’t know what other people are thinking. So this viewpoint is familiar to us when we’re reading it. We do not know what the people around us are thinking.

We could guess what they are, but it’s never going to be, I know exactly what they’re doing and exactly what they’re thinking. I know what VE is doing in chapter six, but I wasn’t present for it. It’s not going to happen.

If we’re, if the character is not there, you’re not going to know about it. So it is very realistic to how we already see the world.

[V.E. Griffith]
That makes sense. Yep. What is second person?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Second person is when the book is written using the word you and your. So you got up and rescued the damsel in distress. You are flying the spaceship.

You said you’re going to do this. You talk to that person over there. It is pretty much a good example of it would be like you are playing a video game and you are doing the activities.

You’re seeing it, you’re doing it. It’s not being told to you. The author is telling you what you are doing and what you are thinking as if you are the character in the book.

[V.E. Griffith]
The classic example that I read as a child was choose your own adventure books.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Those are good.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah. So the character I was, I, as the reader was the character and I was going through the story, making decisions about what actions I would take. And then I would, it would say, if you want to go here, turn to page 37.

If you want to go here, turn to page 64. And I was making individual decisions about where this story would go. That’s how choose your own adventure book works.

By the way, choose your own adventure is actually trademarked. So don’t call your book that if that’s what you’re writing. That is what second character is.

It’s difficult to write in. And most books are not written that way. I’ve tried it.

And for me, it was even harder than first person because I had to be careful about, again, what does the character know? And I couldn’t, I felt like I couldn’t insert thoughts into the character’s head. Oh, this is ugly.

He thought, or this is ugly. You thought that doesn’t sound right because I am projecting thoughts onto a reader. So that can be a stylistic decision, but you want to make sure that whatever stylistic decision you make is consistent.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. I think the only book I’ve ever read that had it was The Night Circus, and it starts off in second person, which was very interesting. And then it went into third person.

[V.E. Griffith]
That sounds like a challenge.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, it worked actually, because you start the book off, like going to the circus before you’re brought into the story of what’s going on at the circus. And then the last chapter of the book is once again, in second person, where you are given the action and the choice of something. So I won’t give it away because in case people want to read it.

But it was very interesting to have that jump of you are deciding, you are suddenly part of the book when you weren’t before.

[V.E. Griffith]
Okay. What is third person?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Third person, my favorite. So third person, and there’s several different types of third person. So for this, third person is when you are watching them from the outside.

So this would be like watching a movie. You are seeing the characters doing stuff, but you are not personable, like you would be in first person, you are not doing the activities like you would in second person, it is very much you are seeing the world third person is usually narrated, not by a character.

[V.E. Griffith]
That makes sense. Most fiction that I read is third person, most fiction that most people read is third person. My own character Montington goes to the store, Montington does something, sometimes I can see into Montington’s mind, that’s a subcategory we’ll get into in just a second.

But the narrator is outside the character’s body most of the time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So with third person, there are two different types, which also have subcategories, because why not make it complicated. So with third person, you have limited and omniscient. With each of these, you have a different level in them.

So let’s start with third person limited. What is that? Because you enjoy third person limited and I do not.

[V.E. Griffith]
I do enjoy third person limited. Third person limited is the idea that the narrator focuses only on one character’s experiences and thoughts in a given scene. A scene will be written from one point of view.

Now you can have multiple points of view in a book. So if you have two different main characters, and you can switch between their points of view, but only from one scene to another. So if you have two characters that go to a party together, the party will take place seen through the eyes of one character only, that is third person limited.

In third person omniscient, you can jump around from one to the other.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Because you are God.

[V.E. Griffith]
Because you’re God, basically, because you are omniscient, because the narrator knows everything. One thing that you need to be careful of when you’re doing third person limited is making sure that you do not switch from one character to another without deliberately doing so at a scene break. If you do that, you’ll get accused of head hopping, which I personally absolutely fucking hate.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
There is the thing with third person limited is that you can have close or far. Now when you are looking at close, this is when you are diving into inner thoughts, you are getting access and the privy to the actual characters thoughts. So that is close.

And when it is far, you don’t have access to the thoughts. So you are seeing the world, you’re seeing the actions, you’re going through that, but you don’t have what they’re actually thinking in that moment. So that’s the big difference between those two.

[V.E. Griffith]
The most common that you’re going to see in fiction is going to be third person close. In my experience, most fiction is written third person close. It can be genre dependent.

Obviously, a choose your own adventure book is going to not be third person close. And a memoir is not going to be third person close. A biography is probably not going to be third person close either.

But your average sci-fi book or your average fantasy is going to be third person close most of the time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So when we go to omniscient, there are also two different types. There is the narrator and my favorite close. So the narrator is when you have an all seeing figure telling the story.

A great example is Narnia. Narnia is the omniscient narrator. You are not diving into the heads of people, but you are being told this as if the story has already happened.

And they are all knowing and giving you this information and extra information that the characters wouldn’t know about yet. Another example would be the series of unfortunate events. For those who read, there is the narrator telling you the story.

Omniscient close is a fun one. It’s also more of a new age kind of writing. It’s where you’re taking that third person limited, where you get to see what people are thinking, but you’re doing it omniscient style.

So it doesn’t matter if you have a room of 15 people, you can bounce around and do it well. And no, it’s not head hopping.

[V.E. Griffith]
It’s head hopping.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It is not. And I really prefer third person omniscient. It is most of the time the fiction I am reading.

So we’ll get into that later because you and I have different ideas on what is most common. Do you have anything else when it comes to third person?

[V.E. Griffith]
Just that I hate head hopping. I can’t emphasize that enough. If you’re going to do it, do it consistently, do it correctly, do it well.

But if you don’t know what you’re doing, usually starting out as a new writer, it’s going to be easier to stick to one point of view and do third person close because that’s what a lot of what you’re going to read is. And when we’re starting out, we emulate writers that we like. That is a natural thing to do.

We don’t copy them, but we emulate them. And that’s something that has happened in art since there has been art. You learn from the master and you emulate the master.

And I know that when I was starting out, a lot of what I was reading was third person close and I really enjoyed it. And it’s what I got used to writing.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That is fascinating because that is not at all what I read. And that’s not at all how I started off writing my third person omniscient close. But then again, I’m one of those outliers.

So all right, we’ll get into that shortly. But what do you think is the biggest challenge when it comes to editing point of view?

[V.E. Griffith]
The big challenge with writing and editing point of view is simply making sure that it’s consistent. This is especially a challenge when you have written the book one way and you later decide, oh, you know, this would be better another way. Most of the time when point of view errors creep in, when I talk to the author, what I find out is, oh yeah, I rewrote this scene from another point of view.

I had three viewpoint characters and it was in Tom’s point of view before and now we’re in Eddie’s point of view. And I think I need to rewrite it again so that we’re in Sarah’s point of view. When that happens, those edits sometimes miss instances where viewpoints need to be rewritten or changed.

So if you’re having head hopping problems and you’re intending to do third person close, particularly if you are in a situation where you’re going, oh, this scene doesn’t really work from this point of view. Maybe it needs to be from some other character’s point of view. You want to go through it with a fine tooth comb and make sure that you get every instance, every thought, every thing correct.

For example, if a character turns around and shows his back to another character, you need, when you’re changing point of view, you need to make sure that all of the descriptions of how the scene changes are consistent because a character can’t see their own back. If you turn around and I rewrite the scene from your point of view, your back will no longer be visible. So I have to take that section, that description of your back out.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. One of the ones that I find challenging is when you go from third to first or vice versa. When you realize this doesn’t work in first person and then you go to third person and I’ve done, it’s not working in third person and I’ve gone to first person.

So that has shifted things. So catching those for writers, I think, is the most challenging when editing is when you’ve completely shifted what kind of point of view you’re going with.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah. I’ve seen remnants like that as well. Oh yeah, I wrote this originally as a memoir and now it’s fiction and eh, or it’s a fictional story written as a memoir where a fictional character is telling their story, but it didn’t work that way.

And so I had to change it and yeah, I’ve seen issues like that crop up where, oh yeah, it’s a previous, I rewrote it from a different point of view or a different viewpoint. And so I missed that kind of an edit. Those kinds of things are places where third party readers, alpha readers, beta readers can really, really help you because that will stop a reader short.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. I think one of the other challenging ones is when you have two different kinds of points of view in a book. I have read books like that that are very interesting.

One of them was, oh God, it’s The Crow, The Rook, and The Bluebird, I think. I’ll have to look it up again, but it’s the entire book is told from four different people’s point of view. So each chapter is the exact same, but from a different person’s point of view in a set, and only one of them was first person.

The others were third person limited.

[V.E. Griffith]
That sounds weird.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It was a very strange book. Very, very strange. So I’ll have to look up exactly what it was.

I know it’s The Crow and something.

[V.E. Griffith]
We’ll put it in the show notes.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. But I do know that when I’ve come across that in other people’s writing, that’s hard when I’m like, hey, which point of views do you want to stick with? Because occasionally, if you’re bouncing between two separate points of view, you’re going to have that slip up where you’re going to have suddenly someone is talking in first person when it’s supposed to be third person.

And I see the most when you’ve just come from writing one of those chapters. So if you were writing third person, third person, third person, and then it’s a first person, I’ll see remnants in there because you were used to writing in third person. And then you’ve shifted.

So it is a different brain shift to write and edit different points of views.

[V.E. Griffith]
So which point of view is the best?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Third person, I’m missing.

[V.E. Griffith]
You’re trying to make me spit on the microphone, aren’t you?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
No, I actually prefer it. I go out of my way to find books with it. If I’m editing, I enjoy third person.

Doesn’t have to be omniscient or limited. I just enjoy editing third person. I’ve never had to edit second person.

I’ve done first person. And I just, I prefer third.

[V.E. Griffith]
I prefer third as well. But I like first when the situation is right. For example, Sue Grafton’s mystery novels, the Alphabet series, A is for alibi, B is for whatever it was for, B is for burglars, C is for those.

Those were written in first person in the detective’s point of view. And it worked very well because those are mysteries. And so the reader only knows as much as the detective knows.

If something happens off camera, the detective doesn’t see it, the reader doesn’t see it. The flip side of that is a series like Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Those are written in third person close, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of points of view.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Third person close?

[V.E. Griffith]
Yes, they are third person close.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You mean like omniscient close? Pretty sure he’s omniscient.

[V.E. Griffith]
No. Some of the scenes were very short, but it was very, very, he was very careful and consistent that during a given scene, you were only in one character’s head at a time. There were lots of different viewpoint shifts.

Yeah. Go ahead and reread all 133,000 pages or however many it is. And you’ll see, take it with a fine tooth comb.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Okay. Because I’m pretty sure he was omniscient.

[V.E. Griffith]
No.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
We’ll settle this now. I’ll just Google it.

[V.E. Griffith]
You can continue while I Google. But that’s an example of a book that is in third person, but has multiple points of view.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I don’t need to know how many points of view there were. Holy shit. Yes, I do.

There are 1,379 total points of view. So it is written from different points of view, but they’re not giving me much else on that, but it’s fine. I’ll take your word for it.

I do love the series, but that is a lot of points of view. I’ve got some cash.

[V.E. Griffith]
It is a lot of points of view. It was one of those things where you really did need a wiki to keep track of it all.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Challenge accepted. Anyway, getting back on track. What is the most common point of view, do you think?

[V.E. Griffith]
The most common in the stuff that I read in science fiction and fantasy, urban fantasy, hard-boiled sci-fi, those kinds of things tends to be third person. I don’t see a lot of first person. I don’t see second person unless I’m doing a choose your own adventure, which I haven’t done since I was a child.

I just haven’t seen one. The most common is going to be some stripe of third person. Most fiction is written that way, and it’s easiest usually for writers to learn to write.

So that’s what they do. Unless I’m reading a nonfiction memoir, it’s going to be third person.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I’m going to disagree, but this could come from an audience point of view because I still read a lot of young adult and finding third person young adult is almost impossible right now. The trend since Twilight has been first person. And almost all young adult books that you pick up will be first person.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s scary to me. I mean, first person, present, that’s really scary. I can’t imagine trying to write something like that.

That is outside, way outside my wheelhouse.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, like most of the most common ones that everybody’s like, look at this book, it’s first person. Like off the top of my head, Twilight, Divergent, The Hunger Games, all first person. Almost all vampire and werewolf books are also first person.

Read a lot of those too. Zombie ones for young adults are first person. In adult fantasy, I tend to read third person omniscient.

[V.E. Griffith]
So what that means is it varies depending on who you read and what you read.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
And sci-fi is hit or miss for me. It’s either going to be in first person or it’s going to be in third person. Romance tends to be first person as well.

[V.E. Griffith]
The romance that we edit is third person.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
No, Kim Lark’s first person.

[V.E. Griffith]
No, Kim Lark’s book is third person.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
First person, two different characters. You follow them first person.

[V.E. Griffith]
No, you follow them third person close.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Unless she’s changed it up on me again, because I know she’s gone back and forth and I have read seven different versions of her writing. I don’t know which version is out there anymore.

[V.E. Griffith]
The last version that I read was third person close, I believe.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Okay. So then she must’ve shifted it because originally when I first read it, it was first person, but she’s also sci-fi as well.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s true. So it varies and it can change.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. So the audience that you’re writing for depends on the trend. Like I said, young adult, you’re usually finding it in first person.

If you are reading for adult, it usually tends to be third person. And then that random second person point of view, I don’t go out of my way to find books like that. So I can’t help anyone with that one.

[V.E. Griffith]
Well, there we have it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. Some point of view for everybody. Which point of view is your favorite?

And what do you like to write?

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah. We’d love to hear from you in the comments or through the contact us link on the website, revisionwizards.com or any other way that you want to get in touch. We’re happy to talk to you.

We’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to come on the show and talk about how you chose the point of view you wrote, we’d like to hear about it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yes, indeed. So then I can show him that third person omniscient is the best.

[V.E. Griffith]
Well, there we go.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. Well, everybody stay magical.

[V.E. Griffith]
Bye.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode. You can find every episode on your favorite podcast player and on YouTube. For transcripts, please visit our website at revisionwizards.com.

They go live the same day as our episodes.

[V.E. Griffith]
If you’d like to reach out to us separately, you can find me at vegriffith.com and Ms. Catherine at scribes-pen.com.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Stay magical.