Whose Point of View is it Anyway?

When I started writing my debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker (Mantle, 2016) I kept getting transported back to 1944. Not literally, of course (though that would have helped with research) but through the eyes of one of my characters.Then another.

Then another after that.

Sometimes this would happen within the same page. Sometimes within the same paragraph. What was going on?

Point of View (POV) is all about knowing where to look: not so much at the trees, or the ground, or the cloud on the horizon, but as Percy Lubbock put it in his 1921 tome, The Craft of Fiction the relation in which the narrator stands to the story. Is she outside looking in? Or omniscient – the all seeing, all knowing goddess? Or is she one of the story’s own characters, fully attuned to her own internal wrangling but in the dark as to the motives of the rest?

I realised as I was bumping around in 1944 that I was trying to be inside the heads of three of my characters at once, each with a unique POV, each trying to tell me their version of the same story. Just to complicate things further, I also had another character in 2011 seeing the same tale but from a completely different angle.

Desperate to bring some order to chaos I thought back to anything I could remember about POV. It came down to this:-

Rule No. 1: Decide on one POV and stick to it.

Rule No. 2: If you must have more than one POV, don’t shift it around within chapters… and certainly not within pages, paragraphs or sentences.

Lubbock was very strict on Rule No. 1. He suggested that War and Peace would have been even greater if Tolstoy’s viewpoint had been consistent. But I’ve always been inclined to play with POV. The first novel I ever wrote tried to tell the story of a disappearance through the eyes of four women. It won a prize from an agent and I thought, this is it, my big ticket to the golden land called, Publication.

Sadly it was not to be. However, the agent did give me some advice. A) leave this book aside and write another one. B) write that story with linear chronology, from one POV only.

Although it took me a while, I eventually accepted the veracity of the first piece of advice and gave up that novel to write another. It became, The Other Mrs Walker.

But the second? I returned in my time machine to 1944 and interrogated my multi-POV instincts. Which character interested me the most? And if it was all three, what was it about each of their versions that really mattered? Could I merge them into a single narrative and still tell the same tale? And whose story was it anyway?

Marlon James spent years trying to work out whose POV should be dominant in his 2015 Man Booker prize-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Each time he started out he found he couldn’t quite say everything he wanted to say, so he began again from a different POV. It took a friend to point out that he had the whole story already, just in several different versions. James put them all together and the rest is history.

(Therein lies a truism for writers. If you can’t see the wood from the trees, solicit another POV on your work-in-progress. You may be surprised at what arises.)

Back in 1944 I too discovered that however hard I tried, the story at the heart of my novel would never conform to the Lubbockian dictat of one POV only. Nor was it chronologically linear. But my experiments with POV had unwittingly led me to the answer I needed. My story belonged not to one voice, with one POV, but to a family – three sisters and their offspring – each of whose point of view mattered.

And yet… Rule No.2 still stood i.e. that shifting around of POV within chapters and paragraphs. What David Lodge calls, ‘…one of the commonest signs of a lazy or inexperienced writer.’

Lazy? No way. But inexperienced? Certainly.

For E.M. Forster, solving the POV puzzle all comes down to the power of the writer. ‘Logically, Bleak House is all to pieces,’ he wrote of Dickens’ great novel that begins with an omniscient narrator, then shifts chapter by chapter from partial omniscience directly into the mind of one of the characters. ‘…But Dickens bounces us so that we do not mind the shiftings of the viewpoint.’

For me, in 1944 once again, my concession to inexperience was to stop trying to shoehorn three POV’s into one section and give each sister the dedicated space she needed to tell her unique version of the story. The result was unexpected: a detective novel without a conventional detective, in which one narrative from 2011 gives way over and over to multiple POV’s from the past that explain the history of a dysfunctional family.

And in accepting these multi-POV instincts, I unwittingly gifted another to the only person who matters. The reader. For in the end it is she who is omniscient, with the power to put together the different pieces of the puzzle.

© Mary Paulson-Ellis, 2016

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Mary Paulson-Ellis lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and was awarded the inaugural Curtis Brown Prize for Fiction in 2009 and the LIterature Works First Page Prize in 2013. Her short stories and non-fiction have been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines including New Writing Scotland, Gutter and the Herald. The Other Mrs Walker (Mantle/Pan Macmillan) is her debut novel. You can follow her on twitter @mspaulsonellis or find lots of extras on www.marypaulsonellis.co.uk.