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The Great Gatsby opens with Nick Carraway’s now famous sentences. What if an author wants their narrator to be an observer rather than the protagonist? How might they work that out on the page? Why might they want to do that? Say hello to “I, the Narrator.” First person peripheral, “I, the Narrator”

There is no rule that says a first-person narrator must also be the protagonist. Holden Caufield from Catcher in the Rye is another narrator and protagonist. The most popular form of first-person POV is “I, the Protagonist.” Hazel from The Fault in Our Stars is both the narrator and the protagonist. Combinations? Flights.Īnd that’s just first-person point-of-view (POV). First-person peripheral? The Great Gatsby. First-person plural? The Buddha in the Attic. The more we study other authors and poets and how they use POV, the more tools we have to tell the story we need to tell.Īuthors have used every point-of-view available in the English language. We gain skills by reading more books, more short stories, more poems across genres, historical periods and levels of difficulty. But we must defend our choice through our execution on the page.Įxecution relates to our skill level.

Don’t be that author and remember: we may choose any POV we want. We’ve all tossed a book aside when an author fails to execute her vision. No author wants reviews claiming we can’t execute POV. “As long as it works” challenges us to avoid a hot, muddled mess. “In contemporary writing, one may do anything one pleases with point of view, as long as it works,” writes John Gardiner in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Some writers choose one POV while others choose multiple POVs. How do you decide which point-of-view (POV) to adopt? There is no right answer. More often, though, the story would have been stronger or more compelling if the author had chosen a different POV.

Sometimes the author lacked the skill to execute the POV they chose.

Of the minority who can, while technically correct, the POV can lack imagination. As a publisher for more than 15 years, I’ve read my share of authors who can’t execute point-of-view (POV).