People ask me about point of view often, and I often try to shrug it off a bit. Points of view can wield a lot of power, whether third or first or, occasionally, second. They do different things, but I don’t always like the way those different things are labeled or discussed because I think they let the other points of view off the hook, as if they don’t need to take up those aspects of craft.

Voice: For example, people talk about voice in first person. Certainly, voice is one of the pleasures of first person, but there are marvelous examples of quirky, powerful or specific voices in third person, too. A close third can carry the character’s voice as much as a first. And in ascribing voice to first person, I think we undercut the need to examine voice in third, erroneously.

Ironic distance: In the same way, the author and underlying narrator of a first person POV has as much obligation as that of a formal third-person omniscient narrator to understand the gaps in what the character knows and understands. And those gaps can be visible or hidden in both first and third, close and omniscient.

So point of view is no excuse for lapses in the use of our writerly tools.

Changing POV: At the same time, I always find myself changing point of view at some point in my novels.

1) In my first novel, Shy Girl [link], I had written the whole thing in first person, carried along by the force of my narrator’s bravado and personality. But at the last minute, my agent said, it’s a little claustrophobic being so close inside this character’s POV.

I decided to change the whole novel into third-person POV. I did a very basic edit, so that the voice was the same, nearly, and the point of view was tremendously close to the point of view character still. And yet that third person gave a little bit of breathing room–enough to do the trick.

2) In my second, unpublished, novel, some readers found a main character unsympathetic, and I rewrote the book into first person. In this case, I changed the voice, too. I wanted her to be funny (in a dry way).

3) In my current novel, I had one character in first and the other, the lead character in the first two-thirds of the book, in third. I noticed that this was the only of my books I had not changed POV. But recently I pulled it back from my agent to revise it before she goes out with it again, and it looking at what I thought the book needed, one of the changes I’ve adopted is . . . Point of View.

I am changing that first lead character to first person. This is partly to provide balance with the second part of the book, where a different first person point of view takes over, but it is also to help me give this character her own arc, her early flaw. And mostly it is because I’d set her up as a storyteller, looking back and trying to figure out what’s going on now based on the events of the past year, and doing that in first person felt more exciting and authentic to the project of being a storyteller.

Possible Differences Between POVs

As I wrote above, all of these things can be accomplished in any point of view. But they will have a different rhythm, different consequences, a different pacing, and maybe a different access to voice.

What I notice most in making these changes are the ways the character can and cannot talk about herself. In a close third, I could get away with observing that the skin on which she rubs cream is olive. In first person, this becomes far more self-conscious.

Small shifts in distance can happen within a close third that can be odd in first person in places, though in other places even a first person narrator can take on a more object, storytelling distance.

Without any musical prowess, I am going to take a stab at a metaphor and guess that changing POV in an otherwise completed work might be like transposing a tune from one key to another or hearing it played with a different instrument. Or both.

It sounds a little different, hits the ear in a different way.