POV: what do readers want?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’ve been thinking about POV a lot recently. A few friends entered the same writing competition and all received very similar cookie-cutter style feedback, with large sections of the text identical. Nothing unusual there - a lot of people enter and, despite the increasingly exorbitant entry fees, bespoke feedback takes up a lot of valuable time. But one piece of advice that came up repeatedly was to only ever use a close POV to ensure readers feel as if they are the character in the story; to make them feel what the protagonist(s) feel(s).

This aim was also presented as rationale for the general rule of show-don’t-tell (rather than immersion in the story world, though I suppose this would be a side-effect of making readers feel as if they’re the protagonist); and more specifically, for cutting out filter and filler words (rather than pacing, story immersion or allowing for reader interpretation). One writer was even advised not to show the protagonist in a bad light (Really? So no more Patrick Batemans or any satire at all, in fact?).

So is this what readers always want from a story nowadays? To feel that they are the main character (and a morally unquestionable one at that)? To never be distanced from what that character feels or experiences? As much as I’m a fan of escapism this seems a step too far, and undoubtedly reductive for the craft of writing. Sure, there must be a lot of books like this that account for a huge amount of sales figures, but is there no room for books that use a different point of view anymore? I think most readers – real readers, not just those who pick up the latest thriller to pass time beside their holiday pool – might find this reductive to their own interests as well.

As Jane Friedman points out in a recent blogpost, there are positives and negatives for all types of POV – it’s up to the writer to decide which fits their story best, then use them in a way that engages the reader.

Now, I’m not necessarily a fan of headhopping – I bounced off Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club because of its insistence on switching to a different character’s POV every chapter, which for me diluted both the characters and the mystery* – but there are times when I want to experiment and use POVs to different effect and affect, even within a single piece of writing.

An obvious example is my first Stank and Bohdrum book, Struggle to Make Sense of It All. I use different POVs to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of three distinct types of evidence: storytelling, scientific enquiry, and purely objective. To achieve this, I use close third-person POV for Bohdrum’s chapters (which make up most of the book and represent his unhealthy dependence on stories); first person for Stank’s diaries (which, while letting us into his inner thoughts, mostly forgo feelings in favour of scientific rationality, as he himself does); and video transcripts distanced from any character’s feelings or emotions, showing only their objective actions (indeed, the transcriber himself struggles to maintain objectivity with these, a very human trait that Stank quickly takes him to task on!). Meanwhile for the sequel Revolution of the Mind I chose to only use Bohdrum’s close third-person POV, allowing me to focus on his gradual (albeit tortuous!) acceptance of scientific enquiry into his mindset.

I’m known for saying things like “If Joyce pitched Ulysses nowadays, nobody would commission it.”  And I love that Ulysses exists. It’s like a polished sketchbook of writing experiments, at once playful and meaningful, determined to push the art of writing to its limits in as many ways as possible.

Here’s an extract from the first chapter that demonstrates Joyce’s effective use of omniscient POV, to the point where it feels like a shift between two close third-person POVs:

“—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you....

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

—But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”

And it isn’t just POV that changes in Ulysses: Joyce employs different forms of writing from standard narrative prose to playscript to stream of consciousness – even Q&A! It’s like a handbook for writing styles, with an appendix that’s longer than some novels.

But if it was released today I wonder who would buy it, aside from other writers, academics and maybe some Dubliners? It’s definitely not an easy read for all its playfulness, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for bouncing off it as early as the first chapter. But the fact it exists is a beauty beyond financial consideration, and the literary world would be a poorer place without it. How many authors, I wonder, have been put off experimenting with their own writing in such ways because of market conditions?

So yes, things change. Readers change. The publishing industry changes. And writers change accordingly. But don’t we all have a responsibility to safeguard the potential for writing; to broaden rather than limit its possibilities?

*Call me weird, but the main reason I read mystery books is for the mystery itself.