جادوی زاویه دید

by Alicia Rasley, محسن سلیمانی (Translator)

زاویه دید یعنی اینکه چه کسی باید داستان را تعریف کند و این راوی چقدر باید بداند و چقدر باید بگوید. اگر شما برای تعریف یک اتفاق راوی را عوض کنید، داستان هم کاملا عوض می‌شود. به علاوه با زاویه دید می‌توان هر شخصیتی را به خوبی نشان داد. نویسنده کتاب خانم آلیشیا راسلی، که خود در دانشگاه‌های آمریکا داستان نویسی درس می‌دهد و تا امروز در حدود ده رمان نوشته است، در یان کتاب با مثال‌هایی گویا انواع راوی‌ها و خوبی و بدی هریک را شرح می‌دهد و سپس به شما می‌گوید برای هر نوع رمان از کدام راوی یاید استفاده کنید. از کتاب: شاید شما از دوران مدرسه اول شخص (من)، دوم شخص (تو یا شما)، و سوم شخص (او) را در دستور زبان به یاد داشته باشید. اما قضیه شخص‌ها در دستور زبان تازه فقط شروع بحث زاویه دید در داستان است. در زاویه دید این / من / شما او شخصی است که ارزش‌ها، احساسات، افکار و نگرش‌های منحصر به فردی در ادراک جهان و نوع گفتن داستان دارد. نویسنده می‌تواند با تعیین زاویه دید شخصیت داستانی‌‌اش و اینکه این زاویه دید چه تاثیری در روایت طرح داستان می‌گذارد، داستانی خاص و نثری جاندار خلق کند.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, Crafts

684 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Alicia Rasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this, and would be glad to talk about it. My blog about writing and editing is http://www.edittorrent.blogspot.com, so meet me there! Also lots of my articles about writing are archived at www.rasley.com.
Thanks.

Alicia

[Reza Qalandari · Rating 4 out of 5]

خب حالا که تموم شد، بیایید من از روی پروسه‌ی نوشتن خودم، اهمیت این کتاب و محتواش رو توضیح بدم.
برای من همه‌چی با ایده شروع می‌شه. قبل از هر چیز دیگه‌ای.
بعد تا حدود کمی، داستان رو تو ذهنم شکل می‌دم.
بعد دنبال ارتباط شخصیتم با این داستان و ایده می‌گردم.
وقتی موفق شدم پیداش کنم، یعنی می‌دونم مضمون این داستان قراره چی باشه.
بعدش پلات داستان رو می‌چینم و باقی چیزها رو تعیین می‌کنم. شخصیت‌ها و ستینگ و از این قبیل.
این‌ها مرحله‌ی اول نوشتنم هستن. در حقیقت مرحله‌ی پیش از نوشتن.
اما وقتی می‌خوام شروع کنم به نوشتن، دو چیز رو باز از پیش تعیین می‌کنم.
اولی روایت و زاویه‌ی دیده، دومی نثر. ( خب طبیعتاً هر ایده و داستان نثر خاصی نیاز داره :دی)
اما درباب زاویه‌ی دید:
برای خودم، ابتدا به‌عنوان خواننده و سپس در مقام نویسنده، روایت خیلی مهمه. باید طوری باشه که نه از خوندنش خسته بشم، نه از نوشتنش. مثلاً نمی‌تونم از زاویه‌ی دید تنها یک نفر استفاده کنم و تعدد راوی نباشه، اصلاً نمی‌تونم بنویسم (هرچند تو خوندن مثال خلف زیاده).
این کتاب مطالب مفید زیادی داشت، که هم چیزهای جدیدی بهم یاد داد، هم کمک کرد کارهایی که قبلاً انجام می‌‌دادم، الان با آگاهانه و تسلط کامل انجام بدم و پیاده کنم تو کتاب.
اگه شما هم مثل من هستین، و روایت خیلی براتون مهمه، بین کتاب‌های سوره‌ی مهر پیشنهادم اینه اول این کتاب رو بخونید. چون مفیدتر و روشن‌گرتر از باقی کتاباست؛ حداقل برای من.

@QalandarNameh

[Felipe Lerma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Understanding my creativity as levels within one point of view.

I'd read and thought about this book for several months, pretty much thinking it was "4 stars" for not having enough examples to get it's ideas about pov across well enough for me to consciously apply them.

Then very recently, pondering over a rare negative but constructive review of one of my fiction pieces, I think I finally got it.


One of the complaints was about some of the language (esp expressive thoughts and perceptions) being odd vs the rest of the. narrative. It was, I finally could see, my narrative sliding within differing levels of point of view from the same character.


Regardless if it was an unfamiliarity by the reader with this more involving technique, or a less than adequate application of that technique on my part, the point is, it was a legitimate expression of sliding within some of the six levels of POV this author has identified.

This has given me a self validation and understanding of my own creativity I hadn't expected.

It gives nothing away to state the six pov's here: 


1) Camera eye/Objective

2) Action

3) Perception

4) Thought

5) Emotion

6) Deep immersion/Voice


Essentially, despite still wishing there had been more examples, how can I not give 5 Stars to a guide that's stuck with me for months, and compelled me to understand some of my own creative writing intentions.


There's much more about POV in this book, but this is what made it worth so much to me.

[David H. Millar · Rating 5 out of 5]

After having published five novels, I still have challenges with understanding point of view (POV). The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life by Alicia Rasley is not an easy read but it is an essential reference in coming to grips with POV and helped me understand how my style of writing aligned with the POV used.
If you are a writer, then this makes a great book to have beside you.

[Jasmina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll tell you how much I like this book:

Someone enters my study with his jolly stride and rosy cheeks, his summer curls bouncing around a friendly face. He asks if he could have a look at THE book.

I look at him and leave my work on the side. I’m knitting a sweater. Without taking my eyes off him I stand up. Slowly. I stand now stone-hearted, my hands are on the sides, ready. The small trembles of my fingers are the only movement of my body. I hold my breath.

Suddenly, with the speed of a crazy cobra I pull out my gun and point it right between his sky shimmer eyes. The poor fellow twitches in fear.

“If you leave a single greasy little fingerprint on IT I’ll ...” But I don’t get to finish because he is already running down the stairs. Screaming.

I pull my gun back. My mouth mimics a smile and after restoring my inner balance I return to my knitting. It’s going to be a wonderful sweater. My niece will love it.

That’s how much I like this book.
The End

[Saleh Rostami · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب‌ جادوی زاویه دید، جامع ترین راهنما درباره زاویه دید در میان کتاب‌های موجود در بازار است. فیلم سازان و کارگردانان تئاتر و سریال و انیمیشن ابزارهای گوناگونی برای بیان داستان دارند. بازی بازیگران خبره، زاویه دوربین، میزانسن، موسیقی متن و... غیره. به این آخری توجه کنید؟ چه صحنه‌هایی بوده که در یک فیلم فقط به خاطر یک موسیقی احساس ترس، شجاعت و یا غم کرده ایم. اما در داستان و رمان فقط یک چیز داریم کلمه کلمه و کلمه. زاویه دید یکی از تکنیک‌های حیاتی برای وصل کردن دنیای کلمات به دنیای داستان است. در کتاب جادوی زاویه، آلیشا راسلی سعی می کند به شکل جامع و با مثال‌های فراوان به آموزش زاویه دید بپردازد.

این کتاب را نباید البته به شکل کتابی دید که با یک بار خواندن به تمام نکاتش پی می‌برید. بلکه باید به شکل کتاب درسی با آن مواجه شوید و چندبار بخوانید و یادداشت بردارید و به قولی کتاب بالینی شما باشد. به هر روی اگر علاقه به نوشتن دارید، جادوی زاویه دید از اوجب واجبات است.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fundamental question you're likely to be asking is, "Is this a good POV manual?" and my bare-bones answer is "Yes." I will be putting it on my recommended-for-students list.

Rasley came to appreciate the importance of POV when studying Edgar Allan Poe, and she realized that her analysis didn't match what others were saying. So she's made a life-long study of the subject.

Her range of examples includes both popular fiction and literary fiction, which makes this manual more accessible to many writers, which pleases me. And a quote that reveals her main approach is telling: "Start thinking of POV tools, not POV rules."

This work is laid out as a manual on POV usage, which is something that many writers need. The question of verb tense is treated very lightly, compared to the rest of the topic (it's about three or four pages, in two spots), but methodology is being discussed from various angles throughout. She makes the same point that Rosenfeld does in Writing the Intimate Character: "Who is narrating the event (that is, the POV character) determines in great part how the reader experiences it."
(p. 5) This is also Castellani's whole theme in The Art of Perspective.

Any POV workshop will be riddled with questions about headhopping (or head-hopping), so one measure of a POV manual is how it deals with that fraught topic. There is useful discussion in these pages, but I was irritated by her decision to redefine how the term has generally been used (changing POV characters during a scene, with or without Omniscient baseline) to mean only bad practice of shifting POV. I find it much more useful to compare good headhopping to bad headhopping, and not try to generate new and confusing terminology for an ancient technique.

Positives:

Pages 75-77 have a good discussion of "attitude" in POV, with a breakdown of a paragraph from Rumpole.

Page 119 has an excellent remark on why present tense or future tense work better in second person.

Page 123, she distinguishes "impersonal third" from "personal third" in a way that some students find enlightening. And on page 140 she distinguishes what she calls "classical omniscient" from what she calls "contemporary omniscient" (the latter meaning that there is no narrative persona, i.e. the Elmore Leonard approach). While I'm terribly aware of exceptions to both eras, that's not the point. The distinction in approach is important, and the historical trend is accurate. Useful definitions.

Pages 162-167 are essentially golden. This is a list with discussion of whom to have as your POV. And page 203 has a good list of ways to establish POV when starting a new section.

Pages 211-12 There's a handy list of "perceptive types" that help with how to use your POV's viewpoint. You may have been schooled to use all five senses in a scene; well, she offers a different approach (which I've been teaching a version of at Seton Hill for a decade and a half...).

I will say that a key to the usefulness of this book is the many lists of example works (under "Reading Recommendations"), from which you can organize your own field recons of book-length examples. What you can't figure out from an example paragraph you can usually figure out from an example chapter.

Negatives:

Rasley uses "change-ringing" exercises, which is a good idea. They sometimes reveal aesthetic issues, though, as in her exercise on Hemingway in pages 19-23. While her changes to Hemingway's original can be illuminating, I must say that her results seem to be "telling" the story, and Hemingway's approach is "showing" it. He didn't bother putting sticky notes all over his prose, which is how I see her product. Be wary.

Minor, but important, typo on page 67, where she meant to refer to the "recently revived genre of Gothic novels" instead of revised.

I have to fundamentally disagree with her use of the term "narrator" in second person. She seems to have taken the whole second-person discussion from an academic thesis and example novel by Daniel Gunn, and maybe her terminology comes from there, but she begins the chapter (5, starting on p. 111) by stating "In second-person POV, you are the narrator." When I understood what else she was saying, I realized the problem. No, the "you" of second-person is generally the PROTAGONIST not the narrator. There is an "I" who is addressing the "you" just as there is in third person and first person. Yes, it's more obvious and tricky in second person. Yes, the speaker, the narrator, is sometimes the actual motive force of the story. Sometimes that speaker is really the protagonist and the "you" is a victim or secondary character, but more commonly the reader's sympathy is with the "you." I just couldn't get her terminology to make any sense, so this chapter needs to be read with great care.

I found the opening pages of Chapter 7 to be muddled, from bouncing around in too many alternatives.

I strongly dislike page 179, and especially the supposedly positive example given. This is exactly what I teach my students and clients Not To Do. Rasley dismisses the mirror trick properly, but then dismisses the effective techniques. I will tell you the modern mantra: Resist the Urge to Describe the POV. Period.

I had a similar negative reaction to the example on page 194. This is what I try to scour out of my students, not teach them to put in. But this is a case where aesthetics differ, so read this bit with a few grains of salt handy.

Aesthetics MUST differ, by the way, or all the books could be written by one person.

In sum: This manual is full of POV tools, and is worth having on the writing reference shelf.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most persuasive writing instruction does not arrive as a set of rules. It arrives as a recalibration of attention. You finish the book and, for a while, you cannot read fiction the same way, because you keep noticing the quiet engineering underneath the surface pleasures: a sentence that drifts a half-inch away from the character’s mind; a paragraph that suddenly knows too much; a scene that tries to carry emotional weight without committing to an emotional owner. Alicia Rasley’s “The Power of Point of View” is built to produce that recalibration. It is not a book that flatters the writer with the promise of instant mastery, nor does it indulge in the mystique of “voice” as something bestowed. Instead it proposes, with an insistence that is both bracing and strangely consoling, that point of view is the central mechanism by which prose becomes experience, and experience becomes meaning. It is a craft book with the temperament of a diagnostic manual and the ambition of a small aesthetic manifesto, and I would place it at 85 out of 100 for the combination of its conceptual clarity, its practical usefulness, and the occasional heaviness of its thoroughness.

Rasley begins by dismantling the beginner’s definition of point of view as mere grammatical person. She does not deny that “I” and “she” matter, but she treats them as superficial labels pasted onto a deeper phenomenon: the reader’s access to perception, thought, emotion, and judgment. This shift has immediate consequences. It means that point of view is not an early decision you make and then forget; it is a set of choices you keep making, sentence after sentence, about what can be known, what can be felt, and what the prose itself sounds like when it is truly filtered through a particular consciousness. The book’s best quality is that it refuses to let point of view remain an abstract term. It insists on consequences. If you change the lens, you change not only the information available but the very temperature of the narrative.

That emphasis on consequence is the reason the book feels, at times, more like a philosophy of reading than a handbook. Rasley is unusually attentive to the reader as an active participant. She assumes, without condescension, that readers are adept at inference and hungry for an interactive relationship with story, one in which they are asked to second-guess, anticipate, and interpret. In this model, point of view becomes the contract that governs that interaction. If the contract is stable, the reader will tolerate ambiguity, delay, even discomfort, because they trust the rules of access. If the contract is violated, the reader feels not merely confused but betrayed. Many writers have experienced this betrayal from the other side, as readers, without being able to name it. Rasley names it, and naming is power.

The book’s early movement through the types of point of view can look, at first glance, conventional. Yet Rasley’s taxonomy is less important than the spectrum she builds: a continuum of distance and intimacy that helps writers understand why two passages written in the same grammatical person can feel radically different. This is where “The Power of Point of View” begins to separate itself from the bulk of craft books that treat point of view as a choice among a few options. Rasley suggests that point of view is better understood as proximity. The writer is always deciding how close the reader stands to the character’s sensory life, how directly the prose inhabits the character’s interpretive habits, and how much authorial explanation is permitted to hover above the scene like stage lighting.

The concept of point of view levels, or narrative distance, is not new to serious craft discussion, but Rasley’s treatment is unusually concrete. She shows how distance is not achieved by a grand declaration but by small linguistic signals: abstract nouns that replace sensations, explanatory clauses that replace reactions, neutral diction that does not belong to anyone in particular. She teaches you to hear when the prose has slipped into what might be called the safe voice, the voice of “good writing” that is competent, coherent, and dead. The alternative she advocates is not constant intensity, not the breathless insistence that every moment be rendered in deep immersion, but control. A story can pull back for reflection or widen for context, but it must do so deliberately, in service of the scene’s purpose. The reader will follow distance shifts if the shifts feel earned, not accidental.

That insistence on deliberateness returns, again and again, as the book’s underlying ethic. Rasley is not a scold. She does not brand mistakes as sins. She treats them as symptoms. A scene that feels flat, she implies, is often flat because the writer has not committed to a point of view owner. The scene has no sovereign. It tries to speak from a shared consciousness, a general perspective, and therefore it cannot generate the pressure of lived experience. Rasley’s question, repeated in various forms, becomes a kind of instrument you can hold up to any draft: whose scene is this? Who has the most to lose? Who is changed by what happens here? These are not merely plot questions. They are questions of authority. If the wrong character is filtering the moment, the scene may still “work” in a functional sense, but it will not feel inevitable. It will not feel like it had to happen this way, through this consciousness.

Rasley’s attention to authority makes her unusually good on the relationship between point of view and emotional impact. Many writers attempt to solve emotional flatness by adding adjectives, by naming feelings, by announcing that a moment is significant. Rasley suggests that the more reliable path is to stop announcing and start transmitting. Emotion is not a label applied to an event. Emotion is an experience that arrives through the body, through attention, through the distortions of perception that fear and desire create. A character who is terrified does not experience a room as a neutral inventory. The room becomes threat, escape, trap. To write that experience, the prose must be loyal to the character’s perceptual reality. This loyalty is not sentimental. It is technical. It is the craft version of honesty.

Here the book’s tone becomes, in an interesting way, quietly moral. Rasley does not preach about ethics, but her model of point of view implies that the writer’s job is to respect the integrity of a consciousness, even when that consciousness is wrong, limited, or unpleasant. The reader’s ability to inhabit a character without endorsing them depends on this integrity. Rasley trusts readers to perform the double action of empathy and judgment, and she urges writers not to short-circuit that action through authorial commentary. When a writer steps in to explain what a character “really” meant, or to interpret the scene from above, the reader is deprived of the pleasure and the labor of interpretation. The story becomes instruction rather than experience.

This perspective leads naturally to Rasley’s most useful discussions of information control. Suspense is often treated as a plot technique, a matter of when to reveal the gun behind the curtain. Rasley relocates suspense to the point of view contract. Who knows what, and how does the narrative distribute that knowledge between character and reader? A writer can create dread by allowing the reader to see what the character cannot. A writer can create mystery by confining the reader to the character’s ignorance. A writer can create shock by revealing something the character has refused to recognize. In every case, point of view is the mechanism by which the distribution occurs.

Rasley is especially sharp on the difference between fair withholding and cheating, and here her practical temperament is most evident. The temptation to cheat is familiar: you want the twist; you want the surprise; you want to protect the reveal. So you excise the character’s awareness from the page. The problem is that readers sense this excision as manipulation. They may not be able to name why the twist feels unearned, but they feel the writer’s hand. Rasley’s alternative is more demanding but more elegant. Withhold not by lying, but by focusing. Let the character notice what they would notice, but allow their emotional bias to steer interpretation. Let fear, pride, desire, fatigue, grief distort attention. This is psychologically realistic, and it produces suspense that feels organic rather than mechanical.

The book’s discussion of switching point of view extends this ethic of reader trust. Rasley does not forbid point of view shifts. She simply insists that each shift has a cost. A shift asks the reader to reorient, to reattach, to relearn the rules of access. Therefore the shift must offer something worth that cost: a new angle that deepens conflict, a new distribution of knowledge that heightens suspense, a new emotional truth that complicates the reader’s allegiance. What Rasley opposes is not multiplicity but arbitrariness. The scene that switches because the writer grows bored, or because another character happens to be present, is not complex. It is indecisive.

Indecision is one of the book’s recurring diagnoses. Rasley treats point of view drift as a major source of the reader’s vague dissatisfaction. A paragraph begins close to a character’s perception, then slides into a neutral summary, then offers an interpretation that belongs to no one, then delivers a line of interiority from another character, all without signaling. The writer may feel they are being efficient, giving the reader everything. The reader feels disoriented and, more damagingly, detached. Rasley’s solution is strict but liberating: decide what the scene is doing, decide whose experience is central to that purpose, and then keep faith with that experience. Once you do, the prose begins to generate its own momentum. The page turns not because the plot is loud but because the experience is compelling.

This is where “The Power of Point of View” begins to resemble a book about voice. Rasley demystifies voice by tying it to perspective. Voice is not, in her model, a decorative flourish. It is the audible imprint of a consciousness: its vocabulary, its rhythms, its habits of metaphor, its tendencies toward analysis or sensation. Many writers, especially in early drafts, default to a competent house style, a voice that is neither wrong nor alive. Rasley suggests that voice becomes alive when the writer commits to the character’s way of noticing. The same event described by two different people should not merely change in opinion. It should change in texture. What one character finds beautiful, another finds suspicious. What one character notices first, another never sees at all. The prose itself becomes evidence of personality.

Rasley’s strongest chapters are the ones that operate at this micro level: sentence-by-sentence control. She teaches you to scan a paragraph for ownership. Who would choose this word? Who is interpreting this gesture? Is the narration naming emotion, or is it embodying emotion? Is the scene in summary because it needs to move quickly, or because the writer is avoiding the moment’s intensity? These questions feel at first like academic exercises, but they quickly become practical. If you apply them to a draft, you find yourself diagnosing problems you previously blamed on vague causes like pacing or “flow.” The book’s main gift is that it gives you a language for what you already sense.

There are, however, limits to Rasley’s approach, and acknowledging those limits is part of taking the book seriously. The first is that the book can feel exhaustive in a way that occasionally blunts its own force. Rasley circles her major points repeatedly. This repetition can be valuable as training, but it can also create a sense of weight, as if the book is reluctant to trust the reader’s comprehension. A sharper edit might have tightened some passages without sacrificing clarity.

The second limit is stylistic. Rasley writes plainly. Her prose is not trying to seduce. It is trying to instruct. For many readers, especially those who value craft books as usable reference, this will be a strength. Yet for a reader seeking the pleasure of literary prose even in instruction, the book may feel utilitarian. It is less a performance than a conversation, and the conversation is focused. You do not read it for delight in sentence music. You read it to learn to control sentence music elsewhere.

A third limit is the book’s relative insulation from the broader ecosystem of craft concerns. Rasley’s focus is disciplined: point of view is her subject, and she stays with it. But many writers come to point of view problems through other doors: scene structure, narrative arc, character desire, thematic development. Rasley touches these, but she does not integrate them as fully as a more holistic craft book might. That is not a failure so much as a choice. The book assumes that the writer will synthesize point of view insights with other craft tools. For some writers, that synthesis will feel natural. For others, it may feel like missing connective tissue.

Still, the overall effect of “The Power of Point of View” is cumulative. It trains you to think of point of view not as a cosmetic decision but as story architecture. The way a narrative controls distance, distributes knowledge, and shapes voice becomes the story’s skeleton. When that skeleton is well designed, the story can carry weight without strain. When it is poorly designed, the story can have brilliant moments and still collapse under its own confusion. Rasley’s final emphasis on reader trust feels like the book’s most mature argument. Craft is not only what the writer wants to do. Craft is what the reader is able to experience. The writer’s freedom is real, but it is freedom within a relationship.

What does it mean, then, to call Rasley’s book powerful? Not that it grants the writer omnipotence. It grants the writer leverage. It gives you a way to move a draft, to shift a scene’s temperature, to tighten suspense, to deepen intimacy, to create subtext without stating it. It teaches you that subtext is often a point of view effect: the tension between what a character says and what they mean, between what they notice and what they refuse to see. It teaches you that irony is often a point of view effect: the space between the character’s interpretation and the reader’s inference. It teaches you that emotion is often a point of view effect: the difference between naming and inhabiting.

Perhaps the book’s most valuable influence is on revision. Drafting often requires a kind of brute momentum. You write the scene because the story needs to move. Revision is where you ask whether the scene is being experienced through the right consciousness, at the right distance, with the right distribution of knowledge, in the right voice. Rasley’s book offers a revision lens that is both strict and generative. It does not tell you to cut everything. It tells you to commit. Many drafts fail because they hedge. They try to be many things at once, to be close and distant, revealing and withholding, personal and panoramic, without choosing when and why. Rasley gives you permission to choose, and she gives you the tools to make that choice visible on the page.

In the end, “The Power of Point of View” is a book that respects its reader. It respects the writer by refusing easy platitudes and by offering concrete diagnostic questions. It respects the eventual reader of the writer’s fiction by insisting that narrative experience is the true currency of story. It does not promise that point of view mastery will make your novel brilliant. It implies something subtler: that without point of view mastery, brilliance will not reliably reach the page. The difference matters. The first is marketing. The second is craft.

You close the book with a slightly altered sense of responsibility. Point of view is no longer a neutral choice. It is the way you decide what matters, what is felt, what is hidden, what is revealed, and when. It is how you invite a reader not merely to watch a story, but to inhabit it. Rasley’s achievement is that she makes this invitation feel both like an art and like a discipline. She persuades you that attention is something you can train. And once trained, it becomes difficult to unsee what you now see everywhere: the quiet power of standing, sentence by sentence, in the right place.

[Robert Richards · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a lot like other self-help books and articles in which authors make a distinction between traditional third-person point of view and “deep” third-person point of view. I think the latter term is a lazy way of simplifying the variations in thought representation that occur in third-person point of view, which determine whether it is traditional third person or deep third person. Instead of discussing narrative distance, it’s more revealing to discuss how a narrator’s closeness and distance is achieved, and that is by the author’s understanding of and using the proper thought presentations: direct thought, indirect thought, free direct thought, free indirect thought, and narrative report of a thought act. During the creative writing courses I took in college, those terms were never discussed, but they were discussed on multiple occasions (and thoroughly) in some of the literature courses I took. I wonder why? Were the creative writing instructors afraid of confusing the students? If so, I don’t know why. There was a reason that creative writing courses tended to be junior level courses and had certain literature courses as prerequisites.

Discussions about point of view often remind me of discussions about a car’s potential speed in regard to its horsepower, but without mentioning factors that generate the horsepower or optimize it.

I think many so-called writing experts are pandering to an uninformed common denominator (yes, if you are reading this, then that most likely means you).

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was kind of hit or miss. Lots of the chapters seemed pretty self-explanatory, and I found the lack of voice made the book uninteresting. Also, as a small point, it frustrated me that Rasley would randomly choose genders to describe the generic "reader" and the generic "character." She ping-ponged between using she/he for both of them. Pick one and stick with it!

That being said, some of the exercises seem really interesting. Honestly, they might be the best part of the book. Some of the definitions are interesting as well, especially one of the final chapters on levels of POV.

3.5 stars, rounded down

[Gabrielle Jarrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Power of Point of View is an excellent guide for writers. Rasley cites many many examples in literature to illustrate points of view, which I enjoyed. I found her work to be enlightening in teaching me more than I've ever known about viewpoints. Rasley writes in an encouraging and allowing manner, expressing more freedom and less rules than I have read. It's definitely a resource compendium for further reference.

[Wendy Bunnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm horridly behind on my book reviews for 2021, but this is a good book on writing craft. The most in-depth discussion of POV I've ever read. The only drawback is that it's over 10 years old and all of the examples, and the discussion of POV trends for certain genres, are dated. But the fundamentals are strong with this one.

[Debra Daniels-Zeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent tips on improving POV characters. It's interesting to read, considering POV. This is a great resource to keep on the shelf to improve any aspect of Point of View, filled with tips and examples, it's a tool both seasoned and new writers would appreciate.

[Traci Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glad for the craft lessons with each section. Break down with specific examples were helpful. References to modern and classic lit put the types of POV in usable snippets. I have tags on multiple pages to refer to when writing.

[Analiesa Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for the writer. Very clear examples and direction on how to not get caught into the trap of the point of view merry-go-round.

[Katrin Gertsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall very interesting and useful

[Riversue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the information I needed. I will dip back into this book endlessly I suspect.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

One Person’s Point of View.

Rasley, Alicia. (2008). The Power of Point of View. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books.

When people hear or read a story, they want to know two things: What happens? And they want to know, Who is telling the story? That second question concerns point of view. If somebody is telling you a tale, whether around a campfire or over a cup of tea, it is important to know who this stoyteller is, what their attitudes are, and how they came to know of the events reported. In a work of fiction, these questions are usually implicit. Stories that just report events, with no consistent point of view, are much less interesting.

The narrator is not, of course the author, but a quasi-character that the author has invented to tell the story. With a first-person point of view, the main character is also the narrator, such as in a mystery, where the investigating detective tells the story through his or her own eyes, with all the biases, attitudes, and errors that might entail. In a third person point of view, there is an omniscient narrator, a “voice” who is telling the tale but who is not one of the nominal characters of the story. This narrator directs the reader’s attention to scenery, characters, and costumes, as a movie director does, as well as relates development of the story and the characters in it.

Rasley explains all the variations in point of view, and how each is used, in detail; and there are many variations on the third person omniscient POV to consider. Each chapter has interesting exercises that could be used in a classroom or by an individual, and a list of suggested further readings.

I thought the book was weakest in failing to distinguish clearly between the narrative voice and the character’s point of view. Some omniscient narrators are full of attitude and opinion, commenting on and interpreting the characters’ actions and thoughts like a Greek Chorus. Most narrators these days are more subtle, expressing their personality through choice of detail and level of diction. This distinction between narration and point of view can be extremely subtle and I would have liked more on that. Nevertheless, for anyone who has struggled trying to decide what point of view is best suited to a work of fiction, this is the definitive book.

[Nancy Butts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second time I've read this, and I think it's the best book available on viewpoint for writers. Rasley parses POV in a way I've never seen before. For example, she divides omniscient narration into three categories: objective, classical omniscient, and contemporary omniscient—all of which are different from distant third. Interesting. I don't always agree with her, especially in her application of voice and viewpoint to children's books. [Though I love the Narnia chronicles, I most emphatically do not believe that CS Lewis captured an authentic child voice for the Pevensie children. And I also do not think that Dean Koontz captures it either.]

But none of this detracts from the excellence of this book. I recommend it to many of my writing students and freelance clients.

[Bart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best book on the craft that I've read so far. It takes one subject, POV, and tells you everything you need to know about it. It shows what POV is, and what kinds of POV there are. It shows, for every kind of POV, what the advantages and disadvantages are of using that kind of POV, the dangers of using that kind of POV and gives several tips for writing in that kind of POV. All this is done in a very clear way with many great examples.
Most of all, this book makes clear that POV is a very important choice which really influences the effects your book will have on the reader. I'll never use a third-person POV by default ever again.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by a group member when I posted a thread on multiple points of view and I'm glad I took up his suggestion. Well-written and comprehensive, "The Power of Point of View" covers the basics right through to the intricacies of "voice". As I'm currently writing a novel from a multiple of view, I found the last section "The Master Class" invaluable. I highly recommend it to all writers as it goes to show that the more you know the more there is to learn.

[Lisa Eckstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited to read a book by someone who is more geeky about point of view than I am, because most writing guides don't cover the topic in nearly enough depth. Rasley analyzes each possible narrative perspective and discusses when it might be appropriate for a story. Highly recommended if that sounds exciting to you, too.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every Character Has a VoicePoint of view isn't just an element of storytelling�when chosen carefully and employed consistently in a work of fiction, it is the foundation of a captivating story.

It's the character voice you can hear as clearly as your own. It's the unique worldview that intrigues readers�persuading them to empathize with your characters and invest in their t...more

[Katherine Trail · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. I'm a fiction editor, working mainly with self-publishing authors, and I ALWAYS recommend this book to clients. It's extremely comprehensive, but doesn't fall into the trap of being dry or dull. If you're interested in writing fiction, I'd strongly recommend reading this book first. Even if you are an experienced writer, I bet you will learn something from it!

[Jeffrey Rasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great examples for novices and multi-published writers. Deeply thoughtful and insightful about understanding POV.

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in parts; the writing exercises were very helpful.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this as a half-assed gift and didn't have the highest expectations, but it was decent for what it does.

[Nourddine Boughaba · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you write fiction or just love to read it well, a must-have book. Buy it, re-read it, take a master's class in the art and mystery of point of view. Brilliant.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5 Stars*

[May Koliander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear and detailed. Got a lot out of it especially as POV has always puzzled me !