Point of View: It's WAY more than 1st, 2nd, and 3rd

Is it first or third person? Past or present tense?

As you'll see in this week's podcast episode, Point of View is about way more than this.

See more here:
https://storygrid.com/point-of-view/

A story’s global Point of View includes the technical choices writers make to deliver the story to the reader. The POP premise and Narrative Device suggest Point of View combinations that create the effect of the story told by the Author to the single Audience member.

Person refers to the vantage point from which the written story is presented the reader.

• First Person: I (or we) wrote a story.
• Second Person: You wrote a story.
• Third Person: Alex (or she or he or they) wrote a story.

Tense distinguishes the timeframe of the story.

• Past: I wrote a scene.
• Present: You write (or are writing) a scene.
• Future: Alex will write a scene.

Mode: The final technical choice focuses on how the information is presented. This is the storytelling Mode.

Showing is an objective and immediate mode that creates the effect of being present and observing the events of the story. Here are some examples.

• First Person: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Second Person: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
• Third Person: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, or “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

Telling is a subjective mode that readers experience as if someone or something is collecting, collating, and sharing the events and circumstances of the story.

• First Person: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
• Second Person: “How to Be an Other Woman” by Lorrie Moore.
• Third Person: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, Animal Farm by George Orwell, or Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Listen as Shawn Coyne, Tim Grahl, Leslie Watts, and Danielle Kiowski work through the Point of View for the the short story EYE WITNESS by Ed McBain: https://www.amazon.com/McBain-Brief-Ed-ebook/dp/B01KFBQEY4/

This is a Episode 254 of the Story Grid Podcast - https://storygrid.com/podcast