Stories are about people first and foremost. When your reader understands the motivations of your characters, they can begin to grow invested in your narrative. However, if your story contains flat and uninteresting people, then most of the time, your reader will abandon you–no matter how interesting you’ve made your setting or plot.
Seldom is a story worth telling without strong and interesting characters. Thus, it becomes imperative to establish your characters as such, and to do so quickly. But this is no easy task. Writing believable characters takes skill, and quickly building a nuanced understanding of those characters takes even more. In order to do this, you’ll need to utilize a variety of tools. And of those tools, point-of-view is one of the most powerful.
I just finished reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. That book was a masterclass in communicating character through POV. Abercrombie tells the story through the point-of-view of six different characters. Three main characters (Logen, Glokta, and Jezal), and three side characters (West, Dogman, and Ferro). He writes in third-person, but our information is limited to the perspective of one character at a time. Sometimes, the POV switches mid-chapter, but more frequently, each chapter sticks to a single character. This “third-person limited” perspective is the most common way to write adult literature.
Good literature told in this way will deliver every piece of information through the lens of its POV character. And it must do so without growing confused (unless, of course, the point is to confuse). And in his debut novel, Abercrombie does this astoundingly well.
For example, at one point in The Blade Itself, Logen Ninefingers arrives at the city of Adua in the company of a wizard. Logen knows not luxury or frivolity in any sense. But appearances must be kept in the city, so the wizard leads him to a theatrical costumer’s. There, they purchase silly outfits that would be ineffectual in any sort of actual combat.
And yet, when we switch to Captain Jezal dan Luthar’s perspective, the nobleman sees Logen’s outfit as “the height of barbaric splendor.” Jezal is taken in by appearances, which Abercrombie indicates through this description. Not only do we learn more about the captain in this way, but we also get some dramatic irony. We know that Ninefingers is wearing a costume, but Jezal does not.
Descriptions all throughout the book are similarly infused with POV. We learn about our protagonists by the way the descriptions contrast one another. By the end of the book, when the POV changes multiple times every chapter, we have no problem determining whose eyes we’re “seeing through,” because each person’s worldview is so unique.
Are the descriptions overly concerned with appearances? Do they demonstrate a familiarity with the city of Adua? We’re likely in Jezal’s perspective. Are the descriptions focused more on the potential lethality of a given situation? Do they demonstrate an unfamiliarity with “civilized” society? We’re likely in Logen’s perspective. And so on.
Even syntax changes with POV here. In Dogman’s chapters, for example, Abercrombie uses shortened words such as, “’em” instead of “them.” Because of little details like this, every one character feels different.
Most often, authors communicate character through thoughts, speech, and actions. Don’t discount point-of-view as a tool. Everybody has an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world; that’s what makes us unique. Channel that into your writing, and your characters will be unique, too.
– AJG
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