8 Unconventional Points of View | Writing Tips

hey everyone it's shaylyn and i'm here today with another writing video so in today's video i'm going to be talking about point of view which as you may know is like my favorite topic within writing for some reason you'd think it'd be something like character or like plot like something normal and fun but no i just have this weird obsession with point of view think of it constantly it finds me in my dreams so the topic on the table for today is unconventional points of view in the past i've made a couple videos on point of view that probably would be good prefaces to this one i have one that's the ultimate guide to tencent point of view and it covers kind of like your standard point of views first person second person third person in both past and present tense and also kind of like my theory and philosophy behind point of view and how to choose it i have one on second person and i have one on psychic distance today i'm gonna be talking about unconventional points of view because as much as i love point of view if there's one thing i love even more it's like weird point of views playing with point of view and experimenting with point of view um the way i see point of view is that it's not something you choose it's something that you build and actively construct and the way i see it every single time you write a piece it's the point of view is unique to that piece you were never using the same point of view twice of course there are going to be different point of views that fall under the umbrella of first person you know you can read 15 books that are first person so they all technically fall under the category of first person but they are all a different point of view because they're set up differently and they come from a different place point of view is kind of the angle it's not like you just have three angles you can tell a story from you have infinite angles you can tell a story from seeing point of view is something that you actively construct kind of helps you realize that it's genuinely infinite and it's not just this simple set of choices that you may have been taught in english class when talking about craft you might simplify it and say first person does this or has these qualities really first person can kind of have any qualities it has whatever qualities you uniquely construct and to give it in that case this video is going to be about unconventional point of views eight unconventional point of views that you can try in your writing lots of them that i've experimented with myself but really there are endless unconventional point of views because point of view can be whatever you need it to be whatever you construct it to be if you want to get used to and really understand the flexibility of point of view a really good way to do that is to try writing in some of these point of views that are very unconventional and trying that will kind of give you the avenue to explore point of view more and see how malleable it is and eventually you'll get comfortable to the point where you can kind of construct the unique point of view you need for your story whether that's a more classic third person limited past tense that is still unique to the piece it might just feel more traditional or whether it's something incredibly wacky and strange that i could not even conceive of really do whatever your heart desires ultimately you can create literally any point of view and do whatever you want with point of view as long as it's logical and consistent or even inconsistent but like consistently inconsistent short stories are really the way to learn here i hadn't really experimented much with point of view before i started writing short stories because novels don't give you as much opportunity to do that you're kind of locked into one point of view for the whole novel or at least one point of view pattern even if you're mixing multiple whereas with short stories you really get the chance to try everything when i was writing novels when i was younger almost everything i wrote was first person present tense and i'd written one novel in third person past tense but when i started writing short stories it gave me the chance to experiment and now i've written in a lot of different point of view intense combos and so i feel really comfortable doing basically whatever the story needs with point of view i no longer have point of views that i feel better at or worse than or more comfortable with like point of view is just amorphous man you can do whatever you want and i hope this video is kind of a good start to just giving you some options that you can play around with so i've got eight unconventional point of views let's just chat about them the first one is first person collective this is also sometimes called first person plural this is basically a story told from a we pronoun so we us pronoun and basically it means that a group of people is telling the story as a first person narrator so it would read like we go to the store wire point of view examples always go into the store we go to the store we buy some pineapples we go home and make pineapple upside down cake i had wanted to use this for ages and i'd never really had the opportunity just because i never had a story crop up where it made sense um and then i finally found one stumble across the right idea for this point of view back in march and i wrote a story called we the girls which obviously is in this point of view the point of view literally in the title this point of view is great for any story where the conflict applies to a whole group rather than just one person so it's actually a really amazing point of view to use if you want to write about like larger topics or like social issues because those topics apply to whole groups of people you can tell the story literally from a whole group rather than having individual defined characters so the story that i wrote that's in first person collective is um from the point of view of all of the girls in a small town it's never really explained how many it's just all the girls you don't really need to know a number um because it's about a small town where there's an active serial killer and it's the young girls who've been the targets and so it's kind of like from all of their points of view because it's not just one person who's affected in this story it's a whole group of people so they can tell the story altogether you could try writing a first person collective from like the point of view of a town a really famous example of that is a rose for emily by william faulkner probably one of the most famous examples of first person collective where it's told from a whole town and they're observing this woman named emily that whole story has like a whispery gossipy tone like it almost feels like everyone in the town is like whispering behind her back and gossiping behind her back but we're getting all their point of views at once another really famous example probably one of the most famous examples of this point of view the virgin suicides by jeffrey eugenies i recently read that and i actually didn't know that it was in first person collective until i read it but it's from a group of boys also observing um a family of sisters in that case it's actually really uncomfortable and really eerie because this group of boys is observing this like incredible tragedy with just fascination and no empathy so it's really disturbing and quite eerie and in that case you know we even get individual characters within the group of boys kind of splinter off at certain points it's kind of like the group talking about one within the group at that point so the point of view is maintained but like let's say one of the boys is named andrew and there's a specific part of the story or andrew is doing something particular to andrew the point of view might shift and kind of read like it's third person for a little bit it's kind of complicated to explain but you can check out that book if you're interested in it you can even do it from really small groups you could do it from like the point of view of a family the water cure by sophie mcintosh does it from the point of view of three sisters in some of the sections grief is the thing with feathers by max porter does it for two brothers it doesn't work well for stories where people within the group can't cohesively speak to the conflict the narrating group in a first person collective doesn't need to agree on everything all the time you can still have conflict within the group but if they can't kind of come together cohesively the majority of the story it's quite difficult i tried to use the first time i tried to use this point of view was a collective about a couple that had since broken up and it didn't work i realized after about two pages that it wasn't gonna work because the two characters had such different experiences of the relationship that there was absolutely no way to tell the story simultaneously from both of their points of view you kind of need that ability for the group to speak simultaneously but it's a really really fun one to play around with the second one is one you may have heard of before it's first person witness so this is basically where you have a first-person narrator but they are not the protagonist and they tell the story about someone else the great gatsby is in this right pretty sure that's like the most famous example of this one um am i would i be revealing myself if i say that i haven't read the gary gatsby i haven't i haven't read the green casting um you know what there are a lot of books in this world and not a lot of time to read all of them and not a lot of time to read all the books that you're supposed to read so oops first person witness is actually not one i really played around with that much but yeah it's basically when the protagonist is just not the narrator a lot of the time actually when you read this point of view sections will read like third person so like if there was a first person witness novel and the protagonist was like a man named joe but it's like told from the grocery store cashier down the street's point of view as he's witnessing joe he's observing joe a lot of sections would read like third person because he'd be like joe does this joe doesn't does this whatever whatever joe does i don't know what he gets up to is not my business it would still be interjected with that eye at certain cases it sometimes it almost reads like third person with first person frame it's a really interesting point of view i would like to play around with it more you can do this kind of subtly actually in some cases it's not so obvious like if you have a story where the focus is more on a side character i don't know it's hard to explain this is an interesting one you know it can kind of display obsession with a certain character and it can give a very unique perspective on the events it can allow you to have an outside perspective on the protagonist while still maintaining a first person narrator so it's pretty interesting the next one that i want to talk about is a point of view i've talked about before and it's like my favorite point of view i love this point of view so much um and it doesn't have an official name but i call it first person referral i've also in the past called it first person directed neither of those are official names i just use them and i've seen other people start using them like i've made it catch on a lot of the time it's just second person through a first person lens is what it's called or it's called first person and second person blended but this is basically where the story is in first person and another character is referred to as you so if you've read my short story i will never tell you this which is linked in the description you can read it online it's in this point of view where it's a first person story the narrator david is telling the story from his point of view first person but he's telling the story kind of as an apology to another character named shelby so shelby is referred to as you not referred to as like she or not or shelby um like a character typically would be she's referred to as you he's telling story directly to her i talked about this point of view in my favorite writing techniques video because it's one of my favorite writing techniques it's so much fun probably the most common comment on that video was what's the difference between first person referral and second person in second person the protagonist refers to themselves as you you run down the path after your brother let's just say but if it was in first person referral let's say the brother is the character who's being directed to it would be i run down the path after you does that make sense the reason i love this point of view is because it wraps up conflict integrally into the point of view as soon as the story is directed to another character there's a relationship like woven into the fabric of the point of view and as soon as there's a relationship woven into the fabric point of view there's conflict woven into the fabric of con of the point of view it just there's so much to inherently unpack it can be told out of so many different emotions or a range of emotions like when i was writing i will never tell you this it was the first time i'd use this point of view i don't think the story would be nearly as effective as it is under the assumption it's an effective story if it were just told in first person because it would remove all the layer of emotion that exists between david and shelby which is a complex relationship it's not a close relationship they don't have a particular affinity for each other they're antagonistic towards each other but at the same time there is this apologeticness because david is assuming this great amount of pain that he's going to cause her by telling the story directly to her it forces him to look at and unravel so many more nuances of their relationship and dynamic that i don't know could necessarily be unraveled just in first person obviously not every story needs this if every story needed it every first person narrative would be told in this not every story needs that and not every relationship needs this point of view to examine it sometimes this point of view wouldn't make sense um because the character might feel too private like the character has a very key relationship with someone they wouldn't want to tell the story to them but i think this point of view is so effective because it gives the story an audience normally you don't know who the audience is right but when you have a first person referral point of view suddenly you know who the audience is and it just really impacts the tone there are a lot of examples of this if you want to read a novel in this point of view sadness is a white bird by mario rothman zecker this is just a super fun point of view i would highly recommend trying it once you try you can't go back it's addicting so the next one is first person omniscient normally when we talk about omniscient point of view we talk about it in terms of third person like when you're in high school english class and you do the lesson on point of view they tell you there's first person second person which we don't have to talk about then there's a third person objective limited and omniscient but omniscience could be applied to any point of view first person could be omniscient even second person could be omniscient omniscience just means that the narrator knows everything but you could write something that's first person omniscient if your first person narrator is omniscient how cool would that be some third-person omniscient books are almost actually kind of also person omniscient the book thief by marcus zufsak is one i think of because it's told from a distinct character like that book is from the point of view of death does use an eye to refer to themselves at some points so it kind of actually is a first person omniscient but death isn't the protagonist but you could totally write it from like the protagonist being omniscient but it's first person i heard of a book that does this but i haven't read it the enchanted by renee denfield i think it's set in a prison the main character is like a prisoner but he's omniscient i think i haven't read it i just remember hearing about that anyways omniscience is something i personally haven't played around it with a ton in my writing but the novel i'm writing called holding a ghost omniscient because it's this is an example of like when you get out of hand with point of view you start constructing really weird things but the point of view of that is first person referral except the protagonist is the you so it's like a witness first person referral from a ghost's point of view but the ghost is omniscient so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry so another really cool one that you can try and i talked about this one a little also in my second person video is second person instructional so when we talk about second person in the classic form it usually is used to mean that the reader is the narrator as soon as someone says that they just don't like second person by principle because they're being told they would do things they'd never do that's when i cannot hold back anymore that will unleash my wrath like nothing else on this earth yeah i know that's the hill i've chosen to die on most of the time second person means that the narrator is talking to themselves not that the reader is the main character so that's usually called second person intimate where the main character is talking to themselves and referring to themselves as a you but you can also try second person instructional this is also often used to mean that the main characters is talking to themselves instead of describing what they're doing they're instructing themselves so a lot of the time here you drop the pronoun so if there's a scene where the main character is like baking a cake instead of saying something like you measure the flour and whisk in the eggs it would just read measure the flour whisk in the eggs so it's the character instructing themselves this can be used to show that the main character maybe is dissociated and needs to direct themselves it can be really quite interesting you can also use this to play with form a lot you can blend it with like going off the example i just used you could do second person instructional in the form of a recipe you know blend it with something that inherently has instructions it has a very unique sound and you can really dig into some interesting psychological stuff within your character with the subtext just being within the point of view that's like my favorite thing about point of view is that you can wrap up character psychology into the point of view so the point of view itself explores character psychology rather than the point of view just being what pronoun am i gonna use it's like an expression of how the character sees themselves and perceives the events which is so psychological it can create theme it's so expansive the next one that i wanted to talk about is a third person you could also try third person plural so this is kind of like first person collective except you're using third person so it's a group of characters who are the main character but it's in third person so you would use they them to be clear you could have a third person singular narrative that uses they them pronouns if your character uses they them pronouns they then doesn't have to be used to describe a plural but it can be if you want to tell the story of a group from third person you could use they them so it's basically yeah first person collective and third person i have never tried it before but i'm kind of intrigued by the possibility of telling the story of a group from the third person i don't have much to say about this one because i've never used it before but i think it's intriguing so the next one i want to talk about is one you've probably heard of before but it's often written off third person objective so this is one that you've probably heard of before but it's not talked about a lot in relation to creative writing or at least fiction writing this is third person where the narrative is completely external so you have a third person narrator but they're basically a camera they don't have access to the character's thoughts so all the narrative voice can do is observe externally can't tell how anyone's feeling it can't tell what anyone's thinking this is what screenplays are written in so if you've written screen you might be familiar with it it's not used that often in fiction i i think hemingway has some stories in it i've heard that i haven't actually read a lot of hemingway but i think i've heard that he has some stories and third person objective there are some short there are some short stories and third person objective but it's not that common and it's often written off because it doesn't give you access to the character's thoughts which is a huge detriment but what is a detriment could equally be an opportunity think about the level of subtext that you could achieve in a story where everything is only subtext all you can do is have subtext because you can't go into anyone's thoughts you can only show through images even just as an exercise to improve your showing versus telling and your subtext skills this would be amazing you know as an exercise if you try writing a scene from third person objective and try to communicate whatever it is you're trying to communicate about the characters without anything internal it'd be a huge challenge but i bet it would be really rewarding in terms of strengthening your skills i've only used it for screen but i think the fact that i wrote screenplays in this point of view is what improved my showing versus telling skills in fiction it really teaches you to use imagery to show character i think that could actually be a really powerful tool in fiction i imagine that it would sound very quiet to read you know because there's no emotion so it would have this almost like cool meditative feel it'd be kind of cinematic at the same time i'm very intrigued to try it if anyone has used it in fiction i'd love to hear what the takeaways for you were and then as the final one this is i'm just lumping this in as one but it's anything in future tense whether that's first person third person second person whatever you want to do in future tense i admittedly have also never used future tense i imagine it's quite hard to write because we have so little exposure to it it implies that nothing is really happening it's only being inferred or predicted somehow i think it could be genuinely quite fascinating i think the risk with future tense is that it could feel like kind of a dream sequence where nothing that's happening is concretely happening you know because it's just being imagined but that could also be the beauty of it dive into a character's future projections of their worries um i actually think this could maybe pair beautifully with second person as mind-boggling as that would sound trippy as that would be second person future tense that idea that a character is so anxious about the future that they're dissociating while projecting it i don't know i feel like that's how i think nowadays is in second person future dance 2020 mood is living in second person future tense but sometimes the things that are the hardest to pull off and that feel like they would have the most drawbacks when used correctly are the most effective you know if you can find the right situation to do something that is often written off like third person objective it can be so impactful and so effective so i'm excited to try things in future tense and try to explore what that might mean and infer about the characters so that's all i've got for this video on weird point of views which i love so much remember this isn't an exhaustive list and ultimately when you get comfortable with point of view you don't have to pick from lists of point of views every point of view you use is its own unique conduction even if it fits under a certain label every point of view is different because it's coming from a unique character and every character is different even if it's technically first person or even if it's technically something more specific even if it's technically first person collective every first person collective is gonna be so different especially when you get into really weird point of views using it is probably going to demand specific parameters in order for it to be used logically and also for it to make sense with the story you know like when i use a weird point of view it's not just because i like messing around with your point of view i mean it's also that but it's also because i think that that point of view is the best way to explore and communicate my story and character and so in order to do that you have to create something quite unique and specific to that character when it's especially weird you even have to do that more you know like when i write first person past tense which is a pretty common point of view sure i think about the unique point of view because i love phone of you so much but it's when i'm writing in something utterly weird that i really think about why and i really think about aligning the point of view as logically as possible with my character and their psychology that's all i have for this video um i hope it was interesting or enlightening in some way i would love to hear what your favorite weird point of view is especially if it's one i didn't mention i really racked my brain to think of all the weird point of views i could think of so if i missed one please tell me about it so we can geek up a point of view in the comments thank you guys so much for watching um if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video [Music] bye

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 4,680

Rating: 4.9719791 out of 5

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, point of view, pov, 2nd person, how to choose your story's point of view, how to choose the point of view of your novel, how to choose the POV of your novel, how to choose you story's pov

Id: -G-G80OORLk

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020