Point of View Penetration

Over the last few weeks, I've been talking about point of view. I talked about first person, third person, and then last week I talked about some ways to pick your viewpoint character for a scene. This post follows up on those. It's about point of view penetration.

Penetration

In the fiction-writing world, the term "penetration" refers to how deep the narrator gets into the viewpoint character's point of view. (What is with some of the writing terms?) People usually use it in reference to third person point of view. Many say that penetration, and its different levels, doesn't relate to first person since in first person we are always in the character's head, and therefore, we're always deep into their viewpoint. I'm going to argue against this somewhat, but first I'll talk about penetration in reference to third person since that's how it is usually used.

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Pros and Cons of First Person, How to Deflate the Cons

By request (you can thank anonymous), I'm going to do some blog posts on points of view, talking about the pros and cons, and how to get around some of the cons. I'll be pulling from two sources, Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress and Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. They are both good books to have for those learning the craft of writing, and they should be easy to remember since their titles are nearly identical. I like how the authors explain point of view in those books the best. They go in depth.

Now, there is a reason I'm pulling from those texts. There has been so much that has already been said on point of view that I didn't think I had anything new to add, but when I started putting this post together, I realized I did. Some of my opinions on point of view are different from the general rules. So, in this post, I'll list the general rules and then my own opinions on them after.

But let's start with the basics.

There are three points of view:

First-person: I thought I was going crazy.
Second-person: You thought you were going crazy.
Third-person: She thought she was going crazy.

Please note that narratives are hardly ever written in second-person point of view, but it has been done, by authors like Jay McInerney.  You usually see second-person in other forms of writing, like role-playing games or do-it-yourself books. Most novels and short stories are written in first-person or third-person.

Today, let's talk about the common pros and cons of first-person, and then I will go and debunk a lot of those with my own personal opinion and tell you ways you can get around some of them.

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