Hi Everyone,
It’s been awhile since our last Roundup, but thank you to those of you who answered my latest call for questions. I’ll be posting answers over the next few weeks. First up, I want to address some overlapping questions from Peter McMinn at
and .Jay’s question has to do with the fluidity of a fictional narrator’s POV, as when a mature 1st POV switches into 3rd POV for sections or whole chapters when the narrator is too young to tell the story. “Could you advise if this approach is fine and whether there are any issues I should be looking to address when I’m switching chapters between first person narrator and third person?”
Peter’s question has to do with the perspective changes that shift a memoir into autofiction: “At what point might the fiction ring less true than the actual--and importantly, unknown--events?”
I’ve addressed aspects of POV and autofiction in previous posts, which I’ve linked at the end here, but today I’ll try to respond to these specific questions.
To switch, or not to switch POV?
First of all, there are no hard and fast rules about switching POV, either in memoir or fiction. I urge you to experiment with different perspectives as you approach your story, especially when writing about other people’s experiences or scenes that you (or your narrator) did not personally witness. Or situations that you can’t reliably remember, perhaps because you were very young.
If writing about yourself or your narrator in 3rd POV makes the scene feel more immediate and authentic— if you feel it helps get you closer to the underlying truth of the situation— then run with that perspective. This POV sometimes makes the writing feel a bit voyeuristic, but that camera-lens objectivity can also help ratchet up the intrigue and suspense. This is one reason so many 1st-person novels open with a preface in 3rd person.
The quick 3rd-POV opening is a convention in thrillers, and it’s not uncommon in literary novels. Michael Ondaatje uses a 3-page 3rd-POV scene to open Cat’s Table, which is otherwise told in 1st person. And I just read a forthcoming novel from Knopf, Rachel Khong’s Real Americans, which employs the same device. After a two-page scene that follows an anonymous break-in, the rest of Khong’s novel is narrated sequentially by three 1st person characters; it takes a hundred pages for the 1st-person linkage to the 3rd-person preface to be revealed.
Consistency & convention
The risk that such switching courts is confusion. When a story is told in a consistent and conventional POV, it’s easier for readers to follow. By this I mean:
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