Episode: 2536
Title: HPR2536: Lostnbronx examines points-of-view and tenses in storytelling.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2536/hpr2536.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:00:47

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This in HPR episode 2,536 entitled Lost in Drunk Settman in Points on New and Tensin in
Storytelling.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunk and in about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunk Settman in Points on New and Tensin in Storytelling.
Today's show is licensed under a CC Neuro-license.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunk Settman and you'll have to forgive me for the sound quality
I'm in the car right now.
Today I would like to talk about narrative point of view in Storytelling.
Now usually this does refer to written works like novels or short stories, but it does
also include the narrative portions of things like movies or television shows, games especially
long cutscenes where the main character or narrator is talking about things that have
happened or are going on in the story.
It can be part of poetry or songwriting.
It does appear in almost any type of Storytelling or fiction.
Now what we're really talking about are four different points of view.
The first is first person, then there's second person, then there's third person limited
and then finally third person omniscient.
Okay, now first person is simple.
I got up and made myself some breakfast.
Second person, he got up and made himself some breakfast or she got up or they got
up.
Third person, if say we're talking about someone named Joe, Joe got up and made himself
some breakfast or made herself or made themselves some breakfast.
Now third person limited and third person omniscient, they aren't distinct but they are
also extremely similar in certain ways.
In a small sequence like Joe getting up, they're both going to seem exactly the same.
What are the advantages or disadvantages of these different types?
Well, the advantage of first person is that you're inside the person's head.
They are telling the story.
They are telling you what they saw, what they smelt, what they touched and generally what's
more important to the narrative.
They are telling you how they felt about all of these things.
They are telling you what it was that they themselves could see and couldn't see.
It has great advantage if you want a certain immediacy to the main character.
If you want the main character to become someone that the reader, and we'll go with reader,
but again this can take any form, that the reader will take to their heart right away, that
this is a character that we're going to like.
Even if the character does unlikable things, now like is probably a strong word, maybe sympathetic
is better.
It could be a character that we come to love, that we really come to care about, but
it doesn't have to be, and it can be a despicable character.
Now, second person, the narrative form, he or she or they got up and made themselves
some breakfast.
It has the advantage of being very visual.
You are outside watching these things happen.
It has a real advantage when it comes to things like action sequences or a particular set
of elements in the story that are visually striking.
If I need to describe a thing outside that doesn't necessarily need to have a strong
emotional appeal to the main character, that is a form of narration that we really want
to have available to us.
I can think of an example where the main character or characters are doing something somewhere
and something gorgeous is happening outside of them and they're oblivious to it.
They don't notice it.
That can't have a really powerful effect within a story depending on how it's used.
Now, third person limited, essentially Joe is doing this, Joe is doing that.
Again, we are outside of the character, but we're not following just one single character.
We are perhaps following all of the characters, but we're not that close to them.
We might be able to tell or infer certain things about Joe and other characters by how they're
doing.
We might have very good views of them, what their faces look like, how they're expressing
their emotions to the outside world, but we're not necessarily privy to their thoughts.
We can be, but I'll go into that in a second.
Now, that is the major difference between third person limited and third person omniscient.
The omniscient narrator knows all of the thoughts of everybody involved.
We're not just talking about Joe, remember, we're talking about Joe and everybody else.
That is the power of third person omniscient.
It's actually pretty popular in fantasy stories or other stories that have many, many characters
that we have to keep straight.
However, at least in recent years, there has been a tremendous bleed over between those
two third person points of view.
Very often, especially, again, in modern writing, we will have authors that jump between
the two.
We will see how the character looks, but we don't know what they're thinking, but maybe
we know what the other person's thinking looking at them, and then it might flip flop.
These are generally used for specific storytelling purposes that is to say we want a reader to
be surprised by what the first person is doing or about to do, just the same way as the
other person looking at them is going to be.
The person looking is like, I don't know what this guy's thinking, I don't know what's
going on in his head, and then that first person does something surprising, and the reader
is surprised because the third person is surprised, and then we abandon that technique
in the next scene, maybe we're in the other guy's head, or someone else's.
Let's study this sort of thing a lot of times they consider that a weakness, I'm not
so sure it is, and I'm not so sure that there should be such a hard distinction between
those two techniques, because I've seen it done to great effect, however, like a lot
of things, it can be overused, or it can be used by an inept writer, and then we have
problems.
Now, additionally, there are other points of view that can be pursued, but those are
the main ones.
The other one, a lot of times in poetry or songwriting is where you'll see that sort
of thing, but I won't go into that because I don't myself, I'm not familiar with them
very much.
Now, understand that the point of view does not necessarily describe the tense of the
story, and by tense I mean the period of time in which the story takes place, so first
person, I did this, I did that.
That is first person past tense.
I am telling you about a story that already took place, so by definition you already know
I'm going to live through this story because I'm telling you about it in the future sometime.
I have survived whatever happened in this tale.
You can already take that away from the very first sentence of the story, you already
know I survived.
Now there are exceptions to that, especially if you're talking about genre fiction, some
sort of supernatural element where I'm telling you this from some other plane of existence
or maybe I've become a member of the undead and I've come back to tell you what happened,
but I still exist, all right?
But I've also seen future tense and it's very unusual, but it does happen.
I will go here, I will go there, I will do this, I will do that.
I will get up and I will make myself some breakfast.
Now it sounds predictive if you leave it like that, it sounds like I am telling you what
I intend to do, but if you have an entire narrative told that way, it has a very different
effect.
It implies that the character has knowledge of the future and it gives the character
a bit of immediacy that they wouldn't normally have and by immediacy I guess I mean it gives
the character power, power over the future.
This character already knows what's going to happen.
Now you can play with that, you can play with it a lot and say that I will do this, I
will get up and I will have my breakfast, but the phone will ring and it will stop me.
My breakfast plans are shot, I can't have breakfast because I have to leave immediately.
So it becomes stilted and pretty terrible right off the bat, but it can be used and
in certain areas and used properly, it can have an effect that maybe other elements don't
have.
It can also imply mental illness, told that way.
You can use it for a lot of different things, but generally you want to use it sparingly.
Now, second person, he gets up, he gets up, hear that, present tense, he got up and
had breakfast, past tense, he will get up and have breakfast.
Now in a story you can use, he will get up and have breakfast when you're talking about
somebody else and your expectations of them.
Again, your character can have a certain amount of power over the future, some knowledge
that other people don't have and predict what will in fact happen and has to happen because
you know about it already.
But he's outside, remember it's second person, we're outside watching it happen, complex,
but it can have a narrative effect.
Now third person, I can tell that Joe got up and Mary got up and Darren got up, these
people all got up and they all had breakfast.
And if we're being strict about our tenses, he got up, it is in the past, Joe gets up,
that's the present, Joe will get up.
Now it begins to sound an awful lot like second person, except again, Joe will get up,
Frank will get up, Benny will get up, Mary will get up.
We know about all of these people, all of these people, we can look at any single one of
them as closely as we want and maybe we can properly interpret their expressions and
from their extrapolate their emotions or their intentions for the future.
These things can all happen in that tense.
So yes, when you start mixing multiple characters, points of view and tenses, a story can get
complicated very, very quickly.
However, it is possible to use these things at the same time and still keep things clear.
For instance, perhaps you have a science fiction story that's being told in the present
tense and it could go something like in the future, I remember all of this happening.
Joe got up and he made himself some breakfast.
He is going to do this, he is going to get up and make himself some breakfast.
Now depending on how you punctuate that, it could be all one sentence and still make sense.
We are talking about a first person singular story being told in present tense, it's
also using past tense and future tense all in the same sentence to try to tell a particular
point.
Basically talking about how Joe is getting up and making himself some breakfast.
But there is a certain power behind this because the main character has knowledge of the future.
We got that information not only from the larger context of the story but also just from
that sentence alone.
So it is possible to mix and match these things but you have to be very careful how you
do it and of course that example is a poor one.
But probably it gives you an idea or a sense of how this thing can flow.
As you look at different books that you've read or stories or movies that have narration,
I think you'll find that these different points of view and often tenses can really add
or detract from a story depending on how they are being utilized.
The better story gets out of its own way, right?
A story that is using say present tense, it better be a good reason and it better
pay that off really really well or else it stands out.
I think that if I may be misremembering it but I seem to remember that the book Bright
Lights Big City is told in present tense, second person.
So you have a narrator who's saying you do this, you do this, you pick this up and you
walk over there, you do this, you do that.
It gives you first off a sense of immediacy because you're being told what's happening
and it's happening about you so there's also a personal quality to it.
It's also visual because we're outside watching it and you have a sense that you don't
really have a lot of control about what's going on.
You know I can think of other stories that have used these things at least for different
parts of the story where maybe someone is narrating it or another character is narrating
it or telling about something that happened.
But you know sometimes it can be very very confusing so you want to be careful with that
but sometimes especially if you have a complex tale with many characters changing the
tense for a particular sequence like say someone telling about something that happened
to them to somebody else.
A lot of times you can help keep that part of the story straight from other things.
You'll know who is talking about whom and when it happened a lot easier just by using
that slight change in the tense and in the narrative flow.
But it is very dependent upon the story and how it's approached.
When you start mixing and matching you have to be very very careful.
If you start changing it part of the way through you have to be very clear why you're doing
it because you can't have a narrative change overall.
You can have a narrative change of a particular part of a story that is buried within the
main narrative but you can't have it change halfway through.
You can't have a story that's joke got up and made himself some breakfast.
I don't know why I'm getting up.
I know I'm hungry.
I can't remember if I ate last night unless you're making physical changes in the narrative
structure to give yourself a sense of dichotomy there and it has to be clear that you're doing
so usually with parenthetical spaces or perhaps something is an italics or it can be probably
done with other types of punctuation.
There are ways to get away with something like that but it is very hard and it's a mistake
that many new authors will make is that they'll change their point of view throughout the
story because you know again stories that do a lot of head hopping they really run the
risk of that when you have many many characters and you're inside all of their heads you really
run the risk of confusing your reader.
And if you start making mistakes with points of view or with tense it becomes a mess and
it becomes hard for people to follow them.
It's an easy mistake to make and it's also very easy to see when you're outside of it
reading it but when you're in the middle of the production part of it when you're creating
your story these mistakes do crop up.
They do happen but if you made that mistake say halfway through the story you may have
a huge problem making it all gel properly.
With a little care and a little focus generally you can avoid it and if you have very different
points of view it's hard to make the mistake to begin with so having a first person story
it's hard for that to turn into a third person say I'm mission.
I got up and had some breakfast.
It's hard for that to suddenly turn into Joe didn't know why he wanted breakfast.
It would be hard for you to make that mistake so that's one way to do it pick one extreme
or the other but that may or may not serve your story so you really do have to take it
as it comes.
At any rate this has just been a little bit on points of view and tense and a little
bit about story structure.
I hope that if you find anything here interesting you would consider leaving a comment for this
episode on hacker public radio or better yet create your own episode of hacker public
radio because you have interests and you have points of view yourself and we want to hear
about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx thank you for listening take care.
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