by PeggySue Wells @PeggySueWells
Point of View encompasses the narrator's position in relation to a story being told.
Who is the narrator or storyteller? Essentially, there are four categories of point of view. Within those four, a couple have subcategories.
First Person
- Epistolary
- Flashback
- Cinematic
- Plural
Second person
Third person
- Limited
- Objective
- Omniscient
Fourth person
First Person POV is a story told from the character’s viewpoint. Characterized by the words I, Me, My, Mine, We, and Us, the story unfolds as seen solely through the eyes of the central character.
Tips for using First Person Flashback include:
Match the character’s voice as it would have been at the time of the flashback.
- What vocabulary did the character have at that earlier time?
- What was the character’s emotional state?
- What didn’t they know then?
- What did they know at that time?
Keep the flashback relevant.
- How does this prior scene apply to the current story?
- What information does the flashback give that moves the story forward?
- What does the flashback tell the reader about the character?
There is an art to smoothly blend a flashback into a story and seamlessly return to the present without giving the reader whiplash. One flashback in Chasing Sunrise shows the reader how our hero, Michael Northington, became a pararescueman. The flashback begins:
Standing stock-still, trailing the jet with his eyes and heart, Michael was transported back to a similar sight from his childhood in the Nebraska farmland.
On that crisp Saturday, fourteen-year-old Michael had raked the musky autumn leaves in the yard …
Several pages later, that flashback ends with:
A lizard scurried across the porch rail, bringing Michael back to the present.
Later in the story, a flashback shows the reader how Michael first came to know one of the most significant relationships of his life. The flashback begins:
The three of them had often trained together. “A tree is not a mast until it’s hewn,” Corbin would say as he ordered ever-tougher workouts. Keeping pace with Corbin reminded Michael of the day when he’d first met his boss.
On a summer afternoon ten years before, Michael’s squadron had stood in formation on the base’s grassy parade grounds…
The story returns the reader to the story’s present with:
Michael didn’t trust easily but he had grown to trust the Scotsman. Until Corbin betrayed that trust.
Now Corbin was back in Michael’s life, invading his island retreat.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s accounts of the brilliant and quirky Sherlock Holmes are written as told to the reader by Holmes’ sidekick, Dr. Watson. The mystery-solving tales are in the First Person Flashback POV as Dr. Watson looks back to recall the adventures.
“In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments.”
In the film, Titanic, the heroine is introduced at the beginning as an old woman. The viewer is transported back as she remembers when she was a young woman aboard the ill-fated Titanic.
Oceans 12 is a film about an international heist. The pieces of the who-done-it puzzle come together toward the end when the viewer is given a flashback. In this montage, the characters reveal what they had been doing behind the scenes while the camera was on another character.
Flashbacks are rarely recommended in the industry for two reasons. First, flashbacks are difficult to write well. Second, when not written clearly and well, flashbacks can be confusing to the reader.
Simultaneously, First Person Flashback is another tool at the writer’s disposal. The best time to use First Person Flashback as the main point of view is when the style proves to be a compelling way to share the story and evoke emotion in the reader.
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