Avoiding Maslow's Hammer: Pick a Point-of-View like a Programmer

Selecting a tool is just as easy (and just as hard) as you think.

Photo by Fotis Nakos on Unsplash

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

— Abraham Maslow, 1966

For those of you who followed Pilot Season and read the Writer's Diaries, you might have noticed that I struggled with point-of-view. Choice of point-of-view makes a big difference on your story and as I've been thinking about it more, I've been considering how similar it is to selecting a language or a framework for a programming project. You have similar questions you have to ask yourself, similar effects. The choice you make here will either make your life harder or easier, and is heavily weighted by your own experiences.

Researching the Right Tool

In programming, when trying to decide on a particular language, you should first do your research. What are the available languages good at? What does the community agree that certain languages do well, and others don't? This is not the only thing you have to consider, but is probably one of the first ones.

So, before we go any further, let's talk about what traditional points-of-view are actually good at.

First Person

First person point-of-view means telling a story through the use of the pronoun "I". Traditionally, this story is from the limited perspective of an individual. Think of classic hard-boiled noir stories (like Raymond Chandler) or a diary.

First person is good at establishing an intimacy and closeness to the reader, but with a comfortable amount of distance. It isn't common in all genres (such as fantasy), but incredibly common in others (mystery). It can be off-putting to some readers and requires a great depth of knowledge of your main character from the very beginning.

Second Person

Second person point-of-view means telling a story through the use of the pronoun "you". Traditionally, this story is also from the limited perspective of an individual. Think of an instruction manual or a story your parents might tell about you when you were younger.

Second person is incredibly rare to read in a full novel and in most genres. It is forcefully direct, almost to the point of being uncomfortable for audiences at certain points. Again, it can also be off-putting to some readers and (due to the rarity) can be difficult to execute for writers and difficult to consume for readers.

Third Person

Third Person point-of-view means telling a story through the use of third-person singular pronouns (“he”, “she”, “they”, etc.). Traditionally, these stories are told from two possible perspectives: limited or omniscient.

A limited third person means that the writing is constrained within the head of an individual character, similar to first or second person. Think of most books you've read and they're probably written in third person limited.

Limited is intimate and close to the reader but not uncomfortably so like second. However, due to its ubiquity and versatility it can almost fade into the background. This is the best choice if you don't even want to think about what point of view you're going to be writing in.

The omniscient third person jumps between different characters heads throughout, rather than just being limited within the same head. This is common in “classic” literature, such as the works of Jane Austen or John Steinbeck.

Omniscient allows you the maximum amount of information. You can pull from multiple people's heads, and sometimes don't even have to pull from people's heads at all but directly from your own lore and knowledge about the world. This can lead to head hopping, however, which is a difficult problem to fix. Also, you have to determine the whether or not your narrator has a persona and their own opinion about what is going on. And having access to all information about your world can be overwhelming; how do you know where to situate yourself when you can be anywhere?

Matching your Goal to your Tool

Now that you've done your research, consider how the pros and cons of a point-of-view fit the goal of your story. In programming, certain languages are good at certain things. Python is pretty good for statistical analysis, for example, but you probably wouldn't want to use Python for website design (although people can and do); JavaScript is inherently better at that. Points-of-view are exactly the same.

In my previous piece on using Scrum for writing, I talked about gathering requirements from other readers or while editing, but this is more generic: what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Not just in a scene, but within your story as a whole. Sometimes, you want to entertain. Other times, you want to educate. Most frequently, you have several goals at once, some of which may even contradict one another.

So the question becomes what do you want not just the story, but the point of view to accomplish? Is it more important to you that a story be readable? Or is it more important that somebody feel almost uncomfortably close to the characters going through the described situations?

For example, if you have an incredibly complicated story with many characters that the readers have to remember, then using second person, which is rare and can be off-putting, is probably not the right choice. Then again, if you want to force a reader to be uncomfortably close to a character in order to establish empathy for a character who is inherently not empathetic, then second person might be exactly the right choice. If you need the characters to have knowledge about certain aspects of the world that it is impossible for them to truly have access to, then third person omniscient might be right. But if having access to all that knowledge can be overwhelming, then it might be time to look at third person limited.

Thinking about these goals, and how the point of view affects them, is critical for trying to figure out how to apply changes within a given story. But it's also critical to understanding the strain (on both a reader and a writer) that a point of view can cause.

Straining to Write (or Read) a Point of View

A real picture of me trying to decide which point of view to use. Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash

As a software engineer, you inevitably get more familiar with a particular language than another. This doesn't mean that your favorite language is the right one for a particular project, but it does mean you understand the pitfalls and problems with that language, so it may have a leg up in your mind over other languages. In my experience, for example, I'm very familiar with JavaScript. That means that if I'm just going to start coding a random project, I'm probably going to pick JavaScript as my "first draft" even if that isn't what the whole project should be written in later on.

When you sit down to write a story, what do you naturally start writing in? First person? Third? Or are you some kind of sadist and pick second?

Part of the strain (or challenge) of writing comes when you are working in a point of view with which you are not familiar. Trying to reign in your mind to keep yourself confined to a particular point of view, or a particular perspective, can be really difficult, and double the effort required to just get your story on the page.

And choosing a point of view unfamiliar to the audience can double the effort to even read the story.

For example, did you know there is actually a fourth person point of view? This is a story told from a community's perspective, using the first-person pronoun "we".¹ I've never actually seen it done successfully, but as an artist and writer, it's an intriguing idea. But imagine the strain it would have on your reader? How hard will it be for your readers to immerse themselves in the story when you are continuously using the word "we" as the principal pronoun in your story? When the story isn't coming from a particular person's point of view, but a town or a neighborhood?

People rarely agree with themselves from moment to moment, never mind the other people within their community. How are you supposed to tell a cohesive story when the community cannot agree on the timeline of events?

This is the secondary strain you have to consider: how much work am I making the reader do when reading this particular point of view? Is this common enough in the genre that nobody will bat an eye or am I making them constantly adjust? And if I am making them work for it, am I okay with that?

Building a House with Only a Hammer

You don’t have to use only one point-of-view for an entire story. You can use several points-of-view throughout. Point-of-view, just like anything else, is a tool; it can make a story harder or easier. You can build a whole house just with a hammer, although it does make for some particularly weird and interesting choices.

Blatantly stolen from Reddit

As everyone knows, communication is hard. Why would you choose to make it harder than it needs to be?

1. Pronouns are different from points-of-view to be clear. Just because this is using a first person pronoun, does not explicitly mean that it is just a different "flavor" of first person point-of-view.