There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel
Counter Craft
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There Are More than Five POVs<br>A little craft rant on points of view in fiction.
Lincoln Michel<br>Jun 22, 2026
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Hello readers,<br>You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to write a book all over again.1 It’s quite annoying. But another reason is that I challenged myself to write a novel in a rotating third-person point of view instead of the first-person POVs of my first two novels.<br>This is my segue into a low-stakes (and probably overly pedantic) craft topic: why I dislike the traditional POV taxonomy.<br>When I teach intro to literature classes to undergraduates, I open the first class going over the five types of POV. (This may seem overly basic, but most of my students are not humanities majors and are unfamiliar with such things.) Each time I teach the traditional POV taxonomy, I feel it isn’t the most useful one from a fiction writing, uh, point of view.<br>Here’s a quick refresher. The alleged five forms of POV are as follows: First-person (“I do this”), second-person (“you do that”), and third-person (“he/she/they/it do the other thing”). However, third-person POV is broken down into three types: third-person objective (no interiority), third-person limited (one character’s interiority and perspective), third-person omniscient (unlimited interiority and perspective). Those are your five.<br>There is more we could say, of course. First-person POV implies a character who exists within the fictional story world while the various third-person forms are narrated by a voice that usually exists outside of the story world. But, that’s the gist. Most intro to literature guides will also say that second-person POV and third-person objective POV are rare in literature,2 meaning you’re left with only three common POV forms.<br>I disagree.<br>It’s not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative. Grammatically, “I” and “we” are both first-person pronouns. Narratively, there is a dramatic difference between an “I” narrator and a collective “we” narrative voice. An I is a single character and the story is limited to one perspective. A we is a group, which can provide a plethora of perspectives or else a sort of consensus chorus perspective. That opens up entirely different storytelling opportunities and restrictions.<br>The grammar focus of POV taxonomy also seems to confuse many. More than once I’ve seen people, even professional critics, mistake a first-person POV with direct address (“I wanted to tell you about the time I woke up as a big ol’ bug”) for true second-person POV (“You wake up and realize you have turned into a gigantic bug.”)<br>Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.
The Storyteller (first-person singular — classic style)
I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. — “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin
This is your classic first-person POV. These days it is likely the most common POV of any type. A character inside the story world is telling a tale to an undefined listener/reader. In this mode, the implied listener is not a part of the fictional reality. They are in essence whoever is reading the tale. Historically, there was often explicit artifice to this effect. “To whoever finds these letters, please believe my strange tale!” In our modern narrative-savvy times, the convention is to avoid overt signaling. The reader gets it. Either way, the story is told from one person’s perspective and we understand the story is being crafted for us. This is where the possibility of “unreliable narrators” creeps in, although many would argue all uses of first-person imply some level of unreliability just as in real life we know anyone speaking to us is omitting, exaggerating, minimizing, distorting, and otherwise shaping a narrative both intentionally and unintentionally. That’s just what people do.<br>The Chorus (first-person plural)
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