Episode 156: From a Certain Point of View, ft. KATE ELLIOTT

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story? Kate Elliott joins us to explore the possibilities!

In this episode, we look at how the point of view can shape both what you communciate about a world and how you communicate it. The POV shows the rhythms of life and can be a good way to feed worldbuilding to the reader -- but it can also expose a character's gaps in knowledge or their biases and prejudices! After all, a commoner and a noble living in same location will interact with different pieces of the world and in very different ways. That, in turn, can affect how the author thinks of the world: what we spotlight, where we might have gaps, and prompting a need to check our own biases. And on top of all of that, POV is also something with its own trends within genres and over time! So we dig into those influences as well.

Transcript for Episode 156

Our Guest: Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written epic fantasy, space opera, science fiction, Young Adult fantasy, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer.