There Are More than Five POVs

Hello readers, 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. This is my segue into a low-stakes (and probably overly pedantic) craft topic: why I dislike the traditional POV taxonomy. 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…