The objective is a not-so-common perspective in fiction and memoir, though it’s perhaps more common than the second person. But the objective POV has the benefit of being most like real life.
Also called the fly-on-the-wall perspective or the cinematic perspective, the objective POV uses neutral narration that doesn’t reveal the thoughts or feelings of any character.
Instead, the narration presents the story events through observation—dialogue, actions, body language—leaving it up to the reader to infer emotion and intention. And while the objective is technically a third-person POV, it differs from the third person in disallowing reader access to any character’s mind.
After all, we can’t know what others are thinking as we’re talking to them. Not really, anyway.
While the objective POV may seem restrictive, it allows for the development of mystery and intrigue and encourages the reader to observe what the characters say and do for clues about their motivations.
The objective appears mostly in short stories, though it’s also used in novels spanning from works of classic literature to more modern stories. And this perspective will force the skillful writer to show, not tell, what’s happening.
Here’s a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s short story, Hills Like White Elephants.
“All right. But you’ve got to realize—”
“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?”
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “That I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.”
“Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.”
“It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.”
“Would you do something for me now?”
“I’d do anything for you.”
“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
In Hills Like White Elephants, the dialogue does the heavy lifting, and the reader becomes an eavesdropper. Hemingway uses repetition, hedging, and yes/no avoidance to keep the reader’s ear listening.
And because the reader never gets into either characters’ heads, all the tension exists in the conversation itself. Just as the objective can’t get into your characters’ heads to reveal their thoughts, it also can’t relay what those characters are feeling.
While it may sound like the objective POV is impersonal, using the objective will force you to get very up close and personal with your characters to communicate how they’re visually or audibly handling whatever is going on in your story to your reader.
Especially if what’s going on is big.
Cormac McCarthy’s crime novel, No Country for Old Men, uses a blend of perspectives, the most predominant of which is the objective, which allows the reader to uncover big emotions by pulling back to look at the minutia.
Leading up to this passage, Llewelyn has come to terms with the fact that he may need to kill somebody after finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He went to Wal-Mart and bought some clothes and a small nylon zipper bag to put them in. A pair of jeans and a couple of shirts and some socks. In the afternoon he went for a long walk out along the lake, taking the cut-off gunbarrel and the stock with him in the bag. He slung the barrel out into the water as far as he could throw it and he buried the stock under a ledge of shale. There were deer moving away through the desert scrub. He heard them snort and he could see them where they came out on a ridge a hundred yards away to stand looking back at him. He sat on a gravel beach with the empty bag folded in his lap and watched the sun set. Watched the land turn blue and cold. An osprey went down the lake. Then there was just the darkness.
In this passage, Llewelyn’s life has taken a strange turn, and he’s preparing for something he couldn’t have expected. All the small details—his purchases, his handling of the leftovers of his sawed-off shotgun, his observations of the animals around the lake—add gravity to what is a poignant moment for him, a point in the story where he has few words to describe how he’s feeling.
And a well-placed passage during which the reader is held at arm’s length may surprise the reader with their own emotions. Coming out and saying Llewelyn was “scared shitless” almost guarantees your reader won’t feel his fear, but focusing on the dying light of the blue hour, the diving osprey, and the darkness gets that message across loud and clear.
And that’s the real treat.
The objective person can also introduce dramatic irony into your story by clueing in the reader to something your main character can’t possibly know, as in this passage from Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs:
In the basement room directly beneath the kitchen was a well, long dry. Its stone rim, reinforced with modern well rings and cement, rose two feet above the sandy floor. The original wooden safety cover, too heavy for a child to lift, was still in place. There was a trap in the lid big enough to lower a bucket through. The trap was open and Jame Gumb scraped his trays and the dog’s tray into it.
The bones and bits of vegetable winked out of sight into the absolute blackness of the well. The little dog sat up and begged.
“No, no, all gone,” Gumb says. “You’re too fat as it is.”
He climbed the basement stairs, whispering “Fatty Bread, Fatty Bread” to his little dog. He gave no sign if he heard the cry, still fairly strong and sane, that echoed up from the black hole:
“PLEEASE.”
In this passage, Clarice Starling and the FBI don’t yet know who Jame Gumb is, let alone that Catherine Martin—the missing woman for whom they’re searching—is being held captive in a dry well in his basement.
But now, the reader knows where Catherine presumably is, and their excitement ratchets up as they wait to find out whether Clarice will locate Catherine in time to stop her murder, or whether the FBI will find Catherine’s body floating in a river like the other women before her.
Writing & Revising the Objective Well
Since you’ve chosen the objective person to create literary distance between your character and your reader, consider how the merits of the objective POV can help you deliver the right message to your reader while engaging their emotions and helping them see what you’ve created.
Writing the objective well benefits from a few considerations:
- tension
- balance
- showing
Tension
Using the objective POV allows you to create dramatic tension for your reader by limiting their experience to what can be observed or overheard, as in the passage from Hills Like White Elephants. Because the dialogue must do the heavy lifting, the reader’s focus is on the conversation. All the characters’ goals and motivations, their internal conflicts, must be present in the dialogue.
And since humans are great at not actually answering the questions asked of them, the objective POV allows you the creative freedom of not giving away the whole story. Instead, you can allow your reader only a taste, which will hopefully whet their appetite for more.
If you’re using the objective POV and are finding it difficult to remain objective and stay out of the heads of one or more characters, zoom out.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What does a fly on the wall notice or hear in this moment?
- How do those observations and sensory clues help the observer understand the conflict in play?
And if that fly on the wall knows more than it could possibly know, you likely dipped into another perspective.
Look for unintentional POV slips—emotion, intention, or thought-laden statements (e.g., he felt, he thought, he desired)—that clue in the reader to the “why,” not just the “what.”
Balance
Because the objective person holds the reader at arm’s length, the reader can’t get into any character’s head, which can disconnect, even limit, the reader’s emotional experience of the story. As such, the objective POV works well when it’s balanced with other POVs, such as the first person or the third person.
Both No Country for Old Men and The Silence of the Lambs use the objective POV with other perspectives, which allows the reader to zoom out and back in again and get a balanced look at the character’s world.
If the bulk of your story is written in the objective POV and you’re finding it difficult to remain objective because your reader needs information they can’t get through observation alone, consider alternating POVs, choosing one or two characters for your reader to know a little more intimately.
But make sure you choose the characters who can reasonably deliver the information your reader needs to understand the contextual landscape of your book.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What information does the reader need to best understand what’s happening to my characters?
- What information does the reader need to best understand how my characters are affected by what’s happening?
- Who is the best person to deliver this information to the reader?
Showing
If you tell your reader about your story events in an “and then” style, the story will fall flat. And while this advice is not just for the objective POV, it’s especially important for the objective, because telling isn’t an option.
The nature of the objective POV means you are required to show, rather than tell, your reader what is happening. So, round out the characters and settings using observable details that can translate to emotions, such as in the passages from No Country for Old Men and Hills Like White Elephants.
Using observable details works especially well when you need to show your reader having a big emotional reaction to something, because the objective can give you the wiggle room to explore what wouldn’t be natural for your character to blurt out more directly. Keep in mind that objectivity is key.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What minutia does my character notice in the moment?
- Why does my character notice those things? How do they affect the character?
- How will I show the reader how the character is feeling in this moment?
Last Notes on the Objective
The objective POV can create suspense, get your reader to ask questions and form their own opinions about what’s going on, and give your reader some emotional breathing room, especially when emotions and stakes are high.
The best practice, especially for book-length works, is to use the objective judiciously to balance out other emotionally taxing perspectives, especially when the plot involves deep trauma, or horrifying events, such as in crime thrillers, some horror stories, and the like.
Happy writing!
<3 Fal
P.S. Have you missed a few POV Deep Dives? Check out the first person, the second person, the third person, and the omniscient person.
P.P.S. Let me know how you liked this POV deep dive series by leaving a comment below!
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Fallon Clark is a story development coach and editor with more than a decade of experience in communications, project management, writing, and editing. She provides story development and revision services to independent and hybrid publishers and authors spanning genres and styles. And in 2018, she had the joy of seeing Forever My Girl, one of her earliest book projects, on the big screen. Fallon’s writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and The MicroZine. Find her online at FallonClarkBooks.Substack.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.