Point of view is a place to stand, but more than that, a way to think and feel.
The size of the world that a write is trying to create often has something to do with the presence or absence of the word “I”. Against a large background, “I” can provide human scale. As a rule, the smaller the canvas, the more intrusive the first person is likely to be.
The first person minor, of the restricted first person, or the reasonable person. The distinguishing characteristic of this point of view lies in the limits and strictures it places on itself. As a rule, not much about the narrator is revealed, including the narrator’s opinions. An example from A Sense of Where You Are by New Yorker writer John McPhee:
… the ball curled around the rim and failed to go in. “What happened then?” I asked him. “I didn’t kick high enough,” he said. “Do you always know exactly why you’ve missed a shot?” “Yes,” he said, missing another one. “What happened that time?” “I was talking to you. I didn’t concentrate. The secret of shooting is concentration.”
This is a utilitarian first person. It helps readers to see.
The attempt to render characters in a piece of writing, to create the illusion that people are alive on a page, is so essential to storytelling, and so dependent on every other aspect of the art, that it can’t help but seem diminished by the standard term “characterization”. That word might better be limited to perfunctory efforts.
The honest nonfiction storyteller is a restrained illusionist.
The fundamental elements of a story’s structure are proportion and order. Managing proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, ideas. Often this means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficially trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning.
the good memoir is different from the memories behind it, not a violation of them but different, and different of course from the actual experience that gave birth both to memory and to memoir.
Essays are a congenial form for the divided mind.
What gives you license to write essays? Only the presence of an idea and the ability to make it your own. People speak of the “personal essay” as a form, but all essays are personal. They may make sweeping pronouncements, but they bear the stamp of an individual mind.
Original ideas, those hinges on which an era turns, are rare. It is unlikely that you will write The Origin of Species. Or that you will be Emerson. But originality and profundity are not identical. Profound ideas bear repeating, or rediscovery, and many original ideas do not. Essays are like poems in that they may confront old wisdom in a fresh way.
Essays illustrate the truth that, just as no word has an exact synonym, no idea can be exactly paraphrased.
beliefs are reached in the course of writing, and essays trace the course. “How do I know what I mean until I hear what I say?” is the familiar line. But its opposite is also true: How do I know what I don’t mean until I hear what I say? Essays let you second-guess yourself, even contradict yourself in front of the reader. Self-doubt, fatal in so many enterprises, fortifies the essay.
Taking the spin off can be the solution not only to a melodromatic sentence, but to a problem of tone that affects a whole manuscript. A phrase like “someone went mad for blood” has among its other demerits, a bossy quality. Taking the spin off can be roughly translated as “Don’t tell the reader how to feel.”