Replay: Rebecca Makkai shares Five Things She's Learned about Grasping Point of View – on the Page and in the World
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“I get fifty pages in and I go, ‘What am I doing with point of view?’ Let me go back and make some decisions now.”
“It’s something at the root of so very many issues that come up in people’s manuscripts: You find something and you dig and you dig and you dig – and it turns out that point-of-view is at the root of it. “
“Sometimes it’s a matter of getting outside readers to tell you if it works…. Just like an actor needs a director or just like an athlete needs a coach, you need that outside point of view to say, ‘Does this make sense? Can I get away with this? Does this work?’”
“It’s important as you’re drafting, as you’re revising, to take the time to get into the head of every character…..If I’m reviewing a scene that I’ve written, I am taking a full roll call of every character who’s there in that scene.”
“The more fun the decisions you make, the more easily you’re going to write your book, and the more fun you’re going to have sitting down to work on it.”
– Rebecca Makkai, Five Things I’ve Learned about Grasping Point of View – on the Page and in the World
On February 23rd, Rebecca returned to Five Things I’ve Learned to share Five Things She’s Learned about the issue she’s found most connected to almost early every problem on the page – and why improving the ability to see through someone else’s eyes is essential to being a good writer and a decent human being. Five Things I’ve Learned about Grasping Point of View – on the Page and in the World offers practical tools and insights for mastering point of view in fiction, helping writers deepen their characters’ interior lives and avoid common POV pitfalls.
Rebecca is the New York Times bestselling author of I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, The Great Believers won the Carnegie Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named one of the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century. A Guggenheim fellow, Rebecca teaches in the MFA programs at Bennington and Northwestern and serves as Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Whether you struggle with inconsistent narration or want to push beyond familiar perspectives, this class offers concrete tools and fresh ways of thinking about who’s telling your story—and why it matters. Plus, Rebecca shares exercises and reading recommendations you can return to long after the class ends.
Thanks for being part of Five Things I’ve Learned on Substack.
Visit myfivethings.com to view personal video invitations from writers, thinkers, and artists we admire – and to get special discounted pricing with our Five Things I’ve Learned Multi Pass.