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Part IV: The Contract with the Reader Point of View is a critically important aspect of successful fiction, and at some point, you must evaluate whether the choice of filtering consciousness you’ve made in your draft enhances or limits the story. Sometimes Point of View will suggest itself to you as the only pronoun option possible to communicate your vision of the story. It is satisfying when the story’s own preference works on an artistic level. Sometimes, however, Point of View suggests itself—and later, you discover that suggestion offered you a profound insight into one character’s experience only—and not the best approach to creating the story as an artistic unity. How will you ever know the difference? Alas! There’s no magic formula to guarantee success on the first attempt. This is strictly a trial-and-error endeavor. The important thing to remember about Point of View is that each option creates a contract with the reader that the writer must honor. To break that contract is to destroy artistic credibility. By “contract,” I mean that you as an artist choose a narrating voice—character or self-effacing presence—and thereby promise that we will be privy only to the thoughts, views, and perceptions it is reasonable for that voice to have. Here is an example of a broken contract: With a sniff of disdain, you say, “Well, that’s just bad writing.”Of course it is bad. It’s awful. Now let’s pinpoint why. Given the physical location of Daedelus’ eyeballs--his skull--how is it possible for him to know that his expression is worried—or that his eyebrows have arched? He would have to pluck out his eyeballs, turn them to get a glimpse of his face, and then push them back in their sockets. Yuck and double yuck. How about this instead: The second fragment honors the contract established by the “I” narrator, whom we understand to be Icarus’s father Daedelus. We feel along side him what is plausible and reasonable for him to feel and perceive—we haven’t switched to an