I'm realizing how important it is to really understand POV

"I didn’t fully understand third-person limited (TPL) point of view for a long time, and certainly didn’t understand why an author would choose to be “limited” in this way. Isn’t limitation generally an undesirable thing? Before that discussion, I’d received about 1,000 consecutive rejections—from literary magazines, agents and editors. But since figuring this whole POV thing out, most of my writing has been published. It’s not a coincidence."
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—Peter Mountford, writersdigest.com

When I first got here I thought I knew POV. All I knew were first, second, and third. Little by little I've been learning how much more there is to it, and now I realize how important it really is.

I now believe that in some regards, POV is the writer's equivalent of perspective in the visual arts. If you screw up the perspective, the drawing looks like crap, assuming it's supposed to be realistic and not abstract or surreal or something. And perspective is also one of the main things newbies fail to understand (just like POV). When they don't know it, they can't see how bizarre their drawings look.

I've been drawing for a long time, painting much less, and I was lucky enough to learn perspective when I was about 10 years old. My friend and I both drew, and we used to get together once a week at my house and look at each other's work. It was pretty competitive, each week one of us would emerge as the definite winner because of one drawing that stood out, and we usually managed to leapfrog each other pretty steadily—it would be me one week and him the next. That was actually a huge reason to get better—you had to show the other guy up at all costs!

One week, after he left, my mom asked me if I wanted a secret weapon to make me a better artist. She had a big loose-leaf binder called the Famous Artist's Course—it was that subscription service where you'd draw the Indian's head or the turtle and send it to them, and you'd get back a redline critique and begin your subscription—you'd get the binder with the first few lessons in it and another lesson every month. My mom stopped the subscription a little ways in, but luckily her binder did include the all-important lessons in perspective. I studied it diligently, and then learned how to draw the human figure as a mannequin built from boxes and cylinders, drawn in proper perspective. Turns out when you learn that stuff, you're like 9/10ths of the way there in terms of learning the basics.

I've long felt that what makes drawing and painting so difficult to learn is that you have to create a convincing illusion of 3 dimensions on a 2-dimensional surface (AKA perspective). I also believed this makes it much harder to learn than writing, at least once you've mastered basic grammar and punctuation, the grammar school stuff we all learned as kids.

But now I discover the equivalent. I mean, quite literally, POV is the viewpoint on the story world. It's often said to be 'through the eyes' of a particular character. This is exactly what perspective is in visual art.

I don't think learning POV as a writer will be as difficult as learning perspective, but then I'm not there yet, so time will tell. Actually though—learning perspective wasn't that hard, it was being able to draw it really convincingly and make the drawings look good that was. And I'm sure exactly the same is true in writing.

But the reason I wanted to make this entry is to say that I think really understanding POV is one of the major things that separate the real authors from the dilettantes.