"But whatever the POV, and the difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame, stay within it"
About this Quote
Creative freedom loves to cosplay as chaos, but Herzog is insisting on a less glamorous discipline: pick a point of view and live with the consequences. The line acknowledges the seduction of “whatever the POV” - first-person confession, close third, omniscient god-mode - while quietly warning that each choice is a contract. A POV isn’t just a camera angle; it’s an ethics of attention. It determines what counts as knowable, what gets withheld, and what the reader is allowed to feel without being told to.
The phrase “difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame” gives away the real struggle: story events rarely arrange themselves to suit your narrative furniture. Writers cheat when the frame stops being convenient: they slip in an extra thought the narrator shouldn’t have, hop viewpoints to deliver information, or pull back into vagueness when the interiority gets messy. Herzog’s “stay within it” is a hard-nosed anti-cheat code. It’s craft advice, but it’s also a philosophy of credibility: readers sense when the narrative authority is wobbling.
Contextually, this sits in the workshop tradition of novelists talking to other novelists, where “POV” functions as shorthand for control. The subtext is almost parental: you’re allowed to choose your constraints, but you’re not allowed to renegotiate them mid-scene just to make the plot easier. The frame is the pressure that turns action into meaning.
The phrase “difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame” gives away the real struggle: story events rarely arrange themselves to suit your narrative furniture. Writers cheat when the frame stops being convenient: they slip in an extra thought the narrator shouldn’t have, hop viewpoints to deliver information, or pull back into vagueness when the interiority gets messy. Herzog’s “stay within it” is a hard-nosed anti-cheat code. It’s craft advice, but it’s also a philosophy of credibility: readers sense when the narrative authority is wobbling.
Contextually, this sits in the workshop tradition of novelists talking to other novelists, where “POV” functions as shorthand for control. The subtext is almost parental: you’re allowed to choose your constraints, but you’re not allowed to renegotiate them mid-scene just to make the plot easier. The frame is the pressure that turns action into meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
