6 Tips for Finding Your Novel’s Best Point of View(s)
Identifying a novel’s most compelling point of view can frustrate authors, and require experiments with first-person, third-person close, omniscient, or even the rarely-used, direct address—the second-person, using the “you” pronoun. Multiple narrators may also tell the story, offering scenes from a third-or-first-person perspective. The late Kent Haruf employed this strategy effectively in his now-classic novel, Plainsong.
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I wrote several versions of Everybody Here is Kin before settling on its two main characters’ perspectives. Lucille is a bossy 13-year-old. Will is a wary, suspicious 30-year-old. In early drafts, smitten with Haruf’s multiple-narrator strategy, I tried it, too, but the novel felt choppy and chaotic. I rewrote Lucille’s chapters, switching from third-person-close to first person, the “I” narrator, the closest possible point of view from which to tell a character’s story. I then rewrote Will’s chapters from his first-person perspective.
After setting the manuscript aside to “marinate,” I re-read the book. My two first-person narrators confused even me, the creator—forcing me to read several sentences at the start of each chapter before I could identify which character was speaking. When I wrote as Lucille, using the “I” pronoun, I became her, finding her voice, thought process, fears, hopes, language, and feelings. That perspective worked wonders for her character. On page one, Lucille is worked up, angry and scared her mother’s latest lover will derail the family vacation.
He was why we’d stopped in Georgia—not Dad’s ashes—instead of beating it to Key West, which I needed to see before it became Atlantis! I gulped down salty air. It stung my raw heart.
I switched Will’s narrative from first person back to third-person, close point of view. This distinguishes his voice from Lucille’s. Even in close-third, readers remain privy to character thoughts and observations. The constant use of his name and the “he” pronoun consistently reinforce his distinct character; Lucille’s “I” pronoun cements readers inside Lucille’s head and heart.
Here’s Will, driving home from his first “date” since he mustered out of the Army:
Will puttered away, chewing on the evening. Belva’s hair had glistened, even in the dim light. Oh. That parting smile, the way she emphasized the word rule? Was she joking? He laughed out loud at his own idiot self.
He’s analyzing the date, making fun of himself. We grasp his thoughts, but we’re not deeply immersed.
First and third person perspectives are writers’ most common point-of-view choices. They convey varying degrees of “psychic distance” between the reader and the novel’s events. A first-person narrator’s mind, heart, and actions lie open and available—think of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, with famous stream-of-consciousness narrators. This is as subjective as a narrator can possibly get.
1. Write different characters’ scenes in first-person and third-person close.
One perspective may capture the essence of a character under scrutiny better than the other. Writing Lucille in third person, I bonded with her, but when I wrote her as if I were her, I settled inside her bones. This rewarded me with plot possibilities I hadn’t considered because I became desperate and lonely, like Lucille.
Try everything, even third-person omniscient, rarely used in contemporary literature, but in which you have access not only to characters’ actions, but thoughts, as Zadie Smith does in White Teeth and Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God. On page 7, Janie, who narrates the novel at the request of her friend Pheoby, drops into Pheoby’s body: Pheoby dilated all over with eagerness.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved emphasizes, and mimics, slavery’s trauma through omniscience and shifting perspectives. Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina famously navigates Anna’s interiority and Levin’s, and occasionally those of other characters.
Check out BettyJoyce Nash’s Everybody Here Is Kin here:
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2. Test-drive characters under stress, in back-story and front-story scenes.
I wrote my original short story from Will’s third-person perspective, but as it expanded into a novel, I needed to grasp his “essence.” I wrote “off the page,” from first-person, to feel his pain—war scenes and love-trouble scenes that never appear in the novel. Writing them provided insights, and authority, to write authentically from Will’s perspective.
Here is a snippet from chapter three:
Will hadn’t built jack since high school. In the army, everything was pre-fab and pop-up. Just add soldiers blend and shoot.
Those words popped onto the page for one reason: I knew Will. Throwing characters in medias res—in the middle of things—reveals hidden agendas and deep hurts that help authors decide, and fulfill, a compelling perspective. Authors can’t know what characters will do until they interact with others in specific scenes in specific settings: a high tide, a trip across the marsh, or a local store. Experiments reveal plot potential plus confirm, or alter, point-of-view decisions.
Write backstories for principle characters. I wrote about Lucille’s track meets, science project (testing phosphorous levels in the Detroit River), and one of her mother’s lovers sneaking into the bathroom while Lucille showered. One line, yet the line carries authority. It’s Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg” theory: Readers sense the depth underneath. Will cared for his mother during her fatal illness—again, the iceberg tip. Such specifics convey an author’s confidence in storytelling.
3. Try everything, even second-person or first-person plural points of view.
I’m using second-person now, to address you, the reader. This directly and quickly involves readers in the story, but can be difficult to maintain over the course of a novel. You also risk reader skepticism. While reading, You are crossing the street, a literal-minded reader might think, Actually, no, I’m not.
It’s worth experimenting with alternate perspectives because they’re hotlines to character. Their dialogue, even voice, may shift, even dramatically, and this new perspective could influence action and/or spark plot ideas.
4. First-person plural, the “we” perspective.
It’s rare but extremely effective for certain novels. The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka, narrates the story of Japanese “picture” brides immigrating to the United States in the early 1900s, through the collective first-person plural, “We.” Their husbands will know them only by their pictures; they speak with one voice.
Likewise, the novel Half, by Sharon Harrigan, is told in the first person “we” of two siblings who are so close they experience their childhood as one character.
5. Did I mention read widely?
Study novels written in omniscient, close third, first, and even second and first-plural. As I wrote, I read desperately, noticing point-of-view, and the amount of narrative distance gained, or lost, to characters’ inner lives and events.
6. Turn characters loose to explore their setting.
Here’s Lucille, on the beach for the first time, on page 5:
…sweat pooling in all my cracks and crevices, legs, armpits; even my eyeballs felt too hot for their sockets.
What do they notice, love, and hate? Trust your instincts. An effective point-of-view produces compelling, honest scenes that place characters in jeopardy, and forces them to act, honoring the fictive dream the writer sets in motion. That’s what we writers want, isn’t it? To transport readers?