There are two things to consider when choosing the point of view of your novel.

1. Who is telling the story?
2. From what distance is the story being told?

There are four primary points of view you might choose for your novel:

• First person
• Limited third person
• Omniscient
• Second person

Whatever point of view you choose, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is suddenly shift point of view, thereby interrupting the fictional dream. This is particularly true with first person narration. If your novel is told from the point of view of a particular character, you must be careful not to break character by suddenly revealing something that your point of view character wouldn’t logically know. The moment you slip into someone else’s mind, the gig is up. The reader is left wondering, “What just happened?”

First Person

An “I” speaks to the reader. The character’s voice becomes extremely important. The language of your story must be consistent with the language and tone of a particular character.

Advantage of First Person:

It’s very intimate, resulting in less distance between the speaker and the reader.

It allows the author to delve deeply into the mind of a single character

Disadvantages of First Person:

The narrator (and therefore the reader) does not have access to what is going on inside the minds of the other characters. The narrator can know only what this particular character knows.

In Nabokov’s Lolita, the story is narrated in the first person by Humbert Humbert; as the story unfolds through his perspective, we begin to understand that Humbert is an unreliable narrator—that is, we cannot trust his version of the story. Either by intent or by some flaw of his nature, he fails to tell us the truth. In the case of Lolita, it makes for an interesting and complex story.

Mersault engages the reader’s empathy in The Stranger, despite his seeming coldness, because the first-person narration brings the reader straight into Mersault’s mind. We understand his motivations from his own point of view, and, as a result, actions that might otherwise seem reprehensible begin to make sense to us.

First person peripheral refers to a first-person narrator who is not at the center of the story, but who is commenting instead on what s/he observes about other characters.

Third Person Limited

This perspective is quite close to first person, so close, in fact, that if it is done well the reader may forget that no “I” is present. Although the narrator speaks in third person (he/she/it), the narrator stays close to the mind of a single character.

Advantages & Disadvantages

This perspective has pretty much the same advantages and disadvantages of the first person narrator. It does, however, establish a bit more distance between reader and narrator than does the first person.

Omniscient

An omniscient narrator sees all, hears all, and knows all. There’s really nothing an omniscient narrator doesn’t have access to. This type of narrator can delve into the minds of all of the characters. An omniscient narrator also knows background, and can even comment on what will happen in the future.

An omniscient narrator sees all, hears all, and knows all. There’s really nothing an omniscient narrator doesn’t have access to. This type of narrator can delve into the minds of all of the characters. An omniscient narrator also knows background, and can even comment on what will happen in the future.

Examples of omniscient narration include the novels of Charles Dickens, the stories of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Advantages

It allows the writer to paint with a broad brush stroke.

Disadvantages

It establishes greater distance between the reader and the characters, so some of the emotional resonance may be either lost or more difficult to achieve.

You must be adept at moving back and forth among the different characters, while making it clear to whom a particular section, paragraph, thought, or event is occurring.

When to Use Omniscient Narration

If your novel has a large cast of characters and you want to be able to show their actions, thoughts, and conversations, the omniscient point of view is your best bet. It’s also good for intergenerational novels.

Second Person

While the second person isn’t terribly common, it bears mentioning.

The “you” to whom the narrator is speaking may be the reader as listener, the narrator’s alter ego (in which “you” refers to the narrator himself, as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City), or a particular third party (as in Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl,” where the “you” is the narrator’s daughter).

Disadvantages:

The second person lends itself more to short fiction than to novels. In long form fiction, second person can sound tiresome or even off-putting, and can feel very claustrophobic. It’s also difficult to maintain over a span of hundreds of pages. I recommend using second person only if you feel that it is the only way in which your particular story can be told.

What Point of View Are You Most Comfortable With?

Look back at the fragments you have written. Is there one point of view that runs through all or most of them?

What point of view came most naturally to you as you were writing? Why? This is often the point of view from which the story wants to be told. Think of the novels you enjoy. Are most of them limited third person, first person, omniscient? The kind of novel you are drawn to will offer clues for the kind of novel you want to write.

Setting encompasses not only place, but also time.

Where does your story take place?

When does your story happen?

To truly understand the depth of feeling that setting lends to a novel, read those writers whose names have become associated with a particular place. The following writers are such masters at setting that reading their books may be the best education you can get in how to write convincingly about place and time:

• Eudora Welty is Mississippi and the Deep South.
• Ron Rash writes so convincingly and heartbreakingly of Appalachia that his novels and stories have become one with the place. When one thinks of Appalachian literature, one thinks of Ron Rash.
• Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, a memoir of desolate poverty and abuse, forever linked her to Greenville, South Carolina.
• By the time I moved to San Francisco in the late nineties, I felt I knew the place by heart, thanks in part to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
• Paul Auster, who has published dozens of books, will forever be remembered for some of his earliest novels, The New York Trilogy.

While Ian McEwan writes primarily about England, his chilling novella The Comfort of Strangers derives much of its tension from the setting of Venice—the convoluted streets and hidden alleys are essential to the feeling of disorientation that leads to the protagonist’s undoing.

Nordic writers seem to have a particular gift for creating settings so stark and extreme that the setting itself becomes a major player in the novel. If you want to know how to do setting, read Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason (Arctic Chill) and prolific Swedish husband and wife team Sjöwall-Wahlöö (The Man on the Balcony, The Laughing Policeman).

On the more literary end of the spectrum, Pers Peterson’s Out Stealing Horses, named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2007, is set in the sometimes bleak, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful Norwegian countryside.

By the way, Peterson has said, “I do not plan” (sound familiar?) He compares making art to “carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward.”

For me, setting comes first. I know the setting before I know anything else about the story. Think about the last great book you read. Chances are, you had a strong idea of where you were early in the book.

A novel or story that opens with dialogue often leaves the reader scratching his head. Why? Because dialogue without a clear picture of who is speaking, or a sense of the speaker’s place, is disorienting. Setting grounds a story. When readers enter a book through a strong setting, they have a more complete sensory experience. Our senses drag us into the narrative. When you begin with setting—the dark alleys of Venice at night, the stark, frozen landscape of Norway—the readers’ senses and emotions are instantly engaged.

Remote as Mars

When writing setting, it helps to make the assumption that your audience has never been there. Think of your setting as a place as remote as Mars: you are describing this utterly foreign landscape to someone who has no idea of what the place is, what it looks like, smells like, what the air tastes like.

Speaking of Mars, I highly recommend Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles for further study on setting. Bradbury puts his character on Mars, and describes the place with such utter attention to realistic detail that we feel not only as though we are there, but as though being there, on Mars, isn’t really that strange at all.

Now, think of one of your strongest memories, from any place or time. Write about the setting where this memory takes place.

Write about the setting where this memory takes place.