I couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed. It was just too cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me. I was going to have to walk all the way to work.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is primarily told from Watson’s perspective

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises

Linda W. Yezak’s The Cat Lady’s Secret

Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants

An excellent way to convincingly carry off multiple first person — deliberately changing the perspective from chapter to chapter so that you have several characters each telling their part of the story.

This can be really fun to do, but must be done with care, or you will run into the same problems third person omniscient can lead to.
Often more effective when it is a first person narrator telling someone else’s story (when the narrator is not the main character). This allows a certain distance between the narrator and the events which is impossible for the main character.

The narrator can lie to the reader, either by commission or omission, because what can be told is limited to the character’s observation and thoughts, and any skewed perceptions s/he has will be passed on to the reader.

You only want readers to know the narrator’s motives.

Allows for a very tight reader identification with the narrator, as well as a more distinctive voice and is ideal for characterization.

• What to tell the reader who can only “know” the storyteller’s thoughts and feelings — no one else’s
  • I doesn’t know what the other characters are thinking or feeling
  • I can make guesses as to what s/he thinks the other characters are thinking — but NOT know
  • I / the reader can only know what other characters are thinking or feeling by their dialogue or actions
• What to omit
• What spin to put on events

There is no possible way for one character to know the thoughts of another, to know about things that happen when s/he is not around, or to know what s/he looks like.

You don’t know if the narrator is telling the truth.

You may want to look at unreliable narrator as well.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Allows you to hide thoughts and actions and create greater suspense.

Can be more powerful as a story, as it concentrates all the emotion and action into the experience of one person.

More subjective and emotional than indirect speech.

Encourages the reader to become emotionally involved with the characters.

“I hate to climb trees,” I retorted.

“I couldn’t help it. I was so cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me, that I didn’t want to get out of bed to wake Marian. She’s going to have to walk all the way to work.”

Donna Gephart’s Lily and Dunkin

Huntley Fitzpatrick’s The Boy Most Likely To

Robin Talley’s What We Left Behind

Harder to do well than dual 3rd person.

Restricts the plotline.

An almost automatic rejection slip from the publisher.

I was so cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me, that I hadn’t thought to wake Marian. I had to walk all the way to work.

Anthony Russell’s Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle

Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, where a young girl, having been killed, observes her family struggling to cope with her disappearance.

The adult character in Marisa de los Santos’ Love Walked In.

We missed the bus that morning because we couldn’t convince ourselves to get out of bed. It was just too cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up between us. We were going to have to walk all the way to work.

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to an End

Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs

Kate Walbert’s Our Kind

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

Can give a sense of inclusion with the group.

A group very rarely feels the same things and thinks the same things.

Very tricky to pull off.

No individual speaker is identified.

I was so cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me, that I didn’t think to wake Marian. She’s going to have to walk all the way to work.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

Jane Hamilton’s A Map Of The World

Keeping track of when and how to switch multiple narrators can be complicated.

Each POV narrator needs his/her own subplot.

I love to dig holes, unlike Helen.

I was so cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me, that I didn’t think to wake Marian. I going to have to walk all the way to work.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir

Hari Daoud’s Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur

Larry McMurtry’s Books

Makes your reader feel like they’re in the room with you — or sitting next to you in the cockpit, or huddled against you in the storm cellar.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

You want to keep the reader wondering what the character is thinking, or the character has a secret the author wants to keep from the readers.

You don’t want the main character to be aware of what is going on, but need a narrator who does have a good perspective.

There is no personal growth for the narrator.

Major focus is on the main character, not the narrator, even though the narrator has the POV

Narrator observes, participates, and reactions to action in which s/he is a part.

May confuse the reader as to who the real main character is and/or may make the narrator more difficult for the reader to relate to.

Events are more significant than the narrator

She missed the bus. She’d probably spent an hour arguing with herself that she really should get up. I could picture her there, curled up in bed with the cat next to her. Now she was going to have to walk to work.

By not having access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, makes the protagonist more mysterious.

Allows you to hold information back from the reader, against all first-person rules.

That Joan. My sister does love how cozy it is under her new comforter, with the cat curled up next to her. It’s so warm and snuggly under there that she tends to get lost in it. This morning, she forgot to wake Marian up, and she had to walk all the way to work.

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Rodger Ackroyd, is told by Dr. Shepherd and those Hercule Poirots that are told by Captain Hastings.

The narrator doesn’t know the thoughts of the main character except through dialogue or inference based on their mutual relationship.

I woke that morning to frost on the inside of the window and my nose feeling as if Jack Frost had touched me, my cheeks cool, but it was so cozy under the comforter, with the warmth and weight of cat curled up next to me, that I didn’t think to wake Marian. I didn’t envy her having to walk all the way to work in the freezing chill of that wind as I snuggled deeper into my bed.

Nuances and nothings become elevated in importance.

Aids in building anticipation, apprehension, dread, disconnect, cognitive dissonance, foreshadowing, fresh worry, unsettling ideas, faint hope, etc.

Authors can forget to come back up to the story.

I love how cozy it is under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to me. It never occurred to me that I should wake Marian up. Poor girl, she’s going to have to walk all the way to work.

William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey“

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc“

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

There is a danger of the writer putting too much of him-/herself into the novel.

I love digging holes, unlike Helen who never likes to get her hands dirty . . . then there’s Peterkins, some days he okay and other days he shouldn’t get out of bed. I wonder if I turned the stove off . . . oh, there it goes. I wonder where . . .

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked in a short interior monologue between a father and son

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files finds Dresden snarking away at himself in short bursts.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Shows strong emotions and is deeply involved in the story.

Resembles natural thought patterns with all the order and chaos of a character’s state of mind.

Often dependent upon symbols and motifs.

Demands more involvement of the reader in understanding a character’s traits and motivations.

She missed the bus. I don’t know why; probably couldn’t get out of bed. You know how warm it gets when you’re all curled up in the blankets. She had a cat, too, and somehow a cat makes it harder to get up in the morning. So she missed the bus, and would have to walk all the way to work (Point).

20 November. It was so hard to get up this morning. I was so cozy under my new down comforter, with the cat curled up next to me. I was so lost in the warmth that I didn’t think to wake Marian up. She ended up having to walk all the way to work on those icy sidewalks.

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones series

Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl

Provides readers with an intimate view of the character’s feelings and thoughts and develops a direct connection with the events without the interjection of the author.

Dear Louisa,
It was so hard to get up this morning. I was so cozy under the down comforter you gave me for my birthday with Max curled up next to me. I was so lost in my contentment that I didn’t think to wake Marian up. She ended up having to walk all the way to work on those icy sidewalks. She’ll be furious with me when she finally gets home.

Aphra Behn’s Love Letters of a Nobleman to His Sister

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Provides readers with an intimate view of characters’ feelings and thoughts and develops a direct connection with the events through letters without interference of the author.

Presenting events from different viewpoints gives the story verisimilitude and dimensions.

I’m sure she didn’t want to get out of bed. I couldn’t say if the cat is the attraction or if she had company. She surely wasn’t thinking of Marian missing that bus. I don’t know how Marian’ll get to work now.

Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita misleads readers

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club has an unnamed narrator who eventually makes the reader question everything s/he has read

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado‘s Montresor never does explain why he feels so insulted by Fortunado

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby hypocritical Nick Carraway only knows what unreliable others tell him and his own inner conflicts affects his judgement

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn‘s innocence causes him to misinterpret events

C.S. Lewis’ narrator in The Screwtape Letters is simply not someone I’d trust

In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the maid, Nelly Dean, loves to embellish what she sees, and when she tells Lockwood her stories, he believes they’re the truth which causes him to misinterpret.
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we can’t trust Gulliver.

In Bruce Sterling’s Globalhead: “Dori Bangs”, the narrator makes it clear that he is unreliable.

Can give readers a chance to offer their own interpretations.

You only want to build tension, suspense, fear.

You know how those hobbits are, always drinking and eating. Totally averse to adventure. Why I suspect that Frodo would never get up out of bed unless it were to eat and drink.

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with Holden Caulfield

Voltaire’s “Candide“

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales series

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler

Such a lazy thing, that Joan. Just lying there under her comforter, the cat curled up next to her. She was too caught up in her own contentment to think of waking Marian who was going to have to walk all the way to work just because Joan didn’t think.

Can intensify action and suspense.

May be unreliable as s/he has not had time to reflect on the conflict.

You couldn’t convince yourself to get out of bed. The comforter made a cozy nest around you, with the cat curled up next to you. Now you’re going to have to walk all the way to work.

Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Misty Copeland’s Firebird

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller

Charles Stross’ Halting State

Nor can that character know about things that happen when s/he is not around or know the thoughts of another. You can’t convincingly include scenes that don’t include your perspective character — no matter how important they are.

If you choose to tell a story in second person, it is very important to make it clear to the reader who is being addressed, so they can trust in the teller and accept the story as given.

“Just because you couldn’t convince yourself to get out of bed with that comforter making such a cozy nest around you, that cat curled up next to you. Well think again, for you’re going to have to walk all the way to work.”

Supports or refutes narrative commentary.

Often quickens the narrative pace.

I’m sure she couldn’t convince herself to get out of bed. It was just too cozy under the comforter, with that cat curled up next to her. She’s going to have to walk all the way to work.

POV is from the gal who climbed the tree, but it can occasionally shift to other characters.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford

It’s easier to write in third person when writing one’s own personal experiences as it lets the writer distance him/herself from the events. This distance can also help the writer change the events to make them more dramatic.

Allows more description and observation of the characters.

Allows more characters to think and feel.

He’s concerned about having enough firewood for the winter. Fortunately, George is always chopping trees down.

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: Modern Essays in Criticism

Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus series

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Very useful for cliffhanger scenes: just as a character falls into a dangerous situation, SCENE CUT. Leave that character hanging on the edge of a pit, while you explore another character’s side of the story, until that character is in danger and . . . SCENE CUT, back to the first character, where you left him about to fall onto a shrub that breaks his fall before he finds himself in some other danger (Pattison).

Allows for more settings, action in different places, and more of the characters’ internal lives.

Make sure each of your characters is different enough so that the reader doesn’t confuse him or her with a different character, each with original and distinct traits, very different backgrounds, jobs, ages, personalities, etc.

Do not use this technique to recap the same scene by using a different character. An extreme example of this is Todd McCaffrey’s Dragon’s Kin, Dragon’s Fire, and Dragon’s Time in which he has written entire books that do this.

Can be confused with third person, third person limited, or third person omniscient.

She arrived panting at the bus stop when the bus was already long gone. She looked at her watch and swore. “Damn warm blankets,” she said. “Damn warm, purring cat.” She sighed and walked along the sidewalk in the direction of her office building.

Provide explicit, observable details.

Emphasizes characters acting out their feelings observably through their actions and dialogue.

Internal thoughts, if expressed, are given voice through an aside or soliloquy.

Does not allow the author to reveal the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of the characters.

The narrator can:

• NOT provide background information about the setting, situation, or motives for the character(s)
• NOT access the character’s thoughts

Can come across as cold.

Is only sure about what is related to his chosen character.

Although the narrator is not a character in the story, his/her opinions and judgments are those of the character s/he’s representing and can create a bond of empathy between character and reader.

Always wiser than a first-person narrator as s/he can describe his/her chosen hero from both inside and outside perspectives.

What the narrator can tell about the remaining characters is subjective and based on conjectures.

Joan was so cozy under her comforter, with the cat curled up next to her, that she didn’t think to wake Marian. Nor did she much care that Marian was going to have to walk all the way to work.

Lee Benoit’s Someplace in This World stories

Claire Davis’ Labors of the Heart

George Orwell’s 1984

Richard Wright’s Native Son

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

Retains the intimacy and focus of first person POV.

The narrator can provide insight that is out of the character’s reach.

The narrator can use a voice or style of writing different from or similar to the POV character.

Inherits the limitations of first person POV.

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series

Can start a scene in omniscient and descend into the deeper single-focused POV, or you can
alternate different characters’ POV passages (as long as you stay in each
POV for the whole passage).

Has the immediacy and intimacy of stream-of-consciousness, with the advantage of being much more readable and compatible with other POV choices.

Language is much more active: Helen felt her stomach churn becomes Helen’s stomach churned.

Highlights more of your voice.

Easier to create three-dimensional characters.

Highly subjective with a narrow focus, as it is tightly confined to each character — what s/he sees, feels, thinks, or knows — and must be written in that character’s speaking style and language.

She spent nearly an hour arguing with herself about getting up. You have to be awake now, it’s a work day. But it’s so warm. Just a few more minutes. You’ll be late. I don’t care. Yes you do. Curled up there with the cat, it was so hard to move, so warm and cozy. And so she missed the bus, and swore, and told herself how stupid she was. Then she started the long walk to work.

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series

George Eliot’s Middlemarch

E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (Read what Kent has to say about the story’s POV.)

Works especially well in stories with complex plots or large settings where we must use multiple viewpoints to tell the story, as you can easily switch from one character to another.

Readers learns about several characters from their actions, dialogue, AND internal thoughts, and so knows their motivations and agenda.

The reader chooses which character to trust more.

Be very careful when you switch perspective and how you handle it, or your readers will become very confused. There must be a reason for the change, and that it’s easy for your readers to follow that change.

As the emotionally coldest POV, it can be difficult for your readers to form any close emotional ties with the characters due to your jumping from character to character.

It can also be a very confusing POV to keep track of your characters’ points-of-view:

• Confusing omniscient with head-hopping can be avoided by giving each character their own chapter in which you can write their thoughts and feelings
• Don’t offer too many interpretations of an event(s), as in “real life”, each individual has their own perspective on what has occurred, which can confuse your readers

It can, however, cause the reader to feel uncertain about whom to identify with in the story. If you are going to skip from one point-of-view to another, start doing so early in the story, before the reader has fully identified with the original point-of-view.

Can be confused with third person, third person limited, or multiple third person.

Too easy to fall into telling the story, rather than showing.

Can slow the narrative pace.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

George Eliot

Leo Tolstoy

Karen Robards’ Sea Fire

“Oh, yes, well I am sorry. There only seem to be enough chairs for three.”

“And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about the insertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be.” – George Saintsbury, introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910)

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” – William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Martin Luther’s and his Ninety-Five Theses is one of the earliest examples of social commentary in his protesting against the practices of the Catholic Church.

Jonathan Swift‘s adventurous tales exposed and decried the appalling poverty in Ireland at the time, which was viewed as the fault of the British government.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 explore the future progression of society.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird looks at racial issues.

Thomas More’s Utopia satirizes the values of 16th century Britain.

It allows a voice without the complication of using an existing character.

1. Sentimentality: The author’s editorial rhetoric tries to evoke an emotional response that the story’s events cannot evoke by themselves — something like a cheerleader trying to win applause for a team that doesn’t deserve it. A particular problem for the “editorial commentator”.
2. Mannerism: The author’s persona seems more important than the story itself, and the author keeps reminding us of his or her presence through stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, or outright editorializing about the characters and events of the story.
   • However, if the point-of-view is first person, and the narrator is a person given to stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, and so on, then the problem disappears; the persona is simply that of a rather egotistical individual who likes to show off
3. Frigidity: The persona’s excessive objectivity trivializes the events of the story, suggesting that the characters’ problems need not be taken seriously.

Jane Austen

Gustave Flaubert

Horacio Quiroga

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Allows you to convey the character’s words more directly than in normal indirect, as devices such as interjections and psycho-ostensive expressions like curses and swearwords can be used that cannot be normally used within a subordinate clause.

Mirrors the way each person experiences the world.

Relatively detached, more rational, and more tolerant of disagreement.

She arrived panting at the bus stop only to see a far-off glimpse of the back of the bus, moving quickly away. She glanced at her watch. It was already half past eight. “Damn warm blankets,” she said, thinking of how it had felt to be curled up and warm in bed. She had argued with herself for an hour about how she should get going. She had stayed in bed so long she didn’t even have time for a shower, and now she’d missed the bus. It was the warm cat curled up next to her that had made it so hard to get out of bed. “Damn warm, purring cat,” she said, and headed along the sidewalk to work.

Gabriel in James Joyce’s The Dead

Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Young Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child

James Joyce’s “The Dead“

Karen Joy Fowler’s Black Glass: “The View From Venus”

It’s easier to create suspense and mystery since there is only one character that everything filters through, which limits what the readers know.

You want the reader to connect strongly with the main character, to trust his/her version of events more. And makes the story more personal.

A good choice when:

• A single main character experiences all the important plot events
• There are minimal diversions or side journeys in a mostly linear plot
• The outer events of your plot matter, i.e., you couldn’t get the same effect by switching a plane crash into a train crash, yet those events are closely tied to the character’s inner growth
• Offers a balance between a plot-driven story and a character-driven story

The reader learns about the main character from actions, dialogue, AND internal thoughts.

Can be confused with third person, multiple third person, or third person omniscient.

It was pure laziness on Joan’s part. She so envied the cat for its easy life, and when she was lying there, so cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to her, that she decided she didn’t want to leave her warm nest. She’d always thought that Marian should take responsibility for waking herself up, and now, she thought with a laugh, Marian was going to have to walk all the way to work.

Poor Marian. She was furious with Joan for not waking her up in time to catch the bush. She hating having to walk to work, simply because Joan was so selfish as to want to stay cozy under the comforter, with the cat curled up next to her. Joan, on the other hand, felt Marian should take responsibility for getting herself up.

Mike Resnick

Keeps up the tension and your readers on their toes.

Very helpful for observing the growth of the relationship between hero and heroine.

Allows the author to broaden the scope of who should be included in the story, from main characters to secondary ones, with elements presented through different perspectives.

Keeps the pace moving.

Adds a richness to the story that is hard to get to with a first person POV, by including side scenes (that contribute to the main plotline), allowing you to introduce information about secondary characters that the main character doesn’t know.

Must write separate scenes from the viewpoints of each character and stay in the one character’s head for the entire scene and maintain proper POV rules, such as not relaying to the reader what the thoughts of the opposite character are.

Switching back and forth too quickly between characters can make the prose confusing — stick to one POV per scene. (Frequently confused with head-hopping.)
Using too many POVs can confuse your reader, the plot, the pacing, etc.

Janet Evanovich

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park used his character, Ian Malcolm, to express views on catastrophic system failure.

Charles Bukowski uses the protagonist, Henry Chinaski, used in a number of his writings.

Clive Cussler frequently inserts himself into the Dirk Pitt and NUMA Files stories.

Leo Tolstoy

Alexander Pushkin uses different dialects throughout his stories.

William Wordsworth

If you decide to hop heads within a chapter or scene, make it very obvious that the character “speaking” has changed. I do love it when an author inserts a text separator of some kind!

If you find yourself shifting heads more than two or three times in a scene, take a step back to see which character will benefit the scene the most, and then rewrite the scene to hold that one person’s POV.

An easy rule of thumb is to try to stick to one POV for one scene.

Jars the reader and breaks the intimacy with the scene’s main character.

Salman Rushdie

Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Ramona Ausubel’s A Guide to Being Born: “Chest of Drawers”

The American political drama show House of Cards also uses this technique frequently to let the viewers know what the main character, Frank Underwood, is thinking and planning.

The first page of Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions

Phillip K. Dick’s VALIS

Felipe Alfau’s Locos: A Comedy of Gestures and Chromos

Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius