shakespearemom

I have found, as I’ve been working on my novels, that point of view is the key to their development or their downfall. It’s rather similar to how I teach my college writing students to approach writing an introduction to their essays: if it’s hard, it’s not the right beginning; if it’s easy to write, and just flows out, then it’s more likely to be the introduction you want to use.

Point of view isn’t much discussed in the writing books I’ve perused, but it’s more important than we might think. I’ve read books with narrators that have unlimited omniscience–where the narrator knows everything and gets into the minds of every single character–and I find such narration completely annoying. Because I can see what each person is thinking, I don’t know who to attach myself to…I can’t figure out who the main character is. I know that someone is bored while someone else is hot for her, while someone else is watching and thinking he wants them both killed.

Most third-person narration written today is limited omniscient, if it’s omniscient at all. That means an author expresses the thoughts of only one character–two at most–and readers know exactly who the main character is because that character is the one they know the most about. A lot of the fiction written today, especially in the YA sector, is first-person, where a character tells his or her own story. That’s convenient, except that the author needs to be careful not to break the rules and offer up action or thoughts which the main character couldn’t possibly know.

With my own novels, I follow a few automatic rules, one of them being narrative: I will NEVER write using unlimited omniscience. NEVER. (Other rules include not writing about writers, not writing plays about theatre people, not making everyone automatically rich, not writing without an ending in mind, etc.).

But I’ve also found that each novel seems to need a specific point of view. I’d written my first novel–at least, it’s first draft–and decided to experiment with writing it in first person. But the novel simply didn’t work. It refused to be written that way.

My second novel went less than five pages as third-person, before I switched it to first person. And my character told her own story. This third novel, which I began several years ago, but abandoned, has a VERY interesting plot (though I am biased). Yet I tried, again, to write it third-person, and it simply wasn’t working. I wrote 16 chapters of it that way, but it wouldn’t work. Then, yesterday, I realized I needed to switch to first person…and I wrote five pages in less than an hour. I found the easy switch, and now my character is telling her own story in her own way.

I’m not advocating first-person over third-person, not by a long shot. But each novel is best written in a certain point of view. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” would not have the same meaning if it weren’t written in third-person (plural) point-of-view. I can’t wait to see how my novel re-develops, now that my point-of-view has changed.

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