Four Viewpoints (Part 17 of 17)

Here are my concluding words of advice about POV.

1. Use first person if you want the entire book to have a limited, personal, and individual perspective.

2. If you want high reader identification with your character, first person is a good choice. Or go with limited third person.

3. If you want to describe your character from the outside, where you tell us "she thought" or "he said," limited third person works well.

4. If you want to experiment and can justify it, choose second person as a modified first person.

5. If you want perspective so readers can glimpse the attitude and feelings of several characters and grasp the plot from different outlooks or perceptions, the omniscient or unlimited third person might work for you.

If you're unsure, write a page or two in each POV. As you look at them and compare what you want to accomplish, ask yourself, "Which of these POVs would be the most satisfying to me?"

You have to decide the POV that works best for you.

Four Viewpoints (Part 15 of 17)

Recently a few authors have tried and gotten away with the totally omniscient POV. For emerging writers, we suggest avoiding this POV because:

1. Switching POV within a scene jars careful readers. It shatters reality because none of us is omniscient.

2. Such pauses in the narrative flow tend to tell readers what they need to show them.

3. The POV continually shifts. The writing tends to become more impersonal because readers don't identify with and focus primarily on one character.

4. Readers aren't always sure who is the major character. Recently I read A Grain of Wheat, written in 1967, which is considered a modern African classic by Ngui wa Thionog'o. The back of the book reads, "Set in 1963, A Grain of Wheat tells the story of Kenya on the verge of . . . independence. The novel focuses on Mugo. . . "

Mugo? I liked the novel immensely, but another character, Gikonyo, seemed as much the focus of the book until I read the last 30 pages. I also liked Gikonyo much better than Mugo. I could argue that the author would have been wiser to go with shifting third-person limited POVs, but it was his choice.

4. The omniscient is difficult to pull off and keep readers with you. When well written, readers can enjoy all perspectives, but it's risky.

Avoid the omniscient POV
unless there's a compelling reason and
you're positive you can do it well.

Four Viewpoints (Part 14 of 17)

In the third-person omniscient POV, the author takes a panoramic view of the characters and events. The story doesn't unfold through the eyes of a single person, but we become part of an invisible, all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. This is also called the God view. It means you can know anything. This point of view works best in a story with a complicated plot and multiple characters.

In the omniscient POV, the author "drops in" on any of the characters. You can write from the hero’s perspective in one scene, from the heroine’s POV in the next, and then to the villain’s. You may vary viewpoints as often as you choose.

In the nineteenth century, those now called the classic authors often wrote from an omniscient viewpoint. They skipped from head to head of their characters within a scene. Often they stopped the action to comment on the people, and some would even pause to say, “And now, gentle reader” or “Pity him, dear reader, who thinks of such evil.”

Years ago I read this someplace (and forgot to keep the reference, for which I apologize):

Humpty Dumpty didn’t realize it, but soon he would have a great
fall, and the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be
able to put him together again.

(Humpty didn’t realize what was happening, so we’re not in his POV. We’re godlike because we know what’s going to happen even though the poor fellow didn't.)

Omniscient POV is a long-established style of writing;
However, most writers stayed within a limited POV.