Selecting a point-of-view (POV) is one of the most fundamental–and often overlooked–choices an author must make when writing a novel. Put simply, the POV is what voice you use to tell your story–first, second, or third. The first- and third-person voices are the most common in modern fiction.
First person: I did
Second person: You did
Third person: He/she did
Third person can further be split into two sub-categories: close third and omniscient third. Close third is very similar to first person, except using “he/she” instead of “I.” In close third, you get a strong sense of the main character’s thoughts and feelings, even though that main character isn’t telling the story. Omniscient third can be a little trickier because it comes in mutliple variations. Many old fairy tales are told in omniscient third. If you think about the famous opening line, “Once upon a time,” you’ll understand what I mean. These stories were told by a colorless, featureless, personality-less narrator. Sometimes in omniscient third, the narrator is a character who remains largely off-screen, like in The Book Thief, which is narrated by death.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each POV. First person allows your audience to best get inside the head of your main character, and to experience the action in a way that feels most personal. One of the major limitations of first person is that it limits you to information that your character knows. If your character doesn’t know it, your audience doesn’t either. In addition, if your character wouldn’t think it, you have to be careful about expressing it from this character’s POV. For instance, if your first scene opens on a fifth-grader walking to school on their last day, that character probably wouldn’t be thinking about how many kids attend the school, or how the school was renamed when the character was in second grade, etc.
The advantage of third person, and particularly omniscient third, is that it allows you to construct a narrative in which your readers know things your main character doesn’t, even within the confines of a single scene. As an example, if your main character is a detective searching for the murder weapon, an omniscient narrator would know that it’s in the same room as the detective, but that he’s looking in the wrong place. In some cases, this type of information can be useful for raising tension.
A similar effect can be achieved by using multiple first person POVs, but there are limits to this as well. Modern conventions dictate that head-hopping, or jumping from one POV character’s head straight to another, is bad practice. Typically, you want to divide different POV characters into different sections or chapters. In addition, POV characters should be used judiciously. If 98% of your story is told from one character’s POV, and there’s crucial information you want to convey from another character’s POV, just don’t. That’s considered lazy writing because it was done solely for authorial convenience. POV characters have to justify their existence. If the only reason for a POV character to be a POV character is for a one-off portrayal of information, you need to find another way to convey that information to your audience.
For Dissection, I chose to use close third.
