I…YOU…HE/SHE

Choosing the person who should tell the story in a novel,

is essential both for the reader and the writer.

It’s often called point of view….or POV…. and it governs how the story is told, what the reader can see and how much information the narrator is able to reveal.

There’s often a tendency for early-career writers to write in the first person….the ‘I’ of the sentence, and that’s fine for deep introspection of the hopes and desires of the narrator.

But it’s limiting, as we’ll see.

So to understand these perspectives, let’s discuss the ‘Person’ who’s telling the story…….the Narrator.

There are three possible narrators for a novel.

First Person is the ‘I’ of a book, and sentences sound like this….”I went to the front door, and there stood…”

Or “We all joined the boat after it landed and…..”

This is the narrator identifying him-, her-, or themselves and telling the story to the reader in his own words.

Second Person is “you”. That’s when the narrator is addressing the reader directly. “You are sitting in a chair, alone in a room. You hate being alone, but now that your partner has left you for good, you resent that you have to fend for yourself…..”

Only the most seasoned and experienced of writers can carry this off with any degree of style. It’s almost impossible to write a complete book in this way, so let’s not even talk about it.

Third Person is the narrator as storyteller. There are various types of third person narrator, but let’s stick with the most common. It’s the Omniscient Narrator. He or she is the narrator who sees everything and can move through time and space; often the omniscient narrator knows far more about the action of the book, than the characters.

You’ll immediately recognize the style from a paragraph like this…..”Lucy stood at the door for a moment and studied the room. She saw with immense relief that the person next to whom she wanted to sit had an empty seat beside him. She walked across the floor, acknowledging the greetings of her colleagues, and smiled to James as she sat down.”

OK, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of the two most common voices used in writing a novel?

Let’s look at first person. If your narrator is one of the major characters, the person around whom the entire book revolves, then a first person voice will enable you, the writer, to minutely examine the thoughts and feelings of your character. You’re inside the character’s head, and you can write precisely how he or she feels, how their emotions are making them act and react, what they truly think of other characters, what they thought in the past and how they might react in the future, and how they’re truly feeling when they react to a situation.. For instance….

“I had two ten dollar bills in my wallet and only bought five dollars worth of gas, yet the only note I came home with was a five dollar bill. My heart sank as I realised I’d inadvertently lost the other note. The two notes must have somehow stuck together. I could kick myself for my carelessness. How am I going to explain to my wife that I’ve lost the money for food for the family?”

The disadvantage of using first person to tell a story, is that it limits you to what your narrator can see, hear, feel, and know directly. It doesn’t limit your narrator’s thoughts, just the ability to know what’s going on in the world beyond. Your narrator can’t look into another room and record what’s being said; can’t know that as he and his partner are having dinner, the police are gathering in the street and are about to break in the door and arrest him.

A first person is both an expansive way of writing the deep inner thoughts of a central character, and limiting as a way of describing what’s happening in the world beyond your narrator because it draws a boundary fence around possible actions.

So now let’s look at Third Person Omniscient Narrators. Most modern books, especially thrillers and adventure and detective stories, are written in this voice. This is the voice of the writer standing aside from and above the action, describing in place and time what’s happening not only to, but also beyond the landscape of the central characters. Third Person enables a writer to move back and forth in time, as well as in place. Something like this…..

“As Jack and Mary slept in their apartment in New York, Dominic was pacing the streets of San Francisco, wondering whether to quit his job and return home as a failure, or pretend he was happy on the West Coast while he tried to find another job. Two years earlier, everything had seemed so promising; but then Dominic met money-hungry Francesca, and his life began to go to pot…..”

Neither one voice, nor the other, is the ‘right’ voice. It entirely depends on how you want to write your novel and the characters who will populate the pages. Perhaps the best rules of thumb are these:

• If your novel has action limited in time and place and characters who circle the protagonist who’s telling the story, and is more about an individual, then First Person might be a suitable narrator

• If your novel has wide ranging action and many characters traversing a broad landscape, then it would seem to suit a Third Person omniscient voice.