Point of view might be the single most common issue I address in my editing work. Let’s start with a simple definition: point of view identifies who is telling the story and how it is told.

If you are one of my clients and we’ve discussed POV, then you’ve almost certainly heard me use the camera analogy. Think of POV as one of those little GoPro cameras you can strap onto your forehead or a drone or maybe even a cat. You, the author, can ideally see the whole world of your novel. Your readers, however, can only see what you choose to show them via that POV camera of yours.

Let’s stick with this analogy as we look more closely at the two major variations of POV: omniscient and limited.

What is omniscient point of view?

This point of view is like strapping your camera to a drone, with the drone playing the role of the narrator. The narrator might hover above a scene to show us the whole landscape, or establish the scene through a kind of panning shot, moving quickly across a wide area. Or the narrator might zoom in on a specific character or characters to show us their actions or thoughts.

Omniscient narration was the dominant style in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Think about Jane Austen’s arch narrator making pronouncements about characters or Charles Dickens’s narrator showing us the fog traveling through the London streets before taking us into a particular house and showing us all the inhabitants. We get a sense of an invisible presence that is with us throughout the novel, guiding our expectations and interpretations. Sometimes this narrator might even speak directly to readers, like the “dear reader” references in Jane Eyre.

By and large, twenty-first-century writers have moved away from omniscient narration. There are a lot of theories about why, but I think Christopher Castellani gets it right in The Art of Perspective:

“I think it’s safe to say that the consensus on the matter is that, in Western literature, the omniscient narrator is too old-fashioned for a fractured world that distrusts authority, has abandoned God, and has little faith in any absolute truth put forth by an individual. Over the past century, as fiction itself has ceded much of its authority to film, television, and the Internet, the credibility of the writer—the novelist in particular—has grown increasingly suspect. The question goes: Who is she to speak for anyone or anything other than herself and her own experience?”

For omniscient narration to be successful, the reader needs to get the sense that the narrator—that drone pilot—is in absolute control and using their POV camera with intention to draw the reader’s attention to certain aspects of the story. It’s much more difficult to do than it appears and can easily devolve into the dreaded head-hopping—a term editors use to describe the sensation of being whisked too quickly from one character’s perspective to another.

Writers with this problem often want to give readers access to multiple character viewpoints but haven’t successfully developed that external, invisible narrator—the drone pilot. Without the drone pilot, the effect is of characters tossing the camera back and forth to one another in a dizzying blur.

What is limited point of view?

In a limited point of view, the camera is strapped to the forehead of one character, and we see the action through that character’s eyes and sensibility. We only see/hear/understand what that character is seeing and we can only have access to that one character’s internal thoughts at any given time, although you can deploy multiple POV characters across the course of the novel.

Now, let’s talk about techniques that will deepen your reader’s identification with your point-of-view character.

Should you use first-person or third-person point of view?

First, let’s talk about one choice you may have already made instinctually for your story: whether to use first-person (I) or third-person (he/she/they) point of view. If you’ve completed a large chunk of your draft, making a radical change to your POV would entail a lot of work, but sometimes it can be the missing ingredient that brings your book to life.

The advantage of first-person narration is that it brings the reader as close as we can possibly be to the main character, especially if you pair it with present tense rather than past tense. We feel like we are living alongside that character, experiencing the action right along with them. If it’s done well, the I collapses into our own I as we read. First-person present can be an excellent choice for an action-focused story like a thriller. For a book with more emphasis on introspection and emotion, first-person past may be a better choice because it allows your character to reflect on the action of the story from a later, wiser vantage point.

The advantage of third-person narration, on the other hand, is that you gain more flexibility. While first-person narration is deep almost by definition, third-person narration can be deep if you are zeroed in on a specific experience or emotion or it can be more shallow for a setting description or action summary if you want to quicken the pace. When you introduce multiple POV characters, you also win the bonus tool of dramatic suspense: when one character knows something significant that another character does not know.

It’s helpful to think about these POV choices as having different numbers of layers between characters and readers. Compare these formulations:

• First person present: {I narrator = I character} reader

• First person past: {present-day I narrator {past I character}} reader

• Third person past: {invisible narrator {POV character 1}, {POV character 2}} reader

See how only first-person present offers a single layer between character and reader?

I firmly believe that all novels, whatever their genre, are to some extent mystery novels, with readers in the role of sleuth. What is this book telling us? What will happen to these characters? So when you are choosing your POV flavor, think of your story as a mystery: Is it more important to you to have your reader feel the story alongside the protagonist? Then first-person POV might be the best choice. Or do you want your reader to have the responsibility to decode the story from the clues provided by the narrator and one or more characters? Then third-person might be more effective.

How to deepen point of view at the sentence level

Second, let’s talk about specific, sentence-level revisions you can make to deepen POV, whichever flavor you are using:

• Make details as specific and concrete as possible. Use the technique of synecdoche, allowing a part to stand in for the whole. Not “the wind blew hard” but “the wind threatened to snap the stem of the sunflower Mary had tied to the porch railing.” (Yep, that’s a callback to last week’s Thing of Joy. Click it again—you know you want to.)

• Give us direct access to your POV character’s five senses: what do they see, hear, feel, smell, taste? (Of course, choose the best sensory details for each scene—you don’t want to overload readers with details either.)

• Strip out filter words like heard, saw, felt that call attention to the separation between the reader and character rather than closing the gap. If the POV is clear and deep in each scene, readers can assume that it is the POV character doing the seeing, without it being specified.

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