Choosing Point of View

Choosing your perspective:

I've been writing a series on how to make your writing more literary.  This particular step is critical no matter how literary you want your piece to be.  From personal experience, I can tell you that you want to choose a point of view from which to write your piece as early in the process as possible.  After I'd written two novels in one perspective, I was told by multiple people that it did not work and should be from another point of view.  Making the change with an entire manuscript is tedious and frustrating because it's one of those changes that can't be easily done with a "replace all" kind of option.  There are just too many I's and me's that have nothing to do with perspective.  It's, therefore, most critical that you make this decision quickly, preferably before one word appears on the page. 

Third-Person Omniscient:

The most archaic option--and one that very rarely works anymore--is 3rd-person omniscient.  This is where you write from outside the text and know everything about everyone.  If you read a book from twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years or more, chances are, that is the perspective the author is using.  This is the kind where the narrator can tell you about what this character is thinking then what another is thinking then what another is thinking with the detachment of someone who knows but isn't part of the story.  This has become increasingly rare in modern books.  Readers aren't used to it and tend not to like it.  It's fairly impersonal and emotionally distant.  A lot of great works of classical literature are written using this perspective, but I wouldn't recommend trying it now.  You may have a hard time getting published.  

Third-Person Limited:

The most common perspective is third-personal limited.  Think Harry Potter.  Your narrator follows one character around and tells you what he or she thinks, feels, and experiences.  Most modern literature is in either this perspective or first-person because it's personal, humanizing, and easy to relate to. There are two major options here.  You can either stick with one perspective only--like the Harry Potter books--or you can do what writers call "head hopping" from perspective to perspective.  If you're using third person limited with just one character, you have to find a way to show anything that goes on outside his immediate experience from his point of view.  J.K. Rowling does this by showing what Voldemort or others are doing via visions and dreams.  Harry doesn't personally view these events, but he knows what is going on through supernatural means.  If your story is not supernatural, you could use something like news, social media, phone calls, rumors, or some other device to show what is going on outside his immediate experience.  

If you're going to use limited perspective but through multiple character's eyes, you'll solve the problem of the limited knowledge but create a host of other things to consider.  You'll want to give careful consideration to how head hopping will occur and how many characters you want to use.  You're still showing each character's perspective, and only their perspective, at any given time.  A big no-no is to hop to someone else's head and back again in the same section, chapter, or--worse yet--paragraph or sentence, e.g. "She looked at him and saw how handsome he was, and he looked back and saw how beautiful she was."   It's a sure sign of a novice to hop heads in the middle of a paragraph.  It often takes away all sense of suspense when you know everything about everyone all the time.   I read a romance novel like that, and there was no mystery or romance to it.  I knew everything everyone was thinking all the time.  It's best to keep one chapter or section to one narrator.  Some people can successfully hop to stranger's heads for just one section then back to main characters' heads then off to some bystander's head.  However, it's usually clearest and most sensical to a reader if you choose a finite number of heads--two or three, maybe four--and just alternate sections, possibly chapters.   It's usually best as well to choose the character who has the most emotional stake in the events.  If it doesn't work one way, you can always rewrite that segment and see if another character's eyes improve an important segment. 

First-Person: 

The last common point of view is first-person.  This can be even more emotionally charged and intense than even the most personal third-person narrative.  You're actually in that person's skull for the duration of the story.  Everything is through his/her eyes alone.  This limits the writer in the same way third-person limited with one narrator does but to a greater degree.  The reader only knows what the narrator knows.  It's possible to write this kind of perspective in such a way as to show your character is unreliable, but that can be tricky.  If successful, however, you can truly impress even the most discerning reader.  In order to figure out how it's done, it's usually best to read several first-person unreliable narrations to see how the author clues the reader in that the narrator can't be trusted.  Another limiting factor is this rarely works well if you have multiple protagonists.  I tried it, and it didn't work for me.  However, The Help pulls it off to critical acclaim.  Anything I say here has exceptions.  These are just rules of thumb.  

Before you launch fully into writing a novel, I'd experiment with perspectives.  Research which is the best match for your story and your characters.  Try one for a chapter.  If it's not working, rewrite that chapter.  Don't be me.  Figure out what works before it's too late.    

Imagery

I've been writing about what makes a piece literary.  One important literary device is careful use of sensory imagery.  Imagery should be used to emphasize and elaborate on significant moments.  If you describe every little thing as your character walks down a hallway, your reader will be so tired of overwhelming amounts of detail that he or she won't be very interested in your story by the time you take them into the room with the actual murder victim and start describing that.  Say an author wants to make sure his reader doesn't miss a moment.  He figures the more description, the better readers will like it.  So he writes, "The shaggy, smelly, dark man with a slow, sluggish, tired trudge carried his large, heavy, leather-shod feet through a cluttered, long, cherry wood hallway and through the tall, brown, oversized door." He may not realize it's just too much.  I have read a book recently that was descriptive as to be what writers call "purple." The author described every moment of the entire book with such detail that very little happened.  I found it boring.  If an author occasionally writes a paragraph that is lavish with detail, it's okay if that scene is important.  It would be better if the author simply wrote description sparingly.  For instance, if that same author wrote the following, it would be much better.  "The shaggy man walked through a cluttered hallway to a wooden door."  The reader gets the idea without being so tired of detail that she's stopped reading.  

It's also possible to go too far the other way, to write in such a spare fashion so as to bore readers on the other end.  Such writing shows the bare facts of the events but does not transport or take the reader there.  Even spare literary authors like Ernest Hemingway use some description.  He said of his description, "I take great pains with my work, pruning and revising with a tireless hand. I have the welfare of my creations very much at heart. I cut them with infinite care, and burnish them until they become brilliant. What many another writer would be content to leave in massive proportions, I polish into a tiny gem." And that is the key to great, literary writing: balance.  You need description, but it should be carefully crafted and trimmed so as to be just enough but not too much.  Now go and impress the world with your careful detail.