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Q&A Does point of view matter drastically?

There are better and worse ways to do this. It can be difficult and needlessly confusing to have multiple first-person narrators --difficult to give them authentically different voices, and confus...

posted 6y ago by Chris Sunami‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T09:43:43Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38616
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Chris Sunami‭ · 2019-12-08T09:43:43Z (almost 5 years ago)
 **There are better and worse ways to do this.** It can be difficult and needlessly confusing to have multiple first-person narrators --difficult to give them authentically different voices, and confusing to the reader. "Close" third-person narration, which closely follows one specific character and his or her point of view, has many of the same problems with POV switching.

But the older style of third-person narration, with an "omniscient" narrator, who knows everything, is a stand-in for the author, is not any given character in the book, and has a "god's eye" perspective on the events, can accommodate following multiple characters relatively easily and gracefully. The basic trade-off is this -- **the closer you are to any given character, the more disorienting it will be to switch away from him or her.** So your best move might be to give yourself a little distance from your characters --describe them more externally than internally, more like a movie than like a diary.

With that said, the main concern I would have is that the omniscient narrator is somewhat out of style right now. Using one may give your book a bit of an old fashioned feel, since modern readers tend to find the technique a bit artificial and unrealistic. However, these trends change all the time. It might be the right time for the pendulum to swing back.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-08-31T13:26:00Z (about 6 years ago)
Original score: 4