Point of view, the decision that changes everything

There's a choice that many beginners completely underestimate, treating it almost like a technical detail to sort out later — and yet it determines the fate of a novel more than anything else: point of view. First person or third, single or choral, limited or omniscient. It isn't a neutral stylistic option; it's the lens through which everything else in the story is filtered, and it's nearly impossible to correct properly after the fact if the initial choice was wrong.

I discovered this truth in the most painful way possible, rewriting one hundred and eighty pages of a manuscript from scratch — one I had begun in close third person and which, halfway through the draft, felt distant, cold, unable to convey what the protagonist was truly feeling. I converted it to first person one night, seized by a kind of creative desperation, and suddenly everything began to breathe in a new way. The exact same plot, told from a different mouth, had become a completely different book.

First person: immediate intimacy, at a price

First person offers immediate intimacy — the reader becomes almost complicit with the character, lives inside their head, shares their prejudices even when those prejudices are unfair or dangerous. The cost is limitation: everything the narrator doesn't know, the reader can't know either, and this demands a far more rigorous narrative architecture to avoid slip-ups, like having the character know things they logically couldn't.

Limited third person: distance that doesn't cool things down

Close third person retains much of that intimacy, but introduces a subtle distance — that sensation of observing the character from just above their shoulder, perceiving their thoughts through a narrative filter that allows a little more stylistic freedom. It's the one I prefer for stories that need moments of irony or implicit judgment on the character, something first person would make harder to pull off without feeling contrived.

The omniscient narrator: absolute power, extreme risk

Omniscient, finally — the one that sees everyone and everything — is the hardest to handle well in contemporary fiction, even though it dominated for centuries. It requires a steady hand and an exceptionally strong narrative voice, capable of holding multiple perspectives together without losing the reader. Few writers use it well today, and when it works it's almost always because the writer has already spent years working with simpler forms before daring to attempt it.

If you're starting a new project, I'd encourage you to ask yourself, before writing the very first sentence, who is telling this story and why precisely this person is the right one to tell it. You'll save yourself months of work — and probably one hundred and eighty pages destined for the bin, as happened to me.

Marghi