Point of View in Fiction

So...back to commenting on things I see on Book Country (even though I haven't had time to actually read anything on the site for more than a week).  This is sometimes a problem in published novels, as well, though I see it much less often in published novels as opposed to unpublished manuscripts from aspiring writers.

Anyway, point of view.  You can use a first-person narrative, like in The Hunger Games books.  Katniss is the narrator, you see "I" in non-dialogue sections of the text, etc.  This can be done well, and is certainly an acceptable choice, but you really have to think about what kind of information the character divulges.  There's an early part where Katniss flips her "long, dark braid" over her shoulder.  Stop and think about this for a moment...unless you have recently changed your appearance rather dramatically (e.g. the first time I dyed my own hair black, something like 18 years ago), do you actually think about what your hair looks like?  I brush strands of hair out of my face all the time, but I don't say I brushed a strand of waist-length black hair out of my face.  I just call it my hair.  Anyway, my point is that you need to get inside your characters' heads and actually think about what they would say.  You very well might have developed detailed descriptions of your characters.  You might know them inside and out.  But they still don't seem like real people, if they don't think like real people.

This is also a problem if you choose third-person limited, where you're in one character's head, and the person is thinking thoughts that he or she wouldn't.  I saw some of this in The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham.  Dawson visits the Kingspire and describes it in his head, down to the last detail.  But he was best friends with the old king as a child.  He's been to the Kingspire dozens of times.  Unless something has changed, he's not going to make note of stuff he's seen many times before.  This was also sometimes a problem in the Riyria Revelations series by Michael J. Sullivan -- every time a character rode into a new town, there was an infodump -- even if the character had visited the town before.

I get it, there are things that authors want to communicate about setting, about character appearance, etc.  You're proud of the world you've created.  Consider that people don't care so much about some of these details, first of all.  (Count me in that camp, most of the time.)  Second, consider other ways to incorporate the details, without infodumping or putting improbable thoughts in people's heads.  If you have an ethnic group whose members have red hair, for example, one character from that group can be called "Red."  Or, when introducing a new character who is from that ethnic group, have your viewpoint character look at the person, internally remark upon the appearance -- for example, "the woman had the pale skin and red hair of an X, something not usually seen in an army officer."  (That's not necessarily a well-written sentence, this is just off-the-cuff writing here.  I'd be more careful in an actual manuscript.)  The trading of insults and jibes in Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed helps us figure out what Adoulla looks like (though the cover art for this one is appropriate and probably influences our decisions, as well).  That's another option.

I like to think this is something I've done well in my own manuscript (hope so, since I sent it off on Monday).  When I describe buildings or cities, the people are seeing them FOR THE FIRST TIME (or in one case, after significant changes).  So these are things they might be remarking upon.

You can do third-person omniscient point of view, but I'd argue against this option.  Most attempts I've seen, at least from amateur writers (and I don't mean that as a slight, I consider myself a member of that group as I am not yet published), stay in one character's head for 95% of the scene, making me think I'm reading third-person limited, until I'll hear some other random character has a headache and I'll think, "well how does the viewpoint character know that?"

Technically, my own manuscript could've been third-person omniscient, because (and this is not necessarily obvious in volume one, but will become apparent later) one character is reconstructing the story after having talked to everyone else.  So he knows what they were thinking.  But because it's not obvious in the first volume, I elected for third-person limited with some first-person sections where the narrator himself is present.  (This actually wasn't planned, it just worked out this way.  And I did have to go through and consider POV in every scene, and change a few things that appeared in my earliest drafts.)

Anyway, if you want some more definitions of terms or some such, here are a few links (honestly just the top couple from Google):

• Narrative mode (from Wikipedia)
• Point of View in Fiction (these load kind of slow but have good information)
• Fiction: Point of View (from Writer's Digest)