Who Says?: Mastering Point of View in Fiction

Book excerpt: A thorough, illuminating, and entertaining guide to crafting point of view, a fiction writer’s most essential choice. Who is telling the story to whom is the single most important question about any work of fiction; the answer is central to everything from style and tone to plot and pacing. Using hundreds of examples from Jane Austen to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Leo Tolstoy to Stephen King, novelist and longtime MFA professor Lisa Zeidner dives deep into the points of view we are most familiar with—first and third person—and moves beyond to second-person narration, frame tales, and even animal points of view. Engaging and accessible, Who Says? presents any practicing writer with a new system for choosing a point of view, experimenting with how it determines the narrative, and applying these ideas to revision.