Atticus Fitch. Huck Finn. Rebecca. Offred. Lolita.

You can name the novels that featured these characters, right? Why? Because their first-person narrator voices are memorable. When a character tells their own story, it allows us insight that we, as readers, would never get otherwise. That voice drives the narrative, providing a sense of drama, because they’re letting us in on a secret we would not get otherwise. They tell us their thoughts, their opinions about other characters, their struggles with the story’s conflict, and that insight layers in a sense of humanity. The first-person narration gives us a closer look at characters who become human, thus reaching us in a way third-person point of view simply can’t.

As a writer, I’m always searching for ways to bring magic into my fiction. I study other writers’ works, especially the classics, old and new. Some authors write amazing descriptions of setting or characters, while others send shivers up my spine with suspenseful twists and turns in their narrative, but the technique that makes stories come alive more than any other is point of view. If a writer can dip into a character’s mind and bring that person’s voice to the page, the character becomes a memory for me that doesn’t fade with time. (I will always identify with Jo, the writer-sister in Louisa Mae Alcott’s Little Women stories, though I read them when I was in grammar school.)

One of the best contemporary examples of point-of-view mastery is Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. When I first read the story of the Price family, the way Kingsolver used each of the family member’s voice to show how they felt about moving from Georgia to the Congo amazed me. Each of the children speaks about their struggles and challenges, which is difficult since they range from 14 years to 5 years old. They are all distinct and their viewpoints provide a texture to the story that we would not have heard otherwise. The story is heavy, thematically, a retelling of the Bible itself, so Kingsolver’s incorporation of the children’s opinions both lightens the story and the multiple points of view produces a subtle nod to the different books in the Bible. And their voices! Perfection.

I admired that story so much that I decided to exercise my own writing chops and show each of the Prescotts, the family in my own story, through their point of view voices. I knew I needed to do so in a way that fit the contemporary themes in my own story, so I used social media, the written word, and gaming to depict the characters themselves. Each of the children is a unique individual searching for their identity in the family while also finding their place in the world.

Because the story is told from the setting of the therapist’s office, the multiple points of view had to be different in order for readers to recognize each family member in the same setting. While they shared their stories differently, each of the characters was part of the jigsaw puzzle that is the Prescotts.

One of the many lessons I learned from writing this novel is that I needed to close my eyes and listen to the characters rather than to impose the narrative on them. Once I got into the space of truly hearing them, they took my breath away, and they stole the story.

Hopefully, my readers will agree.