I've been working on a novel, and in the course of writing isolated scenes I've tried a number of voices & narrator styles, and I may try some more. Those who've read the manuscript pointed out that it kind of jumps around.

So here are a few thoughts about points of narrative view:

• First person. Lets you explore the feelings & thoughts of one character with great intimacy, but leaves you closed out of the heads of all the others. This is particularly fun with unreliable characters, for example in An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, or the Alexandria Quartet of Laurence Durrell.

• Third person immanent. Similar to first person in that the narrator follows one character around looking over her shoulder, as it were. This allows for some distance from the main character, but not very much. One advantage to this is that it allows for some physical description of the point-of-view character, which is tough to do well in a first-person narrative (unless, of course, the character is in the habit of admiring his reflection).

• Omniscient narrator. This is a special case of the third person, but not any ordinary person-like person, what with knowing all about all.

• Other Third person. Like being another character, perhaps disembodied, in the room with the other, stated, characters. Great for describing action, and you can perhaps comment (at some distance) on the unrevealed thoughts and/or feelings of more than one character. But it's kind of confusing.

  There's a kind of continuum of possibilities between third-person immanent and the more distant, objective, camera-like version. Any combination is possible; but I'd suggest picking something that works for your story and sticking to it.

  There's the question of who this narrator is, anyway, and how does she know all this? Robertson Davies finessed this point in What's Bred in the Bone by having the narrator be the muse of biography, who of course knows all things about all people, even an art forger who kept very much to himself throughout his life.

  Another thing I find annoying is Hawthorne's habit (see House of the Seven Gables, for example) of having his disembodied third person narrator step out of character and address the reader from time to time with his disembodied, third personhood. But then I'm also annoyed by the breaks in the action in The Old Man and the Sea, trying to convince us that this huge book is actually a story that could be told around a fire in one evening.

• Various exotica, like second person. I once did a romantic short story with genders unspecified, and finessed the 3rd person pronoun gender problem by doing it in 1st and 2nd person. This smacks of writing exercise unless it's very well done.

• Epistolary writing: a series of letters written by the characters, either to each other, or so someone else. A particularly clever recent example is Ella Minnow Pea, A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark Dunn. If you like word puzzles, do look this one up, it's fun.

• Some sequence of the above. Example: Some of the Parts by T. Cooper. There are 4 main characters who kind of drift through their lives and interlocking relationships; 3 are told in the 1st person and a forth in the 3rd person. It's probably best to confine one's narrator switches to the occasional chapter boundary.

So let us have some of your favorite point of view devices, either from someone else's work, or your own thoughts (or, even better, writing samples).