Budding writers obsess about many things but at the&nbsp; classes I've taught three often come top of the 'tell me more' list. Characterisation. Research. And the simple business of putting words on the page -- how to find the time, how to do it properly.

Here’s a subject I rarely get asked about even though it's one of the most important there is in the craft of modern popular fiction: point of view (POV).

Perhaps this is because lots of people write their first book in the first person where POV is less important -- or more accurately, less capable of being used to enrich the narrative. But even if you're a first person writer a bit of understanding of POV is important.

This is a big subject, one that could make an entire book. So don't look to me to do much more than skim the surface here, or look at more than a single, fine point. Today that's simply going to be an example of how POV works in the book I'm writing -- one you will see in 2012 -- and what it might add to the narrative at a crucial point.

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The story is this. The lead character is in Venice looking for a relative who's disappeared mysteriously. It's carnival time. The place is full of people in disguise, in masks. She's no idea where to look, no idea either, sometimes, who the characters she meets really are, or whether they're helpful, neutral or positively antagonistic.

Up to the beginning of the final act the story is written from the POV of the lead character. In other words in every scene we see things through her eyes, as if we were a little creature seated on her shoulder, able to hear her internal thoughts. Technically this is known as 'subjective third person' to distinguish it from 'objective third person' in which the reader doesn't see inside the character's head.

I don't normally work like this -- though most writers do. Most of my books -- <em>The Blue Demon</em> being a good example -- use multiple points of view to represent a moving thread of story elements involving different but related characters approaching the same problem through varying paths. Since I write with an ensemble cast of regular characters, not a single dominant protagonist, this seems to make sense to me, and it gives me the breadth of story I'm looking for.

But this book is different. It's about one person on her own, stranded in a very chilly and foreign Venice, looking for answers. I want readers to feel her sense of frustration and, on occasion, fear as she fumbles her way towards discovering what's happened to someone she loves dearly. So every scene is viewed through the character's eyes right up to the point that the final act -- where a resolution begins to appear -- commences, and she starts to see, she thinks, the true identity of those around her.

Here's the problem. Any single continuous point of view naturally lulls the reader into a sense of complacency. I'm not talking about lazy or bad writing here. This is going to happen with all writing that continues in the same vein after a while. When we find ourselves in that last act -- like a plane turning onto the final approach to the runway -- I need to signal the moment somehow.

I could have a light bulb go on in her head. I could engineer some revelatory event. There are quite a few things I could do and maintain the single third person point of view I've used throughout.

But I'm after a shock here. A jolt. This is a story about someone very bad secreting themselves in a frozen winter Venice at carnival time, hiding behind a variety of masks to do terrible things. My protagonist wants, more than anything, to remove that mask and expose him to the bright, judgemental light of day.

How do I set in train that process?

Here’s one other way. Totally out of the blue the narrative changes point of view entirely. Instead of the reader sitting on the shoulder of our heroine, they turn the page and find they're suddenly sitting on the shoulder of the villain. They're seeing things through someone else's eyes for a change. The bad guy's. The devil's. With a simple flick of POV I put the reader into the head of the person we've been chasing all along, and never knowing quite who or what he is.

Cue: a quick and possibly cheap thrill (so long as it works I'm not proud).

That's what I'm going to try anyway.

Point of view is an incredibly powerful mechanism if you can use it creatively and against the run of the reader's expectations.

With the last point in mind I trust you will have forgotten all this by the time the book hits the shelves two years or so from now.