1. Consider your options.
Before setting down to write you need to work out exactly who is writing. Is it a character within the story or is it an over-arching voice which can get inside the heads of all your characters? This is a choice between using the first and third person, respectively.
2. Experiment with different voices.
Try writing sentences from an 'I' perspective and then from a 'she' or 'he' perspective to see how they compare. The advantage of writing as 'I' is that you will find it easier to create a more immediate and intimate voice. The advantage of writing 'she/he' is that you will be able to explain every characters' actions.
3. Don't be scared to change your mind.
Salman Rushdie had written 800 pages of Midnight's Children when he decided to swap the third person and go for a first person narrative instead.
4. Don't confuse an 'I' for an I.
If you choose to write in the first person it is important to establish a distance between yourself and the narrator. A novel written in the first person, such as Bridget Jones' Diary, is just as much a piece of fiction as one written in the third person such as the Harry Potter series. Of course, your experience will always creep into your writing, but you should still distinguish yourself from the main character. After all, Helen Fielding isn't Bridget Jones any more than J K Rowling is Harry Potter.
5. Get ready to make more choices.
Once you've chosen between the first and third person voice you then need to work out what type of first person or third person voice you are using. For instance, if you have gone for third person you have to choose whether to 'play God' and know absolutely everything, or are you going to focus on the actions and feelings of just one or two main characters.
6. Choose a tense.
Are you going to tell your story in the past or present tense? Traditionally most novels have used the past tense ('I wanted to go home') rather than the present ('he drags hard on his cigarette'). However, a growing number of novels, including my own, are written in the present tense. Personally, I find writing in the present adds speed and pace to a novel. But that could just be me.
7. Don't limit yourself.
Question: What have Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Jane Green's Babyville got in common?
Answer: They both use different narrative voices.
If you want to switch between past and present tense, or first and third person, there is no law to stop you. Just make sure that it doesn't get too messy or that it ends up giving your readers a headache.
8. Tell the same story in a different voice.
One of the most popular exercises is to take an extract from a well-known novel and then convey that same information using a different voice or tense. For instance, you could select an extract from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which uses the 'I' voice) and turn it into the third person.
9. Be convincing.
To be a good novelist you need to be a good liar. The narrative voice you choose therefore needs to be the most convincing way to tell your story. Is it more realistic if it is told from a future perspective, looking back, or in the present, as it happens? Only you can judge.
10. Don't limit yourself.
While you have to be convincing you don't have to confine yourself. There are more options than those listed here. For instance, if you are mad or brave enough, you could write your novel in the second person (the 'you' voice I use in this newsletter). You could even use the future tense if you so desire, or write from the point of view of your bathroom scales. The choice, as Cilla Black might put it, is yours.
Finding the right narrative voice