h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you want to show us a story that makes us look at things differently, you need to think about the point of view you choose.

Dickens used the omniscient author approach, and I suppose TV and films do that too. If you're writing, you might choose to follow several different people's points of view, or you might choose to follow one person who has an interesting story to tell.

I've just read Andrea Levy's 'The Long Song'. This is narrated by an old woman called July, who is looking back on her early years as a slave on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. It is certainly a remarkable book. It is easy to think the slaves were so ill treated and repressed they had no lives of their own, but this book shows a whole community, with its own hierarchies - and its own ways of ensuring the white owners didn't always get their way.

Only by telling the story from the point of view of a woman who lived through both slavery and the early days of emancipation could Andrea Levy have given such a rich picture of the time, without losing the individual story.

That sounds like a good book, MVP.

Although I think it's true that Dickens, while using an 'omniscient narrator' - a least, technically - does a good job of getting inside his characters' heads.

I'm think particularly about his chapter 'Fagin's Last Night Alive', I think it was, in 'Oliver Twist'. Pretty psychological.

But absolutely, I take your point. It's the camera angle that counts, I think.

Netflix has finally got the rest of 'Dexter'. This is an eight-season TV series told from the point of view of a sociopathic serial killer, complete with voiceover narrative. The story couldn't be told any other way - and is surprisingly insightful and moving.