Point of View

Point of view is the lens through which readers view your story. It determines where your reader is in the narrative space, and it can have a profound effect on how they view and interpret the events of your story.  Choosing the right POV for your writing style and your story are among the most crucial decisions you will make when crafting a book.

This dimension of Narrative Space is a sliding scale.   On one end, we have narrative intimacy, where we know a great deal of detail about a single character.   On the other end, we have narrative perspective, where we know a great deal about the external world.

First Person

The most intimate form of POV is first person, where a single character narrates the story from within his or her head.  We see everything in the story through their eyes.  They use the "I" pronoun, and it's always easy to distinguish the POV character, because they're always "I". 

There are essentially two forms of First Person POV; present-tense and past-tense.  As a writer, it's important to consider when the POV character is relating these events to us.   Are we there with the narrator, experiencing the plot as they do?  If so, the best choice is probably present-tense.   It gives us a feeling of being present inside the character's mind as they go through the events of the story.

If we're hearing the story narrated by an older, wiser POV character, then you'll want to write the story in past-tense.   This gives you the benefit of a narrator who has reflected on the events of the story, and can offer additional insight as to what they were thinking at the time vs. what they think now.  If you're writing a story where the character undergoes some significant change, this can be a great perspective, because the narrator can reflect on what they learned from an event, even as we watch their past self learn it.

First person past-tense offers some of the benefits of Omniscient (which we'll get to in a minute), namely the perspective that time provides.   After you go through something dramatic in your life, chances are you spend time considering what it meant to you.  Maybe it became something you thought about often.  In first person past-tense, you can offer the reader some of that wisdom.

It does not mean you can go dipping into other character's thoughts.  You still have to stick to what the POV character knows.  If a non-POV character told the POV character their thoughts later on, you might include them, but it is important to establish that that's how the POV character came to know them. For example:

I walked into Annie's office.

"Did you hear about the layoffs?"

Annie later admitted that she had known about the layoffs all along, but at the time, she was still trying to protect her reputation.

"No," she said. "Those corporate bastards!"

Here we get to learn information that the POV character could not have known at the time.   But it's important to establish how the POV character came to know that by the time we the reader hear it.

It is possible to have a novel with multiple first person narrators.   Mary Gordon did it quite effectively in The Company of Women.  But if you're going to attempt multiple first person narrators, it will pay to spend a lot of time journaling and doing other writing exercises in each narrator's voice.   It's important that each narrator sound completely different, otherwise readers will have trouble keeping track of who is who.

Overall, first person offers you a variety of choices, all of which have their own advantages.  It's a popular style in today's market, and writers would do well to try it at least once.

Second Person

Second Person POV is less intimate, and it has a very limited place in fiction.   Second person uses the "you" pronoun, and is typically reserved for textbooks or instructional manuals (like this website), but it is worth knowing about, because it does have its uses.  Second person is a conversational style, and depending on the novel, there can be spots where it is useful.  Omniscient narrators will occasionally dip into second person in order to speak directly to the reader.  This technique served Dickens well, but today's readers just don't enjoy this very much.

Some authors have written novels using a conversational style with a first person narrator.  One prominent example is J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.  Holden Caulfield often speaks directly to the reader, and the result is that the occasional second person passage slips in.   Used carefully, this can give us a sense of familiarity with the narrator, but it would make a poor POV for an entire novel.  The "Choose Your Own Adventure" series made successful use of it, but the result is that when authors experiment with this POV, anything they write winds up sounding like one of those novels.   It's very difficult for readers to take second person seriously.

But like all writing rules, a calculated bend is not always a bad thing.  Using second person with most stories is not recommended, but if you choose to write in an omniscient voice, or a first person past-tense narrator, you might occasionally find yourself slipping into second person.  Just make sure to use it wisely.   Every use is a risk.    If it doesn't help the reader enjoy the story, it's best to avoid it.

Third Person

Far and away the most popular choice of POV is some variant of third person.   It offers the ideal mix of intimacy and perspective, giving you the best of both worlds.  We aren't in the character's head, but we're close, and if we look around, we might catch something the POV character can't see.

Third person comes in a variety of flavors, but its best to think of that sliding scale we talked about in the intro.   Third person can be written with a lot of distance, or almost none.  It all comes down to how much you write things in the character's voice, vs. your own voice.

If you want to write third person with a lot of intimacy, you want to use a lot of the character's voice. Include lots of internal monologue, but rewrite it using character names or third person pronouns like "he" and "she":

Harry walked down to the store. They were out of soy milk. That was okay, he didn't really like soy milk, but Chloe made him drink it.

Just so you can see the difference, here's what that passage might look like in first person past tense:

I walked down to the store. They were out of soy milk. That was okay, I didn't really like soy milk anyway, but Chloe made me drink it.

Now, if you want to include some more perspective, you can write in third person, but with a little more narrative distance.   Narrative distance is essentially how far we are from the POV character.    But being further away doesn't mean you have no access to the character.   You can show a lot through body language and dialogue.

Harry walked down to the store. He went to the refrigerator and looked around. After a moment, he turned to the clerk.

"Hey, any soy milk in here?"

The clerk looked up from his copy of Auto Trader. "Sorry, we're out."

Harry shrugged and walked out the door.

Notice that we don't get any of Harry's thoughts in this version, but we still have some idea what he's thinking.  We learn that he's looking for soy milk in the dialogue, and his shrug shows us that he's not terribly upset the store is out of it.   So we still get the gist of Harry's emotions, but we also get a little extra detail about the scene; we see the clerk reading Auto Trader, and that helps us paint in the image of the clerk.  That little detail brings up all kinds of associations we have about gear heads and what they look like, and we paint these onto the clerk, thereby forming an image of him in our minds.   Every reader's image will likely be different, and that's one of the joys of reading.  So using third person with more narrative distance can get a lot done with few words.

If you want to include a character's thoughts in a distant third person, it's best to use a "thinker attribution"; little identifying words like "he thought."   It signals who thinks what, and if you're using a distant third person, you need these.   But the truth is, thinker attributions can be cumbersome, and they make the reader feel the distance between them and the character.  If you find yourself attracted to a distant third person POV, make sure to only include character thoughts when it really counts.

One of the best things about third person is that you can ratchet the intimacy/perspective level up and down depending on the needs of the scene.   If your character is sitting in their kitchen, thinking about some personal issues, you can write it with a great deal of intimacy, and weave their thoughts directly into the narrative voice.   If the character is walking through a complex environment with lots of things going on—say, a rock concert—you can pull back a bit, and give us more details from the environment.   In other forms of POV, every shift needs to be marked by a line break or a chapter break.   But in third person, you can throttle up on the intimacy or perspective any time you want. Think of it as widening or tightening the aperture on a camera lens.  Each direction will show you something different.

Third Person also offers the easiest method of swapping from one character to another.  So long as you find a way to drop the POV character's name in near the beginning of each scene, you can show us scenes from every character in the novel.  Knowing when to switch depends on what the reader needs to know.   If we need to know that the bad guy is secretly gearing up for war, while the hero rots in jail, you switch to the bad guy's POV for a scene, because the hero can't see what he's doing. 

Just make sure every scene counts. Never write a scene in a new POV just because you "haven't heard form them in a while". Make sure every moment matters to the plot, or you'll lose your reader quickly.

Omniscient

Writers who are not aware of the distinction between scenes and narration quite often find themselves writing in an omniscient POV, whether they know it or not.  Without a stark awareness of the need for scenes, beginning authors will often feel the need to explain everything, and provide all possible information to the reader.  They tell a lot, and omniscient POV most naturally lends itself to telling.

But that doesn't mean it's inherently bad!  Omniscient, like all POVs, has its uses.   For one thing, the perspective is infinite.   We can literally see anything the author wants us to.  We can see earthworms wriggling in the ground if we need to.  We can see stars going supernova.  We can see inside anyone's head.

That last one is the reason many budding authors are attracted to omniscient.  They feel a need to tell the reader what everyone is thinking.   To keep track of it at all, you need thinker attributions for sure, and like third person, you need to make sure every thought really counts.  But the truth is, unless we really need to know--unless hearing everyone's perspective really enhances our enjoyment of the story--this kind of head-hopping is just cumbersome, dull, and confusing.

If you're going to use omniscient, you need two things:

1. A story where something other than a single person is the protagonist. In some stories, an entire society can be the protagonist.   In The Call of the Wild, the protagonist is a dog, so the narrator has to supply all the subtlety.
2. A strong, engaging narrator's voice.   You may even choose to make the narrator a character of sorts.  Think about the grandfather in The Princess Bride.  He's not a character in the story, but he has a strong voice of his own, and when we hear it, it engages us on a different level.  Dickens is another classic example.  His witty, engaging voice has kept him on bookshelves for over a century, and oftentimes it takes the shape of a character who stands outside the story proper.

Without these two things, omniscient is pretty much cheating.  It's easy to simply tell us everything and let us hear what everyone is thinking.   There's no subtlety, no room for subtext, and worst, no room for the reader to fill in the blanks themselves.   Part of the joy of reading is building the story world in your mind, and if you simply lay out all the facts, you cheat the reader out of some of this fun.

For most stories, omniscient is probably not the wisest choice. You can get a lot of the same perspective by using a first person past tense, or third person with some shifts toward greater narrative distance.  If you want to try omniscient, make sure to involve the world around the character.   Show us parts of it we wouldn't otherwise see, and make every detail count.   No matter how pretty it is, a detail is easily forgotten if it doesn't affect the plot.   But used carefully, omniscient can bring a story world to life.

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Point of View is one of the most important dimensions of narrative space.  It is the distance between the reader and the story, and you need to measure it precisely.  Make sure that you decide on what works best for the story itself, not just whatever comes easiest to you.  Don't change the story to suit your writing, change your writing to suit the story.  It's worth challenging yourself to create something people want to read.  And one sure way to help them want to read is to tell them where they stand.