Got a story idea and you're not sure what point of view to write in? Try this:
First Person POV
Is your Protagonist considered a criminal, a deviant, or misunderstood? Y or N
Is your Protagonist trying to obscure some dark truth about themself from society? Y or N
Is your Protagonist trying to justify why they have acted in a particular way? Y or N
Is your Protagonist trying to hide some dark truth about themself from themself? Y or N
Is your story mostly focused on one character (Character Study)? Y or N
Is your genre a detective story, crime noir, thriller, or mystery? Y or N
Is your intended audience Young Adult, New Adult, or Middle Grade? Y or N
Is your genre Romance or Chick Lit? Y or N
Could the format of your story be Memoir, or from diary entries or letters? Y or N
Could your Protagonist be dead, telling this story from the Great Beyond? Y or N
If you answered more often YES than NO, you may consider writing a First Person POV story. That means using “I,” and “We” statements, giving the reader full access to your narrator’s thoughts and observations.
This is the most intimate storytelling style and can be used in a variety of ways. Particularly if your protagonist has something to hide, you would probably be best to use the unreliable narrator perspective, meaning your narrator has a secret that they are attempting to hide from the reader. This can be either a character flaw they are unwilling to face in themself, or a detail that would otherwise incriminate them.
In First Person POV, the narrator must know how the story will end. Either they must have survived the ordeal to report the events - - or - - they are returning as a ghost to warn readers not to follow in their path, or they are dead characters and the format of the story is letters that have been written when the narrator was alive.
This POV is usually told in Past Tense, unless the format is from letters written in present tense. The narrator may be a detached observer of the Protagonist, and not be the Protagonist reporting their own activities.
The narrator cannot tell the readers what is happening inside other people’s heads, but they can speculate.
The narrator has an opinion about everything they describe. They draw conclusions from everything everyone else says.
The narrator’s voice is very important. More on that later, but the perspective is always subjective, meaning the narrator has their own agenda for telling the story the way they are telling it.
Third Person POV
Does your story involve multiple subplots? Y or N
That was fast. Yeah, if so, you want to use Third Person. It’s the most common type of narrative style and the most forgiving. It allows the author to focus more on plot developments, which when you have multiple subplots, you’ll probably need to have multiple perspectives.That said, there are multiple variations of Third Person POV storytelling…
Is your story a Speculative Fiction, involving lots of world-building? Y or N
Did you have the overwhelming urge to draw a map of your world? Y or N
Does your story rely on action sequences? Y or N
Subjective Third Person Limited is the go-to POV for genre storytelling. With this narration style, the author reports on a relatively surface perspective—like a screenplay, but focusing on events of one character per chapter or section, and reporting sensory details only that particular character would experience (odors, tactile experiences, sights, and sounds), and their thoughts about what only they could have experienced in the present or past.
The narrative voice can be tinged by the character of focus. This means that the attitude of the narration can reflect the personality of the character. For instance, if the chapter was about a child, the sentence structure might be more simple than the chapter focusing on a college professor. The voice should, however, remain neutral.
Objective Third Person Limited is the same as above, but strips out characters’ thoughts and keeps the narrative voice neutral and consistent. This POV is ideal as an exercise for new writers to discipline their writing skills. This POV helps focus on external details like dialog and body language to tell a story, and not expository writing—‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’, data dumps, and ‘head-hopping’.
Will your story require referencing events in that world’s history beyond what your characters have experienced first hand? Y or N
Is your story historical fiction or is it meant to sound old?Y or N
Does your story have a magical quality, or do you want it to feel like a fable or faerie tale? Y or N
Will your characters all have specialized knowledge that will be important to reveal plot details? Y or N
Is your story epic in scope? Y or N
Subjective Third Person Omniscient can be an awkward choice. If you answered more than one YES above, it may be a valid option. What makes this POV awkward is that it is often done poorly, especially by new writers.
This perspective offers access into every character’s mind at any point in the story, and for an undisciplined, unfocused writer, this can result in readers feeling detached from events in the story as they drift from mind to mind hearing abstract ideas, historical events, technical details, and other information that serves to stoke the writer’s imagination more than the reader’s enjoyment. It is a playground for the ungrounded. Avoid this POV if possible.
This is an old-fashioned narrative style and should only be used after first developing firm experience with non-omniscient points of view. Do not risk sounding like a noob unless you have a firm idea what details are important to the story.
The voice of the narrator must be neutral (with the sole exception of stories designed to sound like a fable or faerie tale, when a strong narrative voice can serve to enhance the magical flavor of the story), and in any case, the voice is trustworthy.
The narrator cannot be a participant in the story.
Objective Third Person Omniscient is a more modern variation, but equally as dangerous to new writers to tell more than the story needs (or more than the reader is able to absorb without losing interest from data dump expositions). It can be applied to stories that require firm realism, but also requires insights into details that no character can use their senses to know—the insides of a sealed explosive device, for instance. This perspective can be used to reveal to the reader what the characters cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.
This POV excludes character’s thoughts.
There are multiple variations within this POV which limit the prose to describe only sights, sounds, and dialog as if it were a screenplay for a film.
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