Tag: point of view

Thursday Technicalities: Choosing Viewpoint Characters

Ariel Paiement
Publishing Journey

Introduction

Choosing viewpoint characters can be a difficult task even for seasoned authors. For those who are just starting out or who have never delved far into viewpoints and point-of-view, it can be a landmine of problems to navigate: problems that can lead to deadly explosions within the piece they’re working on. Viewpoint makes or breaks the novel, so it’s extremely important to choose the right viewpoint. Let’s get right into it!

What is Viewpoint?

Think of viewpoint like a camera lens. That lens will follow around one character at a time, and only one character. It will shine a light onto their inner thoughts and onto their view of the world as well as what is happening in that world. But it can only do it for one person at a time, so it’s limited in its scope. 

Choosing what that lens shows the reader and who that lens shows them is one of the most important decisions for each scene. If your camera focuses in on someone who’s missing all the action or who doesn’t see the parts of it that move the story forward, the scene becomes lifeless and can’t carry its own weight across the page. So, now that we know what viewpoint is, let’s take a look at some factors that can help you choose which character should be the viewpoint character in the scene.

A Word About Omniscient

Before we get into all of the details, let’s take a look at viewpoint in omniscient POV. In omniscient, as we discussed in the article on point-of-views, you can’t delve into the internal thoughts of any of the characters. Instead, the reader will experience the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of characters through the lens of an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. This narrator, then, becomes the frame through which we will see the big picture. He or she will guide us through the world, showing us what we need to see and telling us about important things in clever or intriguing ways. 

Because of this, your viewpoint in omniscient will remain the narrator’s throughout the entirety of the novel. While you may show your reader what various characters think or do, they will not be the viewpoint characters because the narrator is telling us that’s what they thought or did.

Who is Central to the Scene?

This is the first in a series of questions to ask yourself about the scene you are writing. Who or what is central to the scene? The answer may be that several characters or animate objects/sentient lifeforms are central to the scene. If so, that’s fine. This question alone doesn’t necessarily contain the answer to your ultimate question, but it is the first layer in the onion that is your question.

So how does answering this question help? Well, your viewpoint character should always be important to the scene. The character should never be just a side character that’s observing for the heck of it. They should be integral parts of the scene in some way or another, though those ways may vary.

What Does the Character Reveal in the Scene?

The second question to ponder regarding the characters you listed above is this: what do these characters tell you that you don’t already know? If the scene were in their point-of-view, would it move the story forward? Would we gain as much from it as we would if it were told in someone else’s perspective? If so, then that character is likely not the best fit for your viewpoint. 

A scene should always tell us something new or move the plot forward in some way. Preferably, it should do both. If a character can’t help you toward that goal as the viewpoint character, they have no place in that role. They’ll only bog down your story, so strike them from your list.

How Does This Connect to the Bigger Picture?

The final question you ought to consider is how this will factor into the bigger picture. Will your viewpoint character’s revealed information or forward motion weave into the story seamlessly to provide the reader with hints and nudges toward the ending? Does that character work alongside the other viewpoint characters to draw us deeper into the story until we finally come up for air at the end? If not, then this character too would make a poor fit, even if he or she made it through all of the other stages. 

Results

At this point, you should have several very good candidates. Chances are you may only have one character who made it through all of the stages. If so, that’s the character you should use, assuming you were honest with yourself in previous sections. 

But if you still have a few characters left to pick from, go with the one you feel fits the scene best. Choose a character you find easy to write or one that, in your gut, you know fits in with the people and the mechanisms involved in the scene in question to move the plot and the characters forward. 

Conclusion

This may seem like a lot of work, but in reality, it often takes me only a minute or two to decide who should be my viewpoint character in a scene once I have the character established and know the story. Knowing the process and what questions to keep in mind when answering will speed up the process, even if at first it takes a little while to think through everything.

The main takeaway, besides the questions, is that this is entirely possible and can be achieved by even beginning writers. It takes some thought and some preparation ahead of time, prior to writing, but it isn’t impossible. You might never have thought about viewpoint before now, but that’s the good news for you. You can learn it and get to a point where you choose the viewpoint character correctly the majority of the time.

Have a question or another tip on how to choose your viewpoint character? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

Thursday Technicalities: Choosing Your POV

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

Last week, we discussed the different options for point-of-view, and this week, we’re going to go over how you choose one. This can be a bit of a struggle for many writers because the options offer widely varying strengths and weaknesses in some cases. This means that you need to assess your story to determine what point-of-view will really allow you to give the reader the fullest experience possible. By assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each point-of-view option, you will be better able to choose one to fit your needs. So let’s get started!

First Person POV

To start with, let’s look at first person. The obvious strength here is that you get to see intimately inside the character’s head and his/her heart. The character will be the one to tell the story and show us the world that his/her story takes place within. This is great when you want the reader to be close and personal with a small cast of characters. It’s usually suited well to one or two viewpoint characters who switch off, though some authors have used it for more than that.

The downfall of first person pov is that you can’t show us what is going on inside the minds of anyone except the viewpoint character, the “I”, in the chapter. Typically, to avoid confusing readers, you need to stick with one viewpoint per chapter in first person because changing becomes too hard to follow in most situations since both viewpoint characters would be referred to as “I”. To avoid throwing the character out of the novel, you want transitions to be seamless, which usually necessitates using chapters as the break for changing viewpoints instead of scenes as you do in third person. First person can also limit your cast because having too many characters to follow when chapters are the break off point for a new viewpoint. It isn’t that a larger cast is impossible, but it is difficult, so most writers avoid it with this point of view.

Second Person POV

As mentioned in my previous post, second person is really best suited to choose your own adventure novels or similar styles of writing. It doesn’t fit well at all with most other writing because readers will, at some point, find themselves unable to suspend their belief in order to enjoy the book. The weakness of this writing, then, is the fact that it addresses the reader and forces them to be the character, which may work fine if the reader relates to everything the character does. The minute they don’t, they’re going to struggle to keep reading and are, most likely, going to quit reading.

Third Person POV

This option has a few strengths. First of all, it allows the writer to have multiple viewpoints in a chapter. Because third person can easily differentiate between characters if the writer has done a good job with the work, it isn’t necessary to wait to change viewpoints until the beginning of a new chapter. A scene break will work fine. The other major strength is that it allows for a larger cast of characters. You can fit more of them within a chapter to show what’s going on in various places, so novels with a lot of characters and a large scope of events in varying locations are usually better suited to this POV option. It’s also strong because it gives room for not knowing why a viewpoint character did something. If you need to keep it secret, it’s much easier to simply write a scene in another viewpoint character’s perspective than it is to write the whole chapter in the other character’s perspective to hide an intent from the reader.

However, despite those strengths, third person does have the weakness of distance. It isn’t as close to the character as first person, and so readers may feel shut out of the character’s head at times, which could cause problems for relating with that character. Good writers can work around this issue with internal dialogue and other techniques, such as deep pov, which will be discussed in a later article, but it still falls under the weakness category.

Omniscient POV

Last, but not least, we have omniscient POV. This one’s biggest strength is the fact that it allows for a third party as the narrator, one who is seeing everything and knows everything but is not in the story. This allows a writer to give readers a much fuller picture of what’s going on than they might otherwise receive in another POV. Of course, the issue with is that you sacrifice the ability to delve into any one character’s thoughts. Instead, the narrator must tell us that Sally thought Jim was a nuisance or that Justin found Pete to be a tolerable roommate. This POV’s strength lies in the fact that it allows for some very interesting commentary and a humorous effect, in many cases, but it sacrifices the closeness with the characters in exchange. It also means the author must keep the entire narration in the voice of that narrator, not the voice of the author or the character. That can be exhausting, and it forces the author to constantly check to be sure they aren’t including anything unnecessary. Readers won’t have a high tolerance for extraneous information, so the author has to be sure that all commentary fits with the story without bogging it down. The author, then, is the filter for what is and is not important, not what the character would or would not know.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has been helpful to everyone!  If you have other strengths and weaknesses for these viewpoints that you can add, feel free to leave them in the comments! Have a question or a suggestion for a future Thursday Technicalities post? Leave that in the comments as well or send me an email at arielpaiement@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Thursday Technicalities: Introducing the Points-of-View

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week, we’re starting a new mini-series on Thursday Technicalities. We’re going to go over point-of-view. This week, we’re just going to cover the basics. Once we’ve done that, I’ll get into how to choose a point-of-view and viewpoint as well as some other specific, more advanced topics on point-of-view. Hopefully this will be helpful for you all!

First Person POV

Let’s start with the point-of-view that many beginners choose. First person point-of-view is often easier for beginners because it feels more natural to speak in first person. It’s what we use all the time in regular speech. Out of all the points-of-view a writer can use, this is the one that generally feels closest to the reader because the character is the narrator and they tell you how things happened. However, this does present its own difficulties, as we’ll see in a later blog post on point-of-view.

Second Person POV

This is rarely used, but it bears mentioning because some books can use it to good effect. The entire book, in this point-of-view, is written as though the character (you) is the reader. Of course, this usually has the effect of distancing the reader from the book because they balk at more things and their suspension of belief is challenged too greatly. After all, they might not do the things your character (the you in the story) does, and so they find that it is irritating to be addressed and asked to be the character for the duration of the novel. The best place for this point-of-view tends to be books that are of the Choose-Your-Own Adventure variety because it then allows the reader to make some subset of decisions on their own rather than having everything dictated for them.

Third Person POV

This is the second most common point-of-view used in writing and with good reason. It allows for more scope than first person does, but it also still contains some of the up close and personal feeling that first person contains. Often, this is used for adult books because it allows authors to have more than one point-of-view per chapter, which is often necessary for more complicated plots.

Third Person Limited or Omniscient

The final common point-of-view in writing is third person omniscient or limited point-of-view. This is usually best suited to humor and satire, though it can work in other instances too. Of note is the fact that this used to be quite popular during the days of Tolkien and Dickens. Both authors, as well as many of their contemporaries, used the point-of-view with wonderful effect in their writing. However, the days when readers were willing to read that sort of prose in a non-humor or satire setting have passed, and most readers will only put up with it for the sake of reading a classic. As such, generally, it’s best to avoid this unless it suits your novel in a very specific way.

As far as what omniscient point-of-view actually entails, the point-of-view is that of an all-knowing narrator. That narrator may be the older version of a character in the story or someone who is only observing the story (much as Death does in The Book Thief), but the narrator does not participate in the story. Instead, they tell the reader what has happened and provide interesting commentary to go along with it. The key to omniscient point-of-view lies in that interesting commentary and a narrator with an engaging voice, but this also makes it an extremely difficult point-of-view that I don’t recommend for beginners. Not for an entire novel at least. If you want to experiment with it, go for it! It’s a good exercise that will help to grow your writing ability, but start small because this point-of-view is tough, even for experienced writers.

Conclusion

These main points-of-view are the ones that have stood throughout writing history. Various authors use them to produce fiction that vastly differs in its style, content, and voice. You can use them too, but it requires some knowledge of how to choose and what is involved in each. I’ll be discussing that next time on Thursday Technicalities, so stay tuned for that! I hope this has been helpful.

As always, if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover in this blog category or another, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments. I’m always happy to get them!