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!