Fiction Writing Secret Number 13: Choose The Right Point Of View

One of the worst things that can happen to your book is 30-page readers – especially if those readers are potential reviewers. If reviewers abandon your book after 30 pages or less, it will never be reviewed.
There is an old but true saying, “Bad reviews sell books.” The way reviewers sink your book is not by criticizing it, which provokes interest, but by not reviewing it at all. One major reason readers – including reviewers – stop reading can be an uncertain or confusing point of view.
Some writers who have fascinating characters and exciting plots are completely unaware of viewpoint. I often meet such writers in workshops, wondering why they can’t get anyone other than themselves to publish their books.
The wrong POV – or none – makes it very difficult for readers to identify with anyone in your book, but identifying with your characters is what pulls your readers in and makes them want to read on.
What is POV? The term means seeing through a character’s eyes, knowing what he or she knows, and getting that person’s thoughts about characters and events. Limiting the viewpoint of a story actually creates suspense and aids in characterization.
What kinds of point of view are possible? First person (I, me, we, us), omniscient (no one but the author tells the story), and third person (he/she, him/her, they/them) are the most common.
Second person (you) is extremely rare, and something beginning fiction writers should not even consider. It sometimes appears in the fiction of someone who has been successful writing non-fiction, where second person is appropriate in many contexts. When moving to fiction, get out of the second person habit.
New writers often think that it’s best to begin with first person – it seems to be the most natural POV. Unfortunately, first person, in which your main character tells the story in his or her own voice (Huckleberry Finn, Bridget Jones) is the most difficult of all points of view to master.
Omniscient viewpoint is what many novice writers think they are using when in reality they have either no point of view at all, or too many. True omniscient is the second-hardest POV to get right.
True omniscient was used very commonly up until about 200 years ago, and was famously revived by Ernest Hemingway in the 20th century. Omniscient POV gets into nobody’s head at all, sees through no character’s eyes. It’s like a video camera, just giving us the exterior of everyone and everything.
In film and TV, direction, cinematography, and acting make characters sympathetic and intriguing. It is immensely hard to do that with just the written word. And here’s a secret: there really is a viewpoint – the author’s. Yet it has to be subtly sneaked in without clunky author intrusion. Fail to slip it in, and your writing comes off sterile. Lack of POV is sometimes seen in novels by screenwriters – all plot and action, but nothing we can personally relate to.
New writers sometimes think omniscient means shifting from character to character to character until the poor reader is dizzy. Too many viewpoints are worse than none at all – the lack may be cold and distancing, but at least readers can follow the plot. With practice you can learn to write true omniscient effectively, but there is no way to successfully use the POV of every character in your story (unless, of course, there are only two or three characters in your story).
The easiest POV to use is third person, yet it is so effective that most fiction written today uses it. For a short story it is best to have only one viewpoint, while a novel can support from one to four or five. If you can hold it to one or two, you will make it easier for readers to identify with your characters.
I advise new writers to begin with a tight, single third-person point of view – it creates suspense and pushes the writer to figure out how to unfold the plot in a believable way. In a novel, it is sometimes necessary to have two viewpoints – plot it out before you begin to write, and you will see if that is true of your story. But the cardinal rule for using POV effectively is this: use as few viewpoints as you can and still tell your story.