Today we’re looking at the pros and cons of the different points of view through which you can tell your story, but full disclosure, sometimes it all comes down to how you as the author feel most comfortable writing, regardless of the story you are telling.
So this is less what you should do and more what you might want to think about but don’t have to do.
Narrating POVs come in these flavors:
First Person (FPOV)
Second Person (SPOV)
Third Person Limited (TPL)
Third Person Omniscient (TPO)
What you decide for your story doesn’t really matter, only that whatever you pick, you must stick with (unless you’re James Patterson who doesn’t give a damn). The same applies with whether or not you decide to write in past or present tense, so I’ll be covering both topics in this post.
You can choose whatever you want, but the type of story you write can benefit from different POVS. An intimate romance with few characters? FPOV, possibly with alternating narrators. An epic fantasy with an ensemble cast that spans the globe? You’d miss out on so much of the story trapped with one narrator.
First-Person POV
I… hate writing first person POV. I don’t hate that it exists and I love reading it, I just can’t write any of my characters in FPOV, it’s too weird. To anyone struggling to give their characters strong and distinct personalities, stepping away from the “I/me” pronouns may help you.
With that said! FPOV is by no means any lesser than any other POV. FPOV is, obviously, when your narrator narrates with terms like “I, me, we, us.” You are reading in their head, their train of thought, their internal monologue.
Pros: This about as intimate a look inside the story as you can get, you are zero degrees removed from the action. The biggest benefit is how well the audience comes to understand the narrating character as all your time is spent with them exclusively, unless the story head-hops. Every scene is colored by the lenses of the narrator’s biases and the knowledge they have of the story.
Cons: Unless you head-hop, you risk losing out on much of the rest of the story. Other characters can only be viewed through the biases of the narrator and any story happening away from the narrator is unseen, because they’re not there to witness it.
FPOV gives you the most flexibility in coloring your text with personality, think Holden Caufield from Catcher in the Rye. Every page bleeds with Holden’s thoughts and musings on his world.
However, FPOV, versus TPL, traps you within the senses of the narrator. You can’t get away with lines like “he didn’t notice XYZ happening in the background” or “he might have missed this subtle tell” because there’s zero room for ambiguity unless your tone allows for some comedic freedom.
You can say things like “Later, I would reflect back on X” or “Had I been paying attention, I might’ve seen Y” but those lines are almost always followed up with “But I didn’t in the moment and now I’m screwed regardless.”
If you find yourself stuck with a scene of a bunch of characters of all the same gender and you have to balance your paragraphs with names versus pronouns, FPOV does, at least, remove one of them for you with “I”.
Beyond simply using “I/me” pronouns, you can go the route of Anthem. Ayn Rand’s Anthem is written in first person, but with plural pronouns and when I read it in middle school, I spent the entire novel thinking all the different “theys” and “we’s” were entire groups of people acting and not the a singular being because it was middle school and pronouns weren’t a topic of discussion.
There was a scene where “we” (gender neutral singular protagonist) sees “them” (gender neutral love interest) doing… yoga or something beyond a fence, and in my head I was picturing like, ten dudes watching ten ladies all do synchronized yoga. It was funky.
Second-Person
This one almost doesn’t count because it’s so rare. Second person is reserved, I think, for three situations: Romance/erotica, self-help books, and horror/thriller works.
SPOV uses terms like “you think, you see, you feel, you do X”. It’s self-indulgent and I’ve never actually read a fictional work written in it because it’s too weird. SPOV is as intimate as you can get, because you are the protagonist.
I scroll right past all the "character/reader" fanfics but they have their audience, and I've never picked up an actual published romance novel written in SPOV, but I'm sure they exist for their own wish-fulfilment purposes.
SPOV in horror deserves more content and attention. The most iconic example I can think of is the storyline through Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. In it, the narrator tells the tale of you, intrepid hero, who find yourself in the middle of the Thriller, and details your demise at the claws and teeth of disco zombies.
Second-person fiction relies on what your protagonist does more than who they are, as too-strong of a personality limits the reader’s ability to get in the headspace of their fictional VR-goggles. In the “Thriller” example, the story tells entirely of your physiological reactions (you’re paralyzed with fear, unable to scream, etc), not your desires and emotions, beyond terror.
Third-Person Limited
*cracks knuckles* My Favorite! TPL is very much like FPOV, except instead of using “I think” you’d use “He/she/they/it thinks”. TPL is still contained within the box of following a singular narrator at any given time, but the audience isn’t experiencing the novel through the eyes of the narrator, they’re watching it through the imaginary cameraman following them. Depending on how much personality you write your narration with, TPL can be nigh indistinguishable from FPOV.
If your narrator experiences pain, or gets knocked out in a car crash or a fistfight, the narration is still limited by their consciousness and awareness. The scene doesn’t continue on after the narrator passes out.
Also, as a writer, it’s a lot easier to write scenes your audience demands (like romance) if you’re aro/ace and/or too squicked out trying to write it in first person but still wanting to deliver. Same goes for violence/ horror/ combat, anything with a lot of emotion and drama that you can’t bring yourself to write as “I feel such and such so much right now” can be intimidating. Then it’s not happening to you, it’s happening to those poor schmucks unlucky enough to be characters in your book, and then it’s much more fun.
TPL and FPOV both favor the internal monologue, the only difference is the pronouns through which the narration is given. TPL also tends to distinguish direct thoughts by the narrator within the style of the text. This means putting the thought in italics most of the time, or adding in a “she thought” like a dialogue tag.
Third-Person Omniscient
If third-person limited was being the cameraman, third-person omniscient is being the bird watching from above, or God. TPO is a “third” narrator who tends to not be an active character within the story, just “the narrator” watching every other character go through life.
In some cases, you could make the omniscient narrator also in first person as a non-character, but they would have to be some higher power, or make your story a fourth-wall-breaking meta commentary, a story within a story told by an unrelated storyteller.
TPO suffers from lacking intimacy. You’re two degrees removed from the thoughts and feelings of the character and the story is colored with the personality of the narrator, not any one character you’re following (if there is at all a personality to the narrator).
Children’s books tend to be TPO because they’re not that deep. When I say children’s books I mean like Rainbow Fish, or the Very Hungry Caterpillar, not children’s chapter books.
But on the other hand, many classics are written in TPO. I believe the A Series of Unfortunate Events books are written in TPO with a very colorful omniscient narrator. The Chronicles of Narnia are also, I think, written in TPO with the absence of a distinct narrating personality, it’s simply the voice through which the story unfolds (it’s been a while since I’ve read either and can’t recall).
TPO tends to lend itself toward fantasy and fairytales because a colorful narrator just fits the tone and the unnatural reality of your world. The narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events would be very out of place in a book like The Great Gatsby because it would only distract from the story, instead of enhance it.
Head-Hopping and Multiple POV
Head hopping should only be used when you do it on purpose in an established FPOV or TPL work. If you change perspectives mid-narration without any indication that you’re doing it on purpose, that’s just sloppy writing and you’ll confuse the heck out of your readers.
The term “head hopping” tends to be used when writers do it poorly, versus simply “multiple narrators”. This works best with an ensemble cast, or when the author doesn’t want to limit the breadth of their story to only the protagonist’s perspective.
The narration can shift between any number of characters, but I wouldn’t go higher than five or six with rare exception because it’s too many characters to follow. You can follow the protagonist and a couple of their friends, the protagonist and the villain, the different members of team protagonist – the list goes on.
It’s entirely up to you how you want to physically structure your POV shifts. Some authors jump between multiple narrators within a chapter (myself included), some give entire chapters to one narrator at a time, or a chunk of chapters in a row. Sometimes the narrating POV is signaled with a giant banner for their name or the scene opens with the narrator’s name within the first few sentences to let you know who you’re following.
POV shifts without the big banner works best when your narrators have very distinct personalities coloring their narration. How each character speaks, how they see their world, the idioms and metaphors they use in their internal monologue, the cadence in how they tell the story, the syntax -- all of these help justify your choice to shift POVs beyond the flexibility of telling more story. You know you’ve succeeded when you can write an entire page in the new POV without naming your narrator and your audience still knows who it is.
Head-hopping in bad form can be an easy mistake to make, and easiest to make in third-person limited, because you’re already one degree removed. Unless you are writing from a telepath’s perspective, any time you begin writing the thoughts and feelings of a non-narrating character in TPL, you are head-hopping.
If Jane is narrating an argument with Mark, and we cut aside to suddenly start detailing Mark’s feelings on the matter, we have broken the POV. Jane cannot know exactly what Mark is feeling, she’s not Mark. Instead, Jane can look at him and assume what he’s feeling based on his expressions and extrapolate on what he might be thinking.
In which case her thoughts on the matter would be tagged with “Mark seemed to think X,” or “Mark looked hurt”. Doing it incorrectly looks like “Mark thought X” or “Mark was hurt”.
You can get away with “Character was hurt” with any of the following tacked on:
“...they thought/presumed/assumed/suspected/guessed”
“... that much obvious”
“... they could tell”
So long as the tag reflects how the narrator interprets the scene.
Multiple narrators inevitably lend themselves to a longer story and thicker book and a perfect example is the Percy Jackon series and its follow-up, Heroes of Olympus.
Percy Jackson is a rather unique case of shifting POVS. The first five books of the series are entirely FPOV from his perspective. We follow Percy and only Percy the entire time.
The second series hops between TPL perspectives, with the benefit of exploring other characters…. and the massive disappointment of your protagonist for five whole books being completely omitted as a narrator from his final run (but that’s for another day).
The books of the second series are doorstoppers because there’s so much more plot with multiple arcs now being written for each one. HOO is a “banner style” head-hopper, giving chunks of chapters to a narrating character at any given time and following only three to four narrators for a given book.
There was a book our teacher read in elementary school, blandly titled School with a peace sign and a bus on the cover and I have no way to google it because of its stupidly generic title. In it, the entire short story has at least ten narrators and it worked because there weren’t ten different story arcs, it was all the same story just told through ten different perspectives. It was less an “ensemble cast of rich and fulfilling heroes” and more “ten children each argue why they remember the incident the best”.
Twilight hops in later books, with entire swaths of Breaking Dawn divvied up between the three main characters. The Red Queen series and Throne of Glass also hop and it seems, to me at least, that, regardless of genre, multiple narrators are much more common in recent publications.
Maximum Ride is a funky rule-breaker. For reasons unknown, the author decided to write in FPOV for the protagonist, then jump perspectives to TPL for the other characters. It’s incredibly distracting. Why not just write the entire story in shifting FPOV? Or entirely in TPL?
There is plenty of merit to not rotating narrators. I like doing it because I like not being limited to only following one character through the entire story. However, creativity thrives in a box and not knowing what's happening outside that box can be equally entertaining.
Following one character also forces the plot to center on that character (though doesn't always give you a protagonist with agency). It leaves plenty of holes for the audience to fill in missing information as well when side characters are off doing whatever and the narrator isn't there to witness it.
Present vs Past Tense
Tense, like head-hopping, is easy to mess up if you’re not careful, and both have their pros and cons.
Books written in present tense have the benefit of being “present”. You follow the action as it unfolds, uncovering mysteries as the characters do with the added oomph of it simply being written as it happens.
Hunger Games is written in the present and the added “oomph” is that this is a hellish dystopian battle royale and it being “present” subconsciously clues the reader in on the possibility that Katniss might not survive to tell the story back to us, she can die at any moment.
Books written in past tense have the option to get cheeky, since the narrator survived the story long enough to go back and write it down for you. Some books might begin with a retrospective in the opening lines or the prologue by the narrator warning the reader about the story ahead or insisting they were an idiot for letting things play out the way they did.
Most stories written in past tense don’t think twice about it. Past tense is simply comfortable for the author to write in and it by no means spares their heroes from dying simply because of the narration having to exist.
If you tend to write in one or the other and you switch it up for a different story, you, my friend, have quite the uphill battle. You might find yourself having to comb back through entire chapters worth of content fixing your verbs because you just didn’t notice the accidental shift.
Future tense does exist, but it tends to go with stories written in second person and I’ve never read a fictitious work with it, only in bits and pieces in self help books and, again, that doesn’t really count.
TL;DR: How you narrate your work and in what tense it’s written is generally divorced from the genre and story you’re writing and has no impact on how the story reads. Any book with an ensemble cast benefits from multiple POVS and books in the fantasy/ supernatural/ fairtyale genre can benefit from an omniscient narrator, but it’s hardly required. First person POV gives the broadest opportunity to develop one singular character as intimately as possible, at the cost of everyone else. Third person POV removes the reader directly from the action, but is hardly inferior and can be nearly identical to FPOV save for the difference in pronouns used.
Regardless, inexperienced authors beware, head-hopping and tense-changing are easy mistakes to make. Stay vigilant and keep practicing and anything is fixable.
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