167: How Do You Choose a Point of View for Your Novel?

 

If you've ever felt confused or unsure about what point of view your novel should be in, this episode is for you! And for more information on point of view plus everything you need to know to write and edit your novel, check out the Idea to Book course: https://stan.store/thekatiewolf

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How Do You Choose a Point of View for Your Novel?

Hello. Welcome back to your big creative life podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching on YouTube. It's really meant a lot to me. I guess the last couple of weeks, I've gotten messages and and reviews, and I just, I don't know, I really appreciate people who are listening to the podcast, downloading the episode, sharing them. It is really encouraging to me. It helps new people discover the show, and it also just kind of lets me know, like, what episodes are resonating with y'all, so you can always share that with me. I'm always open to that, and I love hearing what episodes are the most helpful, because ultimately, this podcast is for y'all. I mean, I can listen to myself yap only to a certain point.

 

So, yeah, okay, something I've been doing, I had a thought that I wanted to share with you all before we get into point of view, which is what this episode is. I'm doing something. I'm challenging myself to post a vlog almost every single day, or every single day, if I can, for the next 30 days. I've talked before about vlogs in that I am fascinated by vlogs, and I really want to take them apart and, like, understand what makes a good one. And for me, part of that involves making my own to see what works and what doesn't, as far as, like, camera angles and the shots that I'm getting and the editing. I mean, because editing is such a massive part of creating a vlog, and I don't know, it's been kind of a fun experience for me in the past. And so I decided, okay, I want to get better at vlogs. I haven't quite cracked the code on how to do them yet, that I in a way that's, like, really engaging and good, I guess.

 

So let me do this. Let me force myself to do this. And it's been fun. So far, I haven't created that many. I'm still at the very beginning of it, but yeah, and it's funny, because I the thought that I wanted to share with you all is how this relates to like content, but just anything, creative, writing, whatever. So often we are afraid to be seen trying. We are afraid to have other people perceiving us when we are in the process of figuring something out or getting better at something. This is true with with writing. You know, we just want to a lot of us like, want to fast forward to the part when we start writing that where we're like, Good, we're just, we just want to be good, and we want to get there as quickly as possible. We want to figure out some secret hack that's just going to like, allow us to go from zero to 100 in the span of, like, 24 hours, to be a good writer right out of the gate. And we don't want people to like, perceive us or read our work when we're figuring it out and trying to get better.

 

And the same thing is true of content. I mean, I wanted to create vlogs for a long time, but I didn't, because I would look at people who had been doing it for years and who had like, millions of views on their vlogs, and I was like, well, I could never do that. Are you kidding? First of all, my life isn't interesting enough. But second of all, no one would watch it. I don't know how to edit this, and so I just didn't even bother. I didn't even bother doing it. And I will say there's a lot of of mindset stuff tied into content, right? Because we we when, if you create content, you can't help but pay attention to how it's perceived, meaning, the engagement, the views, the likes, etc. But what I'm trying to do, at least for these 30 days, is just release it like I don't care if a vlog gets 150 views, I do not care. I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing it for a content exercise. It's helping me get over my fear of being seen. It's helping me learn how to create this type of content, because I really do enjoy it, and it's almost like a digital diary for me, sharing, sharing my life, showing my days, all that.

 

So I am in real time, getting over this lingering bit of fear I still have about people perceiving me when I'm trying something new, and it's kind of cool, actually, I kind of, I don't know I was gonna say I wish I started it sooner, but that's not true, because I don't think I could have done this sooner to really detach as much as I am from the outcome, and just like creating these and putting them out there, and if people watch them, great. If not, that's okay. I don't care. So again, it's just, it's been fun to kind of do this creative process of creating these vlogs and to just, yeah, I don't know. So I just, I guess I was thinking about that whole like, I. Our fear of being seen trying, and how much that can hold us back from from doing the thing that we want to do, whether it's writing content, some other type of creative work, whatever it is. And so I would encourage you to really look at that, because I think it's something that, again, can can hold us back from doing the thing that we want to do and then putting it out into the world.

 

So that's my little sermon for the beginning of this podcast episode. But we're talking about point of view. And we're talking about point of view because a couple people have requested this episode. If you are not following me on Instagram, go follow me @KatieWolfWrites, but sometimes I will put on my stories like, Hey, I'm thinking about doing an episode on this topic, what are your questions? Or if I'm feeling kind of uninspired, and like all my ideas are kind of boring, I'll put something on my stories that's like, Hey, what are, what are some podcast episode ideas? What would y'all want to hear? And a couple people have requested point of view, like choosing point of view for your book. So I want to talk about this, because this is not something that you have to decide when you write your first sentence.

 

But then also if you want to have a single point of view character or multiple points of view character, so Okay, have some notes. Let me pull these up. Okay, first person is using the pronouns, I, my, mine, like I did this. I went there, blah, blah, blah. It allows for a level of immediacy and kind of like we're just, we're just very intimate with the main character, because we're in their head, we're we're getting access to their thoughts and feelings in a way that is very close. There's less distance between the reader and the character whose point of view we're in. Then there is in other points of view, like second or third person you are, you are obviously limited to the perspective of the person that you are in. So if you're if we are in the point of view of one character, and you are writing in first person, where I walked to the town square, I decided to buy a coffee because I was tired from the night before, whatever, blah, blah, blah, we are limited to that person's perspective. So we can only see what they can see, and we can only get access to their thoughts and feelings.

 

I mean, you can do a little bit of discovery writing, where you kind of figure things out as you go, but especially if you're doing multiple points of view as opposed to just having one single point of view character, that's something that you have to know fairly early in the writing process, because you have to structure your book that way, where one scene or chapter is from the perspective of one person and then it switches. That's something that you have to know pretty early on, so it's definitely worth thinking about. So what I want to do in this episode is just go over first and third person points of view. Just give brief overviews of those. I'm only going to touch on second person briefly, just in case you're not familiar with really what those are. And we'll talk about the different types of third person. And then I'm going to give you a few things to think about that can help you decide if you are struggling with choosing a point of view for your book choosing point of view, meaning first person, second person, third person.

 

So this person can tell us, they can give a description of the town square, the main square, where they're getting coffee, how they're feeling. They can reflect on the night, the poor night of sleep they had the night before, right? But they can't jump into someone else's head to tell us what that person is thinking or feeling. They can't jump to something that's happening across town because that person isn't there. They're not physically present. They can't see it. Now we're going to talk about omniscient a little bit later, but first person omniscient is very rare, so I'll touch on that briefly. Just put a pin in that. We'll come back to omniscient when we get into third person. So that's first person from I've heard a lot of discussion about this on book talk and Bookstagram, where some readers have strong feelings about first person. There are some people who love first person. There are some people who do not really love it, because it feels like a diary entry to them, and they just don't enjoy that. I mentioned that not because I think that's the deciding factor, because what you have to remember is that you are never going to please everyone.

 

There are going to be some people who will not pick up your book because it deals with a character who has blonde hair, or, I don't know, I'm just making something up here, but like, the point is, readers could find all kinds of things to like, all kinds of reasons to just not pick up a book. And so I don't want point of view to be one of those things that you're like, Well, I have to do this, because this is what readers want. No, there's no consensus among all readers about point of view. So you have to make a decision on it as the author, and you have to do what you think is best for your story. Okay, first person is a little bit more common in some genres than others. For example, romance, there's certain genres where it's just a bit more common, just like with the whole reader thing, it doesn't mean that that should sway you one way or the other. I kind of just want to give you information here about these different points of view.

 

Okay, second person is very rare because second person is you. You walk to the town square. You decide to get a coffee because you need caffeine, because you slept really poorly the night before, using the you pronoun, and it's not common in fiction. It's pretty it's pretty rare because it's difficult. It's difficult to pull off. There's a barrier to entry. It's not as accessible to a lot of people because it's just not common. So that's all I'm going to say about second person. I highly doubt anyone listening is going to be writing their novel in second person, if you are, okay, but yeah, I just, I, we're just going to gloss over that one. Okay? Third Person. Third person is he, she, they, and there are a few different types of third person. So the most common, I would say, is third person limited, which is where, if you remember when I talked about first person, which is where, you know, if we're in a character's head, we can only see what they're seeing. We can only know what they're thinking and feeling. It's the same thing with third person limited.

 

So he walked to the to the town square. He decided to get a coffee, because he'd slept so poorly the night before. We could only see what that male main character, the point of view character is seeing, we can only, he can only tell us what he's thinking and feeling, because he can't know what's going on across town if he's not physically there. He can't tell us about it. He cannot tell us what's going on in the thoughts of another character. It's just like real life, right? I always think about this. It's like the narrative physics. I cannot tell you what is I'm in a co working space right now. I cannot tell you what's going on out in the parking lot because I'm not physically present. I'm not looking out a window to see it, so there's no way for me to know what's happening. And I also can't know a guy just walked by outside my little pod I'm in. I can't know what's going on in that guy's head. I can't know what he's thinking and feeling.

 

So it's the same with your characters when you're in this limited perspective. That's why it's called limited. Um, so limited attack characters perspective, okay, third person omniscient. So omniscient is one of those perspectives that is tricky for new writers. I'm just going to say that not to try to convince you that you shouldn't use it, but I just want to include a little note of caution that it's difficult to pull off in the best of cases. But I think in when you're a new writer and you're just wrapping your head around things like point of view and character interiority and narrators. It's just tricky. It's hard to do. So the I looked at the definition of omniscient because I wanted to see where this what exactly what this meant. It means having infinite awareness, understanding and insight. So we in third person omniscient, we are not limited to just one character. There is an unnamed narrator who is narrating, telling us about things that are going on in different people's perspectives.

 

So if you are writing third person omniscient, you can have a you can use third person and say, you know, he went to the main square to get coffee because he needed caffeine because he slept poorly the night before, across town, his younger brother also decided to have coffee. The younger brother woke up early because he blah, blah, right? So we can jump to different characters perspectives, and we can also get a sense of what those characters are experiencing and feeling and thinking internally. There's a narrator who is telling us all of these things with omniscient perspective. I always think about a camera that is like zoomed out and looking over different parts of this world and zooms down to check on one character, then zooms back out, goes down to check on a different character, then zooms back out. They might tell us about a scene going on, like maybe in our example, with the town square in the coffee shop there, the unnamed narrator is just narrating all kinds of things going on. P. Little bustled around this town square. Susie, who was late for work, was kicking herself for missing her alarm on the other side of the town square. Andy was rushing because he felt blah, blah blah, like making all this, these terrible examples up.

 

But the point is, we can get into different characters perspectives. So the big risk with third person omniscient, and why it's tricky, is, you, how do I want to say this? There is a risk? Well, okay, let me. Let me just share this. When I'm editing a novel that's in third person omniscient, I will usually see one of two things, either the person is just jumping around way too frequently, like, let's say there's a scene where there are six characters present every two lines, we're switching back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, this character, this character, this character, and it gets very hard to read. And that's like something called head hopping, which is basically where we're jumping from the point of view of one character to the other and back, and it gets jarring. Or the other thing that happens is they're saying that it's third person omniscient, and there is this unnamed narrator, and we're able to get in the heads of different characters, but it's only like two characters or three. It's not everyone, and the bulk of the story is focused on one character, and then just like one line later in every like four chapters will be from a different character's perspective.

 

And in that case, a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times when my feedback is this feels more like third person limited because we are sticking with one character for 97% of this book. So why? There's not really any point to us zooming out and going to a different characters perspective? Because we're not learning anything. We're not really getting a lot of yeah, we're just not learning anything. So third person omniscient. Let me pull up. I have so y'all. I have a online course that's called idea to book that is a self paced online course that has nine modules on basically everything you need to go, everything you need to know to go from idea to fully written, edited book. And I have an example. There's a module on what to know before you start, and the module covers point of view, and it also covers tense, like if she if you should do past tense or present tense. And I have an example in there from Little Women, like a passage that illustrates omniscient so I want to just read part of that to you right now, so you get an idea of what that looks like. Sorry, I should have had this up. I can also tell I'm getting Oh, my throat is getting scratchy. Well, not getting scratchy. It is scratchy. Ah. Okay. All right.

 

So here's a little snippet from Little Women that illustrates omniscient point of view. Okay, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna include one line of dialog, and then I'll share the omniscient paragraph. So all, all the characters, all the four March sisters, are sitting around. It's Christmas time. We've got father and mother and each other said, Beth contentedly from her corner, the four young faces on which the fire light shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again, as Joe said, sadly, we haven't got father and shall not have him for a long time. She didn't say, perhaps never. But each silently added it, thinking of father, far away where the fighting was. How you know that this is omniscient is this unnamed narrator is describing what they're seeing. This unnamed narrator is describing the four young faces where the fire light is shining, brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again.

 

And then each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was. If we are in one character's point of view, like if we were in Jo's point of view, she couldn't know that her sisters were silently adding this bit of dialog to themselves. And thinking of father far away, she could guess based on their body language, based on their expression, right? But she can't know for sure what's happening in someone else's head, what experience they're having. So that's how you know that this is omniscient. Now, if you want some examples of this, I believe Game of Thrones is written in third person omniscient. Sometimes fantasy. I think fantasy is a little bit more common to have third person omniscient. Maybe it's not.

 

Anyways, there are other examples online if you want to look at some and look at some passages. But that's just an example. Okay, so let's cover now that we kind of know that the gist, oh, I should say there is third person objective, but that's very rare as well. It's not when there's third person objective, you're not including any thoughts and feelings, any interiority from the point of view character, which is not common in fiction, because when you read fiction, you want to get to know the character. You want to know what they're thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling and what they're seeing and how they're interpreting that experience, right, how they're feeling about other characters.

 

So it's just not it's just not common to have that. So how do you choose? I talked about genre already, and I talked about level of access that there is a little bit more distance if you're writing in third person, like he did this, she did this, they did this, etc. It's slight, but that is something to consider. If you use first person, the reader is going to be a little bit closer to your protagonist or the person whose point of view that we're in. And I think it's also important to just pay attention to how the story is coming out. Like when you sit down to write this story, is it coming out with third person pronouns, or is it coming out in first person? It's always something that you can switch. If you get halfway through and decide it's really not working in third person and you want to switch to first person, you can, you can just change the pronouns. I had this experience where I was writing a book, my thriller, my second book, scoop, and I initially started it in third person because I wanted to challenge myself and push myself to have it be third person.

 

And it was like pulling teeth. I just could not do it. And then I switched to first person, and it was so much easier. And I ended up just keeping first person because I felt like it really gave the reader a sense of closeness with my protagonist. It was all in her or her point of view. There wasn't any switching. So I just I liked that, and I just said, I decided to keep it so that's something to consider too. Whatever is going to make it easier to get the draft out, just go with that. And then for the decision of multiple point of view characters or a single point of view character, what you have to think about is, how many main characters do you have? There are some exceptions to this, but most of the time, if you have a point of view character, they're going to be a major character in the book.

 

Sometimes there are stylistic authors will make a choice to have, like a prologue be in the point of view of a minor character, and then the rest of the book is from a different character's point of view. That definitely happens, but it's not super common, because there have what you have to remember about multiple characters point of view characters is we have to have a reason to be in their point of view. So if there's something that we have to see, like something that the reader has to see happening, but our main character, one main character, is not there for it, they're not present, then it would make sense to switch to a different character's point of view. This is common in romance, where it's a dual point of view. You have to the both of the people in the the couple you know, alternating their points of view, that makes sense, because they're two main characters in this couple getting together. If you have an ensemble cast where you have four or five main characters, it's a group thing.

 

And the book is about how these people interact, what journeys they go on, then maybe it would make sense to have multiple point of view characters, where you just alternate between people, but, yeah, just make sure that they're important, that they have their own arc in the story, that we're not just getting their point of view for no reason. Someone asked me once like, well, what's the max number of point of view characters that you can have, and I don't, I don't have an answer for that, because it just depends. You know, yeah, it just depends. But I think if the danger of having too many, like, if you have 14 point of view characters, you are naturally going to be a little bit more surface level with all of them, because we're not, because each point of view character is just not going to have as much page time, whereas if you only have three point of view characters, we're going to get to spend a lot more time with these characters in their point of view, as opposed to if you have 14. So that's something to consider too.

 

Okay, I think that's everything I want to say about point of view in this episode. That's not a comprehensive thing of everything as it pertains to point of view, of course, because this is a big topic, but hopefully this gives you some things to think about that can help you make the decision of how many point of view characters to have, and also what point of view to to write your book in. Um. I think that's everything. Yeah, I'm gonna put a link to, I have a link in the show notes that's to my website that has different information on how you can work with me, a free resource, like a character profile, just all my links in one place. But I'm also gonna paste the link to my idea to book course. So if you want like a course, you're ready to write your book, you want some training on how to go from idea to fully written, edited book, because there's also information on how to edit your draft once you're done, then definitely check that out. It's yours to keep. Once you purchase it, you get to keep access. You get to watch the videos as many times as you want. There's a workbook in there. I talk about my five draft editing method. I talk about my three snowflake method for outlining. So there's a lot of good stuff in there that can help you in the process of writing your book. All right, thank you everyone for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf