Points of View in Fiction
A deep dive for writers.
If you write fiction, ‘point of view’ is likely one of those things that you feel like you should have a good handle on. But it can be slippery and confusing.
Today, I’m going to spend some time exploring point of view and give you some ideas for choosing which one you’ll use when you write your novel.
Point of view refers to two things. Which character’s head is the reader in and from which point of time is the story being told.
There are three character points of view: first, second, and third person.
And there are three point-in-time points of view: past, present, and future tense.
Character
I like to think of point of view as a camera lens. When we see an image, the camera is pointing at something. Someone is on the other side of the camera. The camera is showing us that character’s point of view.
Of course, that’s simplistic. And it overlooks someone. The author.
Look at the image at the top of this post. There is a (crazy) guy leaning away from a tower of some kind, looking over a city. He’s not holding a camera, but if he was, he’d be seeng the city that’s in front of him.
