Choosing the Perfect POV: The Writer’s Quest for the Holy Grail

Note: This is the sixth and last in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived here on my website as downloadable PDFs.


Finding the perfect form of POV for your book is a lot like the legendary quest for the Holy Grail: one wrong choice can spell your doom. Just ask the characters in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Photo by Madder of Grail in Valencia, Spain

In that film, Walter Donovan is a rich American businessman so greedy for eternal life that he collaborates with the Nazis in order to track down the Grail. But the immortal knight who has been guarding the chalice for centuries warns, “The true Grail will bring you life; the false grail will take it from you.”

Undeterred, Donovan chooses a glitzy gold cup and drains it in one smug gulp. Moments later, his face caves in, his eyeballs shrivel up, and finally his entire body crumbles to dust as he shrieks in agony and terror.

The knight looks on dispassionately and deadpans, “He chose…poorly.” Oops!

Donovan’s lethal fate is precisely what you want to avoid when deciding which form of POV to use in your book. You certainly don’t want to make a poor choice that can suck the life out of your carefully-crafted story. But how do you choose wisely?

As I’ve suggested in this series on “Demystifying Viewpoint,” one way to understand POV is to think of it this way—which character is wearing the glasses through which readers view all the events of the book?

I’ve written about both single and multiple POV, and confessed that I am something of a single POV Puritan; both as a writer and a reader, I prefer books where the narrative glasses sit firmly on the nose of just one character from beginning to end.

But I tried to give equal time to multiple POV, since so many fine books, both for kids and adults, are written this way—with the viewpoint glasses switching from one character to another as the book unfolds.

I even wrote about omniscient POV: that form of viewpoint where none of the characters in the book is wearing the viewpoint glasses. Instead, the author reserves those for herself, in one guise or another.

But despite mocking myself a little as a Single POV Puritan, I do realize that this is not the best way to write every novel.  It may sound like heresy for me of all people to say this, but some types of books are more effective if readers can experience them through the perspective of multiple characters—or even via the voice of an all-knowing narrator.

So how do you choose which character should wear the viewpoint glasses? How do you decide which form of POV is best for a particular project?

The answer is straightforward: you need to choose the viewpoint technique that will work best to accomplish your literary goals. That’s the fundamental question you need to ask yourself when you first sit down to write. What is your purpose with the book—to scare readers, or to make them laugh? To make them cry or to ignite them with anger? To lead them on a wild adventure, or to make them ponder emotional truths or existential questions? Your choice of viewpoint can help or hinder you in any of those goals.

In a blog article on multiple POV, writer Christine Kohler has written eloquently about her reasons for choosing that technique for her YA historical novel, No Surrender Soldier [Merit Press, Fall 2014]. Her thought process can be a model for any writer struggling to make this pivotal decision. 

“[The book]…is told in two POVs because the WWII soldier, Isamu Seto, is hiding in the jungle. In 1972, when Kiko’s story takes place, no one knows the soldier exists. If I had told the story in a single POV, then it might have still been suspenseful for Kiko to discover the soldier, but I would not have been able to show the reader how and why Seto hid and survived for 28 years in the jungle. Both POVs are in past tense since this is a historical novel.

“However, 15-year-old Kiko’s POV chapters are in first person, whereas Seto’s chapters are in third person. I wrote it this way so the reader could identify with Kiko, and not Seto. The third person puts a bit more psychic distance between the reader and the character.”

Kohler made a daring choice here; it was a risky move to write even part of a novel aimed at YA readers from the POV of an adult—and an adult who is likely to be viewed as a “bad guy” by readers, at least initially. But she had a compelling narrative reason to do so—that’s the key. Then she was careful to mitigate the risks she took by making another wise decision. She kept the sections in her Japanese soldier’s point of view in third person in order to give readers a “safe zone.” Using third person means that young readers don’t have to get that close to Seto if they don’t want to; they can still cling to young Kiko as their proxy in the book.

•Genre: Note also that Kohler is writing a historical saga, one that spans three decades. A saga can be historical, covering a broad range of time; geographical, covering a sweeping event that happens in many places at once, such as a war, natural catastrophe, or the zombie apocalypse; or speculative, by which I mean a fantasy or sci fi book that builds an entirely new world [or universe] for readers. As much as it pains a single POV Puritan like myself to say this, such sagas might be too limited, too narrow in their scope, if told from the viewpoint of just one character. Such books work best with either multiple POV or omniscient narration. This way readers can get the full impact of the big event by viewing it through the lenses of several different viewpoint characters, or an all-knowing one.

On the other hand, it might work better to stick with the single POV of your detective if you are writing a mystery, where you want readers to compete with the hero in a race to solve the crime, based on clues that only your detective-protagonist knows.

Single POV can also work well in a book where you want to scare readers, such as a horror or ghost story. In books like this, it’s the unknown that ratchets up the level of fear, so the limited knowledge of a single POV character can be highly effective.

A romance, on the other hand, might be more intriguing if you tell it in the dual POV of both parties in the relationship. [Although this use of POV is common in adult romances, in YA romance a single POV is often used instead.]

• Audience: Consider your target audience as well. A more complex use of viewpoint—such as rotating through several different POV characters in the course of a novel—can well with older YA readers, but could possibly fall flat with middle graders. Multiple POV can confuse or put off younger readers, who aren’t as experienced with literary techniques and may respond better to a simpler, more direct approach.

I learned this the hard way with a middle grade ghost story that I’m working on. In the first draft, I had seven—count ‘em, SEVEN!—viewpoint characters. I was convinced I had the writing chops to pull this off; can you say over-confident and delusional? I was 150 pages into the manuscript before I finally realized that one of my characters had staged a mutiny. A quirky little guy whom I had originally thought was just a minor character turned out to be my real hero, so I had to rewrite the entire blasted book. [The fact that the revision turned out to flow so naturally was my clue that I was doing the right thing; I should have listened to my inner Puritan and stuck with single POV in the first place.]

• Reader relationship to hero: Perhaps most importantly, consider your protagonist. What kind of relationship do you want readers to have with your hero or heroine? The more strongly you want your readers to identify with your hero, the more likely it is that you’ll want to use single POV, whether in first or limited third person: perhaps even in Deep POV.

On the other hand, if you are writing a book where the main character is an anti-hero, or even a villain, using first-person narration or a tight single third-person POV might be too claustrophobic for readers. Who wants to be stuck in the head of a sadistic bully for an entire book? When you don’t expect readers to like your protagonist, you may want to hold them at a distance by using a more distant form of third person POV, or even omniscient. Or you can minimize the amount of time readers have to spend with your unlikeable protagonist by switching off periodically to other, more sympathetic characters using multiple POV.

• Literary goals: Finally, don’t forget to consider how the form of POV you choose can help you achieve your other literary goals for the book. Maybe you are writing a story where much of the dramatic impact at the climax comes from a twist that you have cagily been hiding up your sleeve for the entire plot. Your choice of POV is absolutely critical here, because you need to control the information that readers have in order to keep the twist hidden. This is a time where omniscient POV would almost certainly be the wrong choice: the narrator’s all-encompassing knowledge would make it very difficult for you to avoid lying to readers–which isn’t playing fair with them—and yet not reveal too much too soon. Try multiple POV for this kind of book where the twist is vital, so that you can use each POV character to dispense carefully-controlled snippets of information.

Books with a twist also work well in single POV, especially with a kind of viewpoint character called an unreliable narrator. Edgar Allen Poe is brilliant at this, as is the Golden Age mystery novelist Agatha Christie in the classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Another masterful example of the unreliable narrator is Louise in Katherine Paterson’s Newbery-winning Jacob Have I Loved. Louise narrates the entire book in first person, and without spoiling the twist, let’s just say that she is wearing green-tinted glasses through the entire novel. Her perspective of events is definitely biased, in a way that misleads readers as to the motivations of other characters, yet without ever lying to them.

As you can see, there is a lot to consider when you start a new project and need to decide how you are going to tell your story. You need to think about your genre, your target audience, and the relationship you want readers to have with your main character.

But most of all, you need to have a clear understanding of what your story goals are. When you know what dramatic effects you want to create, what emotional reactions you want to engender, and what themes you want to explore, then you can choose the right pair of POV glasses from your literary optical shop, so that readers will see what you want them to see.

Thank you for joining me in what has turned into a bit of a saga itself: it took me nearly two years to complete all six articles in the series. My hope is that buried somewhere in this torrent of words is advice that can help you make your stories shine.

As the Grail knight said, “Choose wisely” when deciding what POV technique to use in order to bring life to your book.

[© 2015 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.]

Power Can Go To Your Head: The Perils of Omniscient POV

Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

Library of Congress

Some of my favorite books are written in omniscient viewpoint—and yet omni POV is my least favorite form of narration. It makes even the most modern of books sound antique—and don't even get me started on the almost ubiquitous head hopping to be found in novels with omniscient narration.  I am convinced that such head hopping is the leading cause of vertigo among avid readers. Seriously. The National Institutes of Health should do a study.

OK, let me remove my tongue from my cheek for a moment. If you have read the earlier installments of this web series on viewpoint, you will already know that I am just a teensy bit prejudiced in favor of single viewpoint.  I'm not all that fond of shifting or multiple POV; and I have just made it obnoxiously clear that omni POV, as I will call it for short, is also a member of my Hall of Shame.

That being said, I adore books like Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket—both of which make use of omniscient narration. And I'm not just pinching my nose, holding my breath, and vowing to "get through it" when I read these books either. I actually enjoy what these two gifted storytellers are able to accomplish with their skillful use of omniscient viewpoint.

So what separates good from bad when it comes to omni POV? And why do I think that it is a very dangerous form of narration, especially for new writers?

Before I talk about that, let me back up and make sure it is clear  exactly what omniscient viewpoint is. It comes in several different flavors, the distinctions between which can get fairly subtle.  In the book The Power of POV which I have recommended multiple times in this web series, Alicia Rasley divides omniscient narration into three basic kinds: objective, classical omniscient, and contemporary omniscient.

For the purposes of this piece, however, I don't think it's useful to delve too deeply into the distinctions between them. If you're interested, read Rasley's book [which I think you should do anyway].

I think the most helpful way to look at omniscient narration is simply to think of it as another kind of third person. We are already familiar with limited third person, where a book is written using he/she but the perspective remains inside the mind of one or more of the characters.

Well, in omniscient narration you are for the most part outside the viewpoint of any of the characters. Thus you can think of omni POV as a distant or impersonal form of third person rather than a personal one; or an exterior form of third person rather than an interior one.

Photo by Steve Wilson

Whatever it is called, when you write in omniscient narration you are not limited by anything any of the characters know—hence the name omniscient, which means all-knowing. Omni POV is a good way to let readers in on information that you don't want your hero to know just yet. For example, if your main character is trying to sneak up on the lair of the villain, you can increase the tension and suspense for readers by letting them know about the evil minions lurking in the shadows, while at the same time keeping the hapless hero in the dark about the danger that awaits him. " Three men with guns stood as still as statues on the other side of the door whose lock Archie had just successfully picked."

Omniscient narration is also handy in certain genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, and sweeping historical sagas. Here a writer can use omni POV to do two things. First, the all-knowing author can use her omniscience to fill readers in on necessary history or backstory that again, no one character might know.

Second, if it's important to the book for the author to keep track of how multiple characters are affected by something like a war , natural catastrophe, man-made apocalypse, or epic quest, omniscient narration is a smoother, more seamless way to do that than a frequently-shifting multiple POV. [Which can end up feeling like a game of musical chairs; when the chapter stops, readers wonder, which character's chair do I have to scramble to sit in next?]

But in a touch of dramatic irony that fiction writers can appreciate, it is the very strengths of omni POV which can lead to its doom.   The all-knowing writer's ability to expound at length on absolutely any character's backstory, any event's history, any fantasy world's provenance,  or any sci-fi gadget's fascinating inner technology can all too quickly lead to the dreaded "information dump." That's what it's called when a writer allows the characters to go into hibernation and the plot to stall out while she goes on and on for pages of exposition, in what amounts to a term paper within the novel. Boring!

And if you're not careful, omniscient narration can lead you to reveal too much, too soon—which can ruin a good thriller, ghost story, or mystery.

I also think that omniscient narration can sound old-fashioned to today's readers, since many of the classics that we grew up on—or were forced to read by our English teachers at school—were written in omniscient narration. So even if a book was published in the 21st century, if it is written in omniscient POV, we feel a sort of literary déja vu when we read it—a flashback that makes the modern story feel as if it were a relic from the 19th century.

But to me the number one failing, the Fatal Flaw, of omniscient narration, is its impersonality. Readers don't know who it is that is dispensing this encyclopedia of information. Is it some god-like narrator, or is it the author? If it's the latter, is he or she wearing an invisibility cloak that we're supposed to pretend not to see, or is this some kind of purposeful meta-fictional insertion of the writer's persona into the book?

Zeus
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen

Or is the narrator an eerily amorphous no one at all? That's the hallmark of what Rasley calls objective  or camera's-eye POV.

And not only are readers unsure of who the narrator is in omniscient viewpoint, and what their relationship to that narrator is supposed to be, they also aren't given the opportunity to get know any of the characters all that well. As a consequence,  readers may never bond with any character. That emotional distance heightens the risk of alienating readers from the book all together, to the point that they put it down for good.

Writers who use omniscient POV know this, which is perhaps why you see a lot of what is called "dipping," or momentarily slipping into the viewpoint of one of the book's characters. JK Rowling is a genius at this. The first chapter of  Goblet of Fire is a superb example of how to write omniscient narration well.

Midway through the chapter, Rowling makes the graceful narrative glissade that is called dipping. Within the space of one paragraph, she descends gradually from the stratospheric heights of omniscience. First she slips into the heads of several nameless village boys, all at once, in a kind of joint or communal POV, telling us that they teased the crippled old gardener Frank Bryce simply for the cruel fun of it.

Then, in the very next sentence, Rowling descends even further. This times she dips into Frank's head to tell us that Frank has misinterpreted the boys' motives. He believes that they torment him because they blame him for the murders of Tom Riddle and his family—though we already know that those murders bear the unmistakeable stamp of dark magic.

The fact that Rowling changes POV twice in one paragraph could mark this as head hopping—the worst of the writer's Deadly Sins. Indeed, it can be difficult to know when a writer has transgressed, crossing the line from dipping to head hopping, and I am probably a harsher judge of that than most.  Nonetheless, I think Rowling avoids being branded with head hopping here primarily because for the rest of the chapter, she stays in Frank's head. If she had jumped back out of Frank's head again, that would have been head hopping.

But it's a narrow escape, and that's my point; it's devilishly difficult to avoid head hopping when you write in omniscient narration and try to dip. Harsh judge that I am, I think that  author Trenton Lee Stewart made that mistake in his best-selling middle grade novel The Mysterious Benedict Society.

Stewart uses omniscient narration throughout the book, though he frequently dips into several of the characters' viewpoints. Most of the time, he stays in a POV long enough to avoid head hopping—but not always. Look at this passage where the adult mentor is telling the four young characters about a challenging task ahead. One of them gets a little nervous and needs a bathroom break.

...and then Mr. Benedict added, “Now, do you truly need to use the bathroom, or can you wait a few minutes longer?” [Omni POV]
Sticky truly did, but he said, “I can wait.” [Sticky's POV]
“Very well...” Mr. Benedict said [Omni POV]

To me, going into a character's head for just one sentence, and for no compelling plot purpose, is head hopping. So with apologies to Mr. Stewart, I do believe that's what he's done here.

The point is, if a  talented and experienced author can make that kind of slip-up, what hope do the rest of us have of avoiding the same trap? It is just too perilously easy to go astray with omniscient POV.

So proceed at your own risk. If you are writing the kind of book that might benefit from the peculiar powers of omniscient viewpoint, then go for it! Just keep your wits about you at all times, and stay on the lookout for the pitfalls that await the unwary writer with this form of POV.

[© 2015 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.]

Next—Which POV technique is best for you?

Confessions of a Single-POV Puritan

Note: This is the second in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts here on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

I'm beginning to think that I’m obsessed with viewpoint, to the point where I’ve turned into a POV prima donna. Or what novelist and writing teacher Alicia Rasley called a “single-POV Puritan” in a 2009 blog post on the subject.

Me, a Puritan? Heaven forfend.

It didn’t used to be that way. Before I started writing fiction, I didn’t pay any attention to whether an author used omniscient or first person narration, multiple POV or the tight single perspective of one character. All that mattered to me was whether the book gripped my imagination. I didn’t care how the wizard behind the curtain created that story magic; I just wanted to be swept up in it.

But after many years on the other side of the page, as a writer, I’m definitely aware of viewpoint in everything I read, to the point where it’s difficult for me to shut off the Inner Editor in my brain long enough to simply enjoy a book. And it drives me mad when an author skips blithely from one character’s POV to another. Perhaps I’ve developed a kind of empathy deficit disorder in my later years, but how am I supposed to care about anything that happens to these characters when I don’t get the chance to spend more than a few paragraphs at a time with them?

Yes, yes—I’ve read the sage advice that it doesn’t matter which viewpoint you use, so long as you do it intentionally, as a tool to accomplish a specific effect in your novel. And although I agree with that, it doesn’t shake my almost visceral aversion to both multiple POV and omniscient narration.

Maybe part of the reason for my “puritanism” is that children’s writers like myself are forced to use viewpoint more cautiously than do writers for adults. The standard advice I give to my writing students is that whether they use first-person or limited third-person narration, they should zoom in on one young character in the book and tell the entire story through that child’s eyes and ears, her heart and mind. Why? For one thing, the younger the reader, the less experienced they are with narrative techniques. So using a more “sophisticated” POV technique such as multiple viewpoint might confuse them.

Also, developmentally-speaking, kids have a more egocentric view of the world. Since each child sees herself as the center of the solar system of her life, it’s easier for her to comprehend a book in which the young main character occupies a similar position.

I go beyond that. Use a tight single viewpoint, I advise my students, to help readers slip inside the skin of the protagonist, to the point where kids can no longer tell where their identity stops and that of the hero begins. This total immersion into the viewpoint of the main character is very similar to Deep POV, about which I will write later in this series. It enables kids to bond so closely to the hero or heroine that young readers experience and react to the events of the plot as if they were happening to them.

Hypocrite that I am, I violated this single POV rule in my first novel, Cheshire Moon. I wrote from the perspective of a secondary character for a few chapters, which I felt was necessary to show how the protagonist, a young deaf girl, was [unbeknownst to her] sharing the same series of dreams with a boy she had just met.


But I used limited third person and stayed mainly in the head of my young hero in my second novel, The Door in the Lake. Is it a coincidence that this book has been much more successful than the first, earning an ALA Quick Pick and a Scholastic Book Club selection? I don’t think so. I believe that my use of a single POV enabled kids to connect in a deeper, more immediate way with the protagonist, a boy who had mysteriously disappeared for two years and returned to his family with amnesia.

The middle grade novel on which I am working now has an even tighter focus on the eccentric young main character. It didn’t start out that way. In the first two iterations of the manuscript, I was actually brazen enough to think that I could get away with seven—count ‘em, seven—different main characters. Yikes! Fortunately, my critique group cured me of that particular delusion.

And they were right. When I allowed a young boy whom I had initially conceived of as a minor character to take center stage, the entire book came to life in a way it never had before. By focusing on his POV, and his alone, I found my way into the novel.

When children’s writers decide what viewpoint to use, we don’t just consider the needs of the story—we also stop to think how our choice of POV will affect readers. It’s that perspective—the viewpoint of readers—that I think gets lost sometimes when writers discuss POV.

I think we need to realize that viewpoint is more than just a literary tool, a way to shape a book and showcase our virtuosity; we need to recognize how it’s going to affect readers on an emotional level. It isn’t just about us, in other words, and what we need as writers; it’s about readers, too. And whenever we use the more distant forms of viewpoint, whether that be a shifting, multiple POV or omniscient narration, we increase the odds that readers won’t be able to form a deep connection with our characters—and thus with our books.

At least, that’s been my experience—not just as a writer, but as a reader. Perhaps it’s all my years in children’s literature, but I find myself increasingly impatient with novels where the author skips from the POV of one character to another.

Maybe that’s just me. I posted this question about multiple POV on my Facebook page, and got a thoughtful response from someone who said that when done well, she was eager to get inside the heads of different characters to see how each one responded to plot events. This added to her enjoyment of the story. This is an adult reader, talking about a specific adult novel, and she did note that she got confused when a writer changed POV without warning, especially within a chapter or scene.

So perhaps that’s my real problem. It’s not multiple POV itself that I dislike; it’s poorly-done multiple POV.

I just finished Reckless, by Cornelia Funke. She changes POV with each chapter, rotating between several characters, including two brothers, their respective love interests, and two of the villains. Though I appreciated the artistry of Funke’s prose, and the subtle way she explored themes in this first installment of a new fantasy trilogy, the multiple POV left me cold. It was far too easy for me to put the book down, forget about the characters and the travails they were enduring, and decide I’d rather be reading another book instead. By the closing pages, I finally did start  to care—but not about the heroes. I found myself actually feeling more sympathy for the villains instead, which I don’t think is what Funke intended.

Based on the book reviews that I see on Amazon, I’m not the only reader who feels this lack of connection with the POV techniques used today in so many novels. Readers today are more savvy about viewpoint—and about all the various scaffolding tricks we writers use to structure our tales. And they respond to this in their reviews, complaining when they feel an author has jerked them around too much with a constantly-shifting point of view.

I’m not saying that we should pander to readers. As writers, we have stories to tell, and I believe that we need to do that in whatever way seems right and best to us.

However, I think we would be wise to stop for at least a moment to consider the repercussions our literary choices have on the aesthetic experience of our once-and-future readers. There is a balance we ought to consider, a trade-off between the artistic effect of a particular viewpoint technique and the impact it has on readers. If a POV technique succeeds in either a literary or structural sense, and yet fails to capture the imagination of our readers, is it worth it?

“Only connect,” EM Forster famously wrote. In my view, that should be the measure we employ to gauge whether all this distant, peripatetic point of view is worthwhile. Remember what readers want—to get caught up in the story world we are creating—and use POV in a more controlled, purposeful way to help them do that. 

Maybe I’m not a single-POV Puritan after all. What I am is fascinated and perplexed by the eternal mystery of viewpoint.

Next time: Multiple POV gets the chance to defend itself in Fight Club: Multiple POV Claws Back.

Who Gets the Glasses? An Easy Way to Understand POV

Note: This is the first in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts here on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

New writers may be forgiven for being utterly lost when confronted with decisions about how to employ viewpoint in their stories and books. There is a bewildering array of variations. How does distant third-person POV differ from omniscient narration? When does dipping become head-hopping; and what the !@#$% do those two terms even mean?

The difficulty with understanding viewpoint is compounded when you realize that not every “expert” analyzes it the same way. Although I think Alicia Rasley does an excellent job of explaining viewpoint in her book The Power of POV, I don’t parse the different kinds of viewpoint in the same way that she does.

The nuances of viewpoint require an entire book to explain; no one can cover it all in just one 1500-word article or blog post. But I’m going to try to demystify viewpoint here anyway, adding other posts later in an entire series on the subject. So let’s get started with this valiant attempt.

Viewpoint is often called point of view, which is where the acronym POV comes from. I will use all three terms interchangeably in this article. At its most basic, viewpoint means the character through whose eyes and ears, thoughts and feelings, a reader experiences a scene or event in the plot.

Think of viewpoint as if it were a pair of glasses. You as the author have the power to give these glasses to any character you want. Whichever character happens to be wearing those glasses at any moment in your book is your POV character. For however long that character wears those glasses—a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a scene, a chapter, or even the entire book—then you can write ONLY what that character can see through those glasses. The moment you switch from what the character is seeing, hearing, feeling, or thinking to someone else, even for just a moment, you have yanked the POV glasses off his face.

Here’s an example.

Laughing at the TV screen, Ben crammed another salty handful of popcorn into his mouth. This show was so funny.

In these lines, the POV glasses are sitting invisibly on Ben’s face. We know this because we can taste the salt on the popcorn along with him, and share his thoughts about why he was laughing. The line “This show was so funny” dips into his thoughts.

Now let’s look at this next paragraph.

His father came into the room and scowled because the TV was so loud. “Turn it down, would you?” he barked.

The first eight words of the second paragraph are still in Ben’s point of view. Through his POV glasses, he is seeing his father walk into the room with a scowl on his face. However, those glasses are yanked off Ben’s face in the last six words of the sentence [colored in yellow]. The moment I wrote the reason why Ben’s father was scowling—because the TV was too loud—I left Ben’s mind and jumped into that of his father, just for a moment.

It’s subtle, but look at it closely. Unless this is a Stephen King novel and Ben is telepathic, he can’t know why his dad looks so grouchy. When I wrote “because the TV was so loud,” I jumped from Ben’s mind to his father’s. I changed POV, just for half a sentence. And that’s what we call head-hopping, switching POV from one character to another too often, too quickly, or for too short a time.

Note: as soon as I quoted the actual words his father said, I jumped back into Ben’s mind, because that was dialogue that Ben heard.

So how do you avoid the POV error? It’s easier than you might think. All you have to do is rewrite the second paragraph like this.

His father came into the room and scowled.
Uh oh, Ben thought. The TV was too loud again.
“Turn it down, would you?” his father barked.

Instead of reading the father’s mind, I stayed in Ben’s head instead. From past experience—apparently Ben has been scolded repeatedly about the volume on the TV—Ben deduces that his dad must be angry about the noise, which is confirmed by the dialogue a moment later. But since I never left Ben’s mind, writing only what he saw (his dad’s scowl), what he thought (Dad’s mad about the noise), and what he heard (Dad’s command to turn the TV down), I’ve gotten rid of the head hopping. The POV glasses stayed firmly on Ben’s face for the entire scene. The only way we find out for certain why Dad is upset is because he says so out loud, in a line of dialogue.

*******

When you keep the POV glasses with one character for an entire scene or longer, that is called single viewpoint. That is the first of the three fundamental groups of point of view.

Note that in writing for kids, remaining in single viewpoint for the entire book is the norm, especially in easy readers, chapter books, and middle grade novels. There are variations with single viewpoint; you can choose to do it in first person (I) narration or third person (he/she) narration. But we’ll talk about that in a later article.

The second fundamental kind of POV is multiple viewpoint. This is when you transfer the POV glasses from one character to another.

This is where Rasley and I disagree. To me, any book in which there is more than one viewpoint character is multiple POV. If you are telling the book from the perspective of more than one character, then to my mind, you’re using multiple POV.

Rasley sees it differently.  To her, it’s only multiple POV if you change viewpoint within a single scene. Everything else is single POV—even a book where every chapter is told from the viewpoint of someone new. I guess she sees that as a kind of serial monogamy! :D

When multiple POV is defined as Rasley does, however, I don’t see the difference between it and head-hopping. I’ve read her book twice now trying to figure that out, and all I came away with is the vague sense that multiple POV only gets labeled—or libeled—as head-hopping when it’s done badly.

But in this series of articles on viewpoint, when I say multiple POV, I mean any book in which more than one character is used as a viewpoint character. 


Multiple POV isn’t recommended for children’s books, though you do see it sometimes, especially in YA novels. I think there are two reasons why single POV is preferable. First, it’s less confusing. Remember, your readers are young. This means that they aren’t just inexperienced with written language—they are also inexperienced with narrative techniques in fiction, so it’s easy to confuse them.

What you hope to do in your book is bring your viewpoint character to life so vividly that readers start identifying with him or her closely—to the point where kids actually feel as if they are slipping inside the skin of the viewpoint character and experiencing every moment of the story with her. So every time you jump into a different character’s POV, you forcibly eject kids from this character they’ve been inhabiting. And that poses the danger not only of confusing readers, but of alienating them as well. They might even put the book down and not come back when you evict them from a character they’ve come to know and love.

The second reason I think multiple POV is not the best choice is that it’s very difficult to pull off, especially for a new writer attempting his or her first novel. It’s a challenge even for experienced authors to do multiple POV smoothly and well. When you are first starting out, I think it’s better to stick with single POV. [True confession time, however; in my first novel, Cheshire Moon, I did use an alternating viewpoint. But I had a good reason for doing so, I promise. I’ll write about that later in the series.]

Which brings us to the third fundamental group of viewpoint, omniscient narration. Rasley breaks this down into several different types, but let’s keep it simple. Omniscient narration is when none of the characters in your book gets to wear the POV glasses: you keep them for yourself. Or for some invisible narrator who, in a god-like manner, knows all the characters inside and out. The omniscient narrator hovers above the entire book, knowing everything about both the characters and the plot.

The various forms of omniscient narration are less popular today than they used to be, though you still see it in fairy tales, fantasy epics, and in some picture books.

So there you have it. Later in this series we’ll get down and dirty with more of the subtle intricacies of viewpoint. But you won’t go wrong if you think about the three fundamental kinds of POV in terms of who has the viewpoint glasses.

1. Single POV: One person has the glasses
2. 
Multiple POV: Two or more people have the glasses
3. 
Omniscient POV: Zero people have the glasses; a floating, invisible, all-knowing, all-seeing narrator’s got ‘em

Next time: Confessions of a Single-POV Puritan