All about perspectives in novels

Your novel might have a great plot. You might have great characters. You might have a great setting. But if you don’t know your novel’s perspective? It can sink everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish.

Perspective is quite nearly everything in a novel, because it’s the lens through which the reader sees what happens. And yet too often when I’m editing authors’ manuscripts, I see a mishmash of perspectives that confuses the reader and deadens our emotional connection to the novel.

In this post I’ll talk about:

• Why it’s important to have a consistent perspective
• But what about [insert book published fifty+ years ago]?
• An overview of perspectives in novels
  • The two tenses
  • Types of novel perspectives
  • What about mixing and matching?
• Pros and cons for novel perspectives
  • First person
  • First person plural
  • Second person
  • Third person limited
  • Third person omniscient
  • Third person objective
• How to choose your perspective
• How to change perspectives within a novel

Why it’s important to have a consistent perspective

Let’s be honest: the perspective in novels is weird.

In real life, we don’t have the ability to see the world through another person’s eyes, or over one person’s shoulder, while being able to read their mind, or from up above with the ability to divine what everyone in a room is thinking. But when we zoom around in a novel, it somehow makes sense that we should be able to dip into characters’ heads and read their thoughts.

Yet for something so inherently weird and devoid of real-life analogues, there are some basic things that you need to get right about a novel’s perspective (also called POV for “point of view”).

Namely: A novel’s perspective needs to be consistent so a reader knows where to situate themselves within a scene.

Think about how confusing it is to start a novel. You’re essentially starting in a completely dark room. The writer then starts to fill in details and slowly and steadily bring the world to life.

It’s much easier to contextualize what you’re seeing if you know where to situate your consciousness within the novel. Are we in one person’s head? Looking down on the scene from above? Looking over someone’s shoulder with the ability to read their thoughts?

It can be any of these approaches, it just can’t be this one: It’s disorienting to head jump from one character to another.

Head jumping means you have to constantly re-contextualize whose perspective you’re seeing the events from and constantly re-evaluate your understanding of a scene. It can make for exhausting, confusing mental labor. Don’t make the reader do it.

Instead: choose a perspective and stick with it, at least within a single chapter. The reader will settle in like a happy passenger.

But what about [insert book published fifty+ years ago]?

Yes, sure. You can probably think of a classic book that breaks the “rule” around keeping the perspective consistent and head-hops like mad. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were a time when the perspectives in science fiction and fantasy were like POV spaghetti splattered against the wall.

I want to be clear that the “rules” around perspective are not laws of physics. They are conventions that can change through time. At the end of the day, if it works it works, and if you want to head hop like mad, no one is stopping you.

But throughout the twenty-first century, the convention has moved very decisively toward a cohesive and consistent perspective. Particularly if you’re seeking traditional publication, you may struggle to be taken seriously if your perspective is messy.

Everyone has to write for the readers of their time, and readers have grown used to a consistent perspective as well. So much so that they’ve developed very strong likes and dislikes about particular tenses and styles.

An overview of perspectives in novels

First, there are two main tenses you’ll need to choose between.

The two tenses

These are:

• Past tense
• Present tense

Past tense (She said, I said) is the more “classic” approach, whereas present tense (He says, I say) can feel more modern and convey a bit more immediacy. Whichever one you choose is up to you, but there’s really only one rule: stick with the one you choose.

When writers jump around with timelines, they sometimes use present tense to denote the present timeline and past tense to denote the past timelines. Anything can be made to work, but this can end up feeling pretty confusing. Err on the side of sticking to one tense.

Types of novel perspectives

Next, you’ll need to choose your overall perspective. Here are your choices:

• First person: Told from a specific narrator’s perspective. “I did this, I did that.”
• First person plural: Told from a joint perspective. “We did this, we did that.”
• Second person: Written as if the narrative happens from the reader’s perspective, or as if it’s a conversation with an invisible character. “You did this, you did that.”
• Third person limited: Tied to one character’s thoughts and perspective at a time. If the perspective shifts, it’s almost as if the camera is handed to another character. “He did this, she did that, but he wasn’t sure why she did what she did.” Some books contain multiple third person limited POVs.
• Third person omniscient: Kind of like a god’s-eye perspective. Sometimes this means an all-seeing narrator who is almost another character, other times it’s just a dispassionate voice describing thoughts and actions. “He did this, she did that, he was thinking this, she was thinking that.”
• Third person objective: Description without any interiority. People don’t tend to write this way, because interiority is one of the qualities that sets novels apart from other forms of storytelling.

What about mixing and matching?

While most novels stick to the same perspective over the course of the novel, there are definitely novels that mix and match, sometimes even mixing third person with first person.

However, typically perspective shifts are consistent within sections and chapters, and any shift in perspective is broken up by a chapter break. If you change perspectives, the scene-setting at the start of the next section or chapter is super important to help the reader get their bearings.

While there aren’t hard-and-fast rules around what you’re “allowed” to do here, err on the side of minimizing the number of perspectives and shifts, because it can become exhausting for the reader to constantly change gears and to wrap their mind around all the different vantage points.

Pros and cons for novel perspectives

First person

• Pros
  • Inspires a sense of intimacy with the narrator
  • Interesting to see the world through one character’s POV
  • Easier to make difficult-to-believe plots feel realistic (e.g. Never Let Me Go)
• Cons
  • Constrained. We only see what the narrator sees. Difficult to show things happening out of their view.
  • Challenging to filter everything believably through one character’s POV
  • Narrator needs to be compelling
• Notable examples
  • The Great Gatsby
  • Lolita
  • Moby-Dick
  • The Secret History
• Tips
  • Your reader only knows what your narrator knows and only sees what your narrator sees. It’s really hard to show the reader things that are happening “offstage” that the reader doesn’t know about. You’ll need to shift the plot accordingly.
  • The narrator doesn’t have to be a good person, but they have to pass the “stuck in an elevator” test. Would you want to be stuck in an elevator with this person for six hours? Nothing kills a first person narrative quicker than an annoying narrator.
  • The narrator also doesn’t have to be reliable, but if you go this route, make sure the reader sees glimmers of the truth filtering through via secondary characters and objective events.
  • Go easy on slang, exhortations, and flippancy or you’ll exhaust the reader. Again, would you want to be stuck in an elevator with someone who is saying “Ugh!” every few seconds and is VERY EXCITABLE?
  • You can get away with some omniscience in a first person narrative. (Herman Melville does this in Moby-Dick). The key here is just to make it credible that the narrator would know the things they’re narrating.
  • First person also sometimes encompasses an epistolary format, where we’re reading a character’s letters or other ephemera. In this case, the narrative is constrained by what the character chose to write down.

First person plural

• Pros
  • Narrating from the perspective of a collective can offer a wonderfully unique vantage point.
• Cons
  • It can be difficult to engage with any individual character.
  • Risks feeling disorienting.
• Notable examples
  • The Virgin Suicides
  • And Then We Came to the End
• Tips
  • Smoothly orienting the reader in the setting is crucial for first person plural in order to help the reader understand who is encompassed in the “we.”
  • Help the reader understand early on whether the “we” acts like an outside Greek chorus narrating the action, or are the active participants within a scene.

Second person

• Pros
  • It can lend a sense of intimacy via direct address.
• Cons
  • It can feel very disorienting and difficult for the reader to understand who exactly is being addressed.
• Notable examples
  • On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
  • The Reluctant Fundamentalist (sort of)
  • The Night Circus (sort of)
• Tips
  • Think twice before writing a novel this way, or at least use it sparingly. It can quickly get exhausting for the reader.
  • One common approach with second person is to make it more like a one-sided conversation with an absent other character rather than making the reader literally a character, though there is some debate over whether this is still truly second person.

Third person limited

• Pros
  • Inspires a sense of closeness with certain characters while retaining some flexibility.
  • Able to show what a character is thinking and feeling while still retaining some objectivity and distance.
• Cons
  • Similar constraints to first person. We only see what the anchoring character sees. Difficult to show things happening out of their view.
  • It can be tricky to get the voice right. The descriptions need to “sound” like the character even as you’re not literally describing things from within their head.
• Notable examples
  • Harry Potter
  • A Game of Thrones
  • The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
• Tips
  • This perspective is also sometimes called “third person close.”
  • Stick with the anchoring character. Even though it’s third person, the reader should be seeing the world through their eyes and only dipping into their head to see their thoughts.
  • Do not confuse third person limited and third person omniscient and do not mix them. They are two separate beasts.
  • Don’t head jump into another character when you’re writing in third person limited. Again, stick with the anchoring character. If you want to let the reader know what a character is thinking, show this through action or have the anchoring character observe the emotion in the other person.
  • You can get away with some cheating with third person limited. If you want the anchoring character to leave but keep the scene going, think of it as keeping a camera in place and ease the reader into the new perspective.

Third person omniscient

• Pros
  • Maximum flexibility. You can show the reader anything you want, within reason.
• Cons
  • It can be tricky to make it a seamless experience for the reader and avoid disorienting head jumping.
  • It’s harder to build a sense of connection between the reader and any one character.
• Notable examples
  • Pachinko
  • Sacred Hunger
  • From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Tips
  • The key to a good third person omniscient narrative is a unifying voice. Whether the novel is being narrated by a literal character or just by an unnamed narrator, we should be seeing the scene from one perspective rather than an amalgam of the different characters.
  • Think of a third person omniscient narrator as a clairvoyant fly on the wall or someone looking down from above but not as a combination of the characters in the room.
  • Try to dip into characters’ heads a bit more sparingly in third person omniscient and remember that we’re only doing this because the unifying voice wants us to know those thoughts in order to understand what’s happening.

Third person objective

• Pros
  • The extreme distance from a character’s POV can hide their true motivations.
  • The zoomed out style can almost feel like a documentary.
• Cons
  • There’s a reason almost no one writes a novel this way: The lack of interiority makes it very difficult to attune the reader to storytelling essentials and connect the reader to characters.
• Notable examples
  • The Maltese Falcon (sort of)
  • Hills Like White Elephants – the definitive example of third person objective, though it’s a short story
• Tips
  • Anything can be made to work, but over the course of a whole novel, making third person objective work is ridiculously difficult. If you’re considering this, I hope you’re up for a challenge.
  • Sometimes writers will employ third person objective sparingly, such as in a prologue, or to establish the overall setting at the start of a chapter.

How to choose your perspective

You may be starting the whole novel writing process with a strong preference for which type of perspective you want to employ, in which case congrats! Move straight on to the tips below.

If you’re having a hard time choosing, here are some tips:

• You must understand the difference between third person omniscient and third person limited. Some people grasp the differences between omniscient and third person limited intuitively, some people really struggle to see the difference. To keep the perspective cohesive, it’s important to understand what makes them distinct. (And yes, sometimes there’s some blurring between limited and omniscient, but start from a standpoint of understanding the differences).
• Consider the constraints of the different perspectives: With first person and third person limited, it’s difficult to show things happening outside of your character’s eyesight. With third person omniscient, it’s sometimes tricky to build a sense of deep connection with any one particular character. Think through these limitations and how you’ll structure the story with these constraints in mind.
• Think about how many characters you want to anchor to: If you want to show events through more than two or three characters’ eyes, you will probably want to go third person rather than first. It starts to feel unwieldy and confusing to have too many first person narrators thrown into the mix.
• See what feels natural: Try out a few scenes in a few different ways and see what feels right to you. Chances are one approach is just going to feel like the right one.

For further reading:

• First Person vs Third Person
• Third person omniscient vs. limited vs. head jumping
• How to bridge characters’ thoughts in an omniscient POV

How to change perspectives within a novel

If you want to combine a few different perspectives in your novel, here are some tips for making that work:

• If you want to shift the perspective from one character to another, denote the shift with a section break or a chapter break and clearly signal to the reader that they’re with a new character at the start of the next scene. Help the reader get their bearings.
• If you’re going to change perspectives, the voices should feel unique as we’ve entered a completely different character’s vantage point. It can feel distinctly flat if all of the characters “sound” the same and use the same word choices, intonation, cadence, etc.
• If you are inserting an interlude from another POV or a wildly different perspective (like a brief passage of first person in an otherwise third person narrative), make it stylistically different from the rest of the novel, like using italics or a markedly different prose style, so the reader recognizes it as an interlude or a distinct passage rather than as a continuation of what came before.
• You can get away with some cheating with these perspectives, but be very careful. Think of it like leaving a camera rolling in one place, even if the narrator happens to leave for a bit. The reader shouldn’t have to completely readjust their perspective within a scene.

Perspective is so, so important to get right, and you should give it a great deal of thought and care. If you’re able to get it just right, the reader will never even notice because the illusion will be so perfect that they’ll lose themselves in your world.

See anything I missed? Any tips or tricks? Let me know in the comments!

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Art: Stilleben mit Bordeuauxflasche by Juan Gris