Point of view (POV) is the eye or camera lens through which the reader views the story. For a writer, choosing what point of view is right for your project can be difficult. Maintaining it can be even harder. And if you find you have to change the point of view of your story half-way in, you have to change everything. Changing POV means a full rewrite. So, you really want to give it some careful thought from the start.
Broadly, your choices when it comes to point of view are:
First person: I flew off in a spacecraft.
Second person: You flew off in a spacecraft.
Third person: She flew off in a spacecraft.We’ll look at each point of view in more depth below. But first, let’s talk a little about the importance of choosing the right POV for your project from the start.
I originally wrote my literary novel A Recipe for Bees from the character Rose's point of view. But another character, Augusta, was my protagonist; the story was about her. Rose was her friend who had a limited view into Augusta’s life. And yet I had chosen to write the story from Rose’s POV. While you don’t necessarily have to follow the protagonist’s POV to tell a story, Rose couldn’t offer the depth of perspective that Augusta, who had lived the events, could. So, Rose wasn’t a great choice as a POV character. What was I thinking? Predictably my editor pointed out the problem. My immediate feeling was exhaustion. Again, a change in point of view changes everything in a project, so what I was facing was a complete rewrite of the novel. But my editor was right. I had kept the reader at arm’s length from the action of the novel by writing Augusta's story from Rose's point of view. Ugh. So, I got to work and rewrote the novel from top to bottom from Augusta's point of view. Believe it or not, I got that next draft written in about six weeks. The book went on to be a finalist for the Giller Prize, and I'm still proud of that book, but geeze I wished I'd started writing the darn thing from Augusta's point of view in the first place.