Who Should Be Telling This Story?

Every story is told from a point of view (POV). Who is telling the story determines the story that can be told, because it determines what the reader can know about actions, characters, events, thoughts, and motivations. The more limited the viewpoint, the more limited the reader’s access to information and the more personalized that information is. The more diffuse the viewpoint, the more comprehensive the reader’s access to information, but also the less personalized that information is. If you want to write a sweeping historical saga, a close first person viewpoint might not be the easiest. If you want to write an intimate story of personal transformation, distant third person will make your work harder.

What POV should your story be in? If the story is told through more than one character’s viewpoint, which character should be telling which scenes? Asking these simple questions can provide a strategy for editing and refining as well as drafting a story.

I am revising a work in progress from distant third person to close third person POV. I’ve already written a post about how writing in closer third person breathed more life into the characters and how that changed the story. In my revisions, I also discovered that sometimes the problems with a chapter or a scene stemmed not from whether it was ‘close enough’ third person, but whether it was being told by the wrong character. I solved several of those problem scenes by rewriting them from a different character’s POV.

The first step in that revision was choosing which character should be telling the story or scene. Particularly for complex scenes with many characters and many interwoven plot details, the best POV character was not always obvious. Each knew pieces of the story puzzle, but not all; each was there for their own reason, but didn’t know why some of the others were there.

I developed two questions that helped me determine which character provides the best POV for a scene. One question is about the emotional impact of the scene, the other is about the information needed to understand the scene.

• Emotional Impact. Which character is the most affected by the events of the chapter? That character is a good candidate to provide the point of view because their viewpoint can add the most emotional engagement to the actions and events.
• Critical Story Information. Which character knows the most—the actions, events, and information—and can reveal to the reader the essential story elements necessary to understand what’s happening in the scene and to follow the story arc into the next? That character is a good candidate to provide the point of view because they can directly impart that information to the reader as the story unfolds.

While it’s obvious that telling the scene through the most emotionally affected character keeps the stakes high, if that character can’t tell the reader the information necessary to understand what’s going on in the story, then the author has to find another way to impart that information. Those ‘other ways’ are often places where the writing breaks down. The necessary information is offered to the reader through head hopping (temporary shifts in POV), through often intrusive narrative or expository sequences, by (not always believable) fortuitous plot circumstances, or by some other contrivance. How many scenes have you read where some coincidence or red herring character imparts the missing action or information necessary to lead the characters to the next step in the plot? (Don’t get me started about Tolkien and eagles.) In any story, a couple of these coincidences are believable, but they are noticeable, and after awhile they become glaring.

            So if you are struggling with a scene or a chapter, and how to make it more emotionally engaging, or how to impart the necessary story points to the reader when the POV character doesn’t know them, try writing the story from a different viewpoint character. Ask yourself if there is a character who is more emotionally affected or knows more than the current POV character. Rewrite the chapter from that other character’s point of view. Make the stakes low at first. Do it as an exercise, without committing to which character’s POV will be the final version.

In my experience, whichever version I ended up finally using, writing a scene from more than one point of view clarified how the actions of each character intertwined. That clarity helped me see strategies to remove the red herrings and lucky coincidences. It also revealed when information was not needed for the reader to understand a scene. In some cases, withholding that information to a later chapter helped increase tension.

For example, in one scene I reworked, two characters discover a long-hidden secret. One of the characters, the protagonist, had been looking for it. The other character, a side character, was blindsided by it. The chapter was initially told in the protagonist’s POV, but it was always a weak scene. The biggest emotional payoff was that the POV character found what he was looking for–a small triumph with little emotional resonance. Since he’d already known what he was looking for there was also nothing new added to his understanding of the story arc by the discovery.

Then I tried rewriting it from the side character’s POV. The discovery of the secret took that character by surprise and made them rethink not only recent experiences and events, but all they’d grown up assuming to be true. It made them question their own loyalties and doubt the trustworthiness of the other character. And it made them think long and hard about what to do with the valuable secret.

That POV shift made the scene far more emotionally resonant. As the character thought through all the consequences of the discovery it also offered a world of possibility for imparting new information to the reader. This gave me a way to give the reader the necessary information without resorting to red herrings or other contrivances.

In choosing new POV characters, you do have to be open-minded:

• Which characters are allowed to be viewpoint characters? For a number of the rewritten scenes, it turned out that the best ‘character’ to tell a scene was often one who had not previously been given a ‘voice’ in the story. This increased the number of viewpoint characters, and I had to weigh the value of the new POV against an already pretty-large list of voices in the work.
• How much story information has to be revealed during a scene? You have to be willing to leave the reader in the dark about some events. Shifting the viewpoint character might mean gaining access to a whole new level of information, but it also might mean losing access to other necessary story information.
• Which emotions do you want the scene to highlight? The most emotional character might have negative rather than positive emotions, or evil rather than good thoughts. Sometimes, the most affected character was traumatized by events, sometimes overjoyed. In at least one instance, telling the scene from the antagonist’s viewpoint was the best choice, even if it meant casting immoral actions from a positive point of view.

Who tells your story? Is it from one point of view? Multiple? How did you decide on that viewpoint?

Beautiful Iris, by Lizapopova143, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jeanne Kisacky

Jeanne Kisacky trained to be an architect before going back to her first love–writing. She studied the history of architecture, has written and published nonfiction, and has taught college courses. She is the author of Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940.