Ask Sally #22 Point of View

Can you explain the different points of view, and how to ensure you stay strictly in one POV or when you can get away with changing POV?

Point of view is one of the hardest things for new writers to get right, and I was no different. Remaining within one point of view takes a lot of discipline and control, but once you get it right, you seldom get it wrong again.

I’ll explain the three basic points of view within literature as opposed to ‘life writing’ i.e. journalism, fly on the wall, autobiographies, which we’re not dealing with here.

note: I’m only using examples from my own work because I own the copyright to it, so won’t get into any trouble. They’re not intended to be the be all and end all of writing.

1st Person

I went to the shops. I bought bananas.

This is the most limiting point of view a writer can use. The I telling the story cannot tell us what other people are thinking, or what’s going to happen to them next. They can only tell you the story as it happens to them. For a lot of new writers the first person narrative can be the easiest to stick to. This is an example from my story, Clarence, in which the first person narrator is talking about Mrs Bailey. Notice that she doesn’t know what Mrs Bailey is thinking. She can only glean it from what Mrs Bailey tells her.

We sit down to drink a cup of tea together, and she tells me about her life. All the charities she’s involved with, the luncheon clubs, her friends and their trips to the seaside in summer. She’s been a widow for ten years, but she’s still hanging in there, making every moment count. I’d assumed her life is empty but it isn’t.

First person omniscient is almost unheard of, though I would argue that Jane Eyre is told in 1st person omniscient as it is the older Jane telling us the story of what happened between her and Rochester, and whilst she knows the outcome, she chooses to withhold information until it’s relevant that the reader knows it. Another such novel is Great Expectations, where Pip is telling his tale as an older man, who already knows what happened to his younger self.



2nd Person

You went to the shops. You bought bananas.

This is the least used point of view in writing, though it is effective in epistolary novels (novels that are told via letters or diaries, like Dracula or Les Liaisons Dangereuse), when someone is addressing another character in a letter. I’ve seen very few short stories using this device, unless they happen to be in the form of a letter. Here’s an example from an unpublished story of mine:

I bet you didn’t expect to hear from me. Perhaps you won’t even read this. But if I know you as well as I think I do, you will. Because it’s all about you, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?

Having said that, I recently wrote a story that’s been entered into a competition that’s told completely in the second person, but actually is about the person telling the story. This is the opening paragraph:

He tells you that he’s come all the way to town - six miles - to ask if you’ll thread his needle. It’s on the table in front of you resting on the matchbox that he’d carried it in. You’re thinking ‘you’re taking the piss aren’t you?’

It took a lot of control to stay in that mode, and not slip into the I, but I hope (?) it’s unusual enough to get the judge’s attention.

3rd Person

She went to the shops. She bought bananas.

The most commonly used point of view, but it’s also easy to get it wrong. There are a couple of ways to write in third person. Third person limited, third person universal omniscient.

Third person limited (called the over the shoulder perspective) is when the narrator (not the author) sticks with one person throughout the story. This is the most commonly used perspective in modern literature and should be familiar to all. Think Pride and Prejudice, told from Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view throughout. Until Elizabeth has experienced something, the reader doesn’t know about it. Most short stories are in third person limited. The reader discovers the outcome alongside the character.

Sometimes a writer might shift the narrative from one person to another, looking over several shoulders. An example of this can be found in modern novels like The Day of the Jackal, which switches points of view between the Jackal and the policeman who’s pursuing him. Neither knows what the other is thinking or doing, though the reader sees both points of view. A lot of crime writing uses this to good effect, and whilst ostensibly following the sleuth, the narrator sometimes switches to another character’s point of view, to drop hints and red herrings.

Third person universal omniscient is a rarer used device. In universal omniscient, the narrator, still speaking in the third person, knows everything that happens, and might use this to drop hints. It’s something Stephen King does a lot, to create a cliffhanger ending to his chapters.

An example of universal omniscient might be:

Dave watched as Cathy’s plane took off. It was the last time he saw her alive.

The narrator hasn’t told us how Cathy is going to die, but we know she is. The next part of the story might deal with how she dies. Perhaps the plane crashes, or she lands okay but is murdered when she reaches her destination. A lot depends on how the novel has been set up, of course. We might already know that a terrorist has planted a bomb in the cargo hold of the plane, and the rest of the novel might deal with Dave getting revenge for losing the love of his life.

Wikipedia has a good article which includes other uses of point of view, but I think we’ve got enough here for our short story or novel.

Keeping to point of view

Now, how does one avoid slipping out of point of view? The important thing to remember is that if you’re following just one character, they can’t possibly know how others are feeling. They might guess, but they don’t know.

Here’s an example of a scene where there’s a clumsy point of view shift.

Dave tried to explain how he managed to lose the mortgage repayment. Cathy was so angry with him she could hardly bring herself to speak to him.

Okay, Cathy might well be furious with Dave, and it might be obvious to him that she is, but the second sentence moved into Cathy’s state of mind, and we’re following Dave in this scene, not Cathy.

Here’s a better way of doing it:

Dave tried to explain how he managed to lose the mortgage repayment. Cathy looked furious.

“Just go away, Dave. I don’t even want to speak to you at the moment.”

(Yes, I know ‘She looked furious’ is very tell-y, but we’re dealing with pov here, not show and tell.)

The point I’m making is that whilst the narrator is with Dave, we can only ever know what Dave thinks Cathy is feeling.

To avoid these subtle point of view shifts, think of using words like looked, seemed, as if, when trying to describe the feelings of other characters. Or better still, show how they feel using dialogue.

Switching points of view

If the narrator wants to switch between character’s points of view, the demarcation lines need to be much clearer. Either use separate paragraphs for separate character’s pov’s, or in a longer work, use separate chapters.

Here’s an example from one of my most recent stories, where the point of view switches between Anne, who’s a prison psychologist, and Kitty, who has been sent to the Wilderness as punishment for murdering her children. The extract doesn’t show entire scenes. It’s the end of one scene and the beginning of another.

Anne followed the warder to the facility, where Mags lay curled up in a foetal position on one of the gurneys. Her bulky body burst through the safety barriers on either side.

“We’ll have to do more tests, but we can’t reach her,” said the doctor. “She’s catatonic.”

“Keep me informed. She’s due to be going home next week.”

Anne wasn’t surprised to find she didn’t care about Mags. Some of the women moved her with the stories of hardship, but Mags gave off the glow of pure evil.


Kitty managed to move the rock first. It irritated her because the more she tried to walk towards it, the further away it seemed, always just out of reach. Why she should need the rock, she didn’t know, but she had a feeling about it that she wanted to prove.

She concentrated on bringing the rock to her. To begin with her mind jarred with the strain, leaving her with a stinking headache for the rest of the day. Not that there was anything but day in this place. That was something else that bothered her. She wasn’t an expert on the movement of the sun and moon, but she felt sure there should be a few hours of night.

I hope that shows how clearly the points of view change.

I was told a couple of years ago, by a writing teacher, that you must NEVER change POV in a short story.

I've been to many a class/workshop where they say you should never swap POV as it is unacceptable.

Hear that sound? It’s me banging my head against the wall again. Yes, I was told this too. Again it’s one of those rules that creative writing teachers spout without giving good reason. As you can see from my Dave and Cathy example above, a clumsy point of view change doesn’t work. If you’re going to change points of view, you need to be consistent, and also even out the changes.

I went through a phase of having an entire story in one point of view, then, probably because I had that person die, changing the pov in the very last paragraph. That’s probably (definitely!) a clumsy way of doing it, though I have seen it work in other peoples’ stories.

There isn’t a lot of room to change point of view in a short story under 2000 words, so if you can stick to one character’s point of view, it probably makes for a tighter story. Those that you’ve seen in magazines obviously worked out well and it was probably clear that the writer had tight control over the narrative changes.

If your point of view changes are even, for example, two paragraphs per character, rather than changing mid-paragraph or sentence then you might just get away with it. I’ve found it a good device for the longer stories that I write for anthologies and Amazon Shorts.

As with everything, it depends what the story needs. Does it need point of view changes? Or is there a way you can put forward the information you need to give without changing point of view?

It’s like everything else in writing. Be aware of the dangers, but if it works, then go for it!

Incidentally, if you want to read a novel that’s got loads of pov changes, some mid-sentence, then you could try Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, though I doubt very much she'd get away with it nowadays.

I hope that's helped a bit. If there's anything unclear, please feel free to ask questions.