Choosing point of view and tense before you draft

Point of view and tense are the two decisions that touch every sentence of a book. Change your mind about a character’s name at chapter twenty and it is a find-and-replace. Change your mind about who is telling the story, or when, and it is a rewrite of every page.

That is a good reason to make the choice on purpose, before the draft rather than halfway through it. This post walks through what each option gives you and what it costs, and ends with a quick test that settles the question better than any amount of thinking about it.

Why the choice matters so early

Point of view decides what the reader can know. If the story is told from inside one character’s head, the reader learns things when that character does and not before, which is the engine of most mysteries and a lot of romance. If the narrator can see into several heads, or stand above all of them, the reader can know things the characters do not, which is the engine of dramatic irony and most epic fantasy.

Tense decides how the story feels in time. Past tense sounds like a story being told; present tense sounds like a story happening. Neither is more correct, and readers adjust to either within a page. But they set a rhythm, and switching between them by accident is one of the most common reasons a draft feels unsteady.

First person

I opened the door. First person puts the reader inside one character’s voice. You get intimacy and a strong personality for free: everything on the page is filtered through how that person sees, so the narration itself becomes characterisation. It suits memoir-like fiction, crime with a sharp narrator, young adult fiction and any book where the voice is the draw.

The cost is reach. The narrator can only report what they see, hear or are told, so every important event has to happen in front of them or be explained to them afterwards. Watch for scenes where the narrator conveniently overhears things, and for a narrator who describes their own face in a mirror because there is no other way to get it on the page.

Close third person

She opened the door. Close third stays near one character at a time, often as near as first person, but the narration is not literally their voice. This gives you most of the intimacy with a little more freedom: you can describe the character from just outside, step back for a line of landscape, or use a vocabulary they would not.

Close third is also the easiest way to write more than one point of view. Each scene belongs to one character, a break or a new chapter moves to another, and the reader always knows whose head they are in. The guide to scenes and chapters explains why one point of view per scene is a rule worth keeping.

The common trap is head-hopping: drifting from one character’s thoughts to another’s inside a single scene. It is not forbidden, but done by accident it blurs the scene, because the reader stops knowing whose experience they are having.

Omniscient

Neither of them knew, as the door opened, that the house had been sold that morning. An omniscient narrator knows everything and can say so. It is the voice of a lot of classic fiction and of big, many-stranded stories, and it lets you summarise, foreshadow and move between characters freely.

It is harder to do well than it looks, because the narrator becomes a character in its own right, with opinions and a tone that have to stay consistent across the book. Omniscient narration that is really close third with occasional slips tends to read as a mistake rather than a choice. If you pick it, give the narrator a voice worth listening to.

Second person, briefly

You open the door. Second person is rare in novels and common in short fiction, interactive fiction and some memoir. It can be startling and intimate, and it can also become tiring over a long book. If you are drawn to it, write a chapter before you commit to three hundred pages.

Past or present tense

Past tense is the default for most fiction and nearly all memoir. It is invisible: readers stop noticing it after a paragraph, and it lets the narration look back, summarise and reflect without strain.

Present tense gives immediacy and a sense that nobody, including the narrator, knows how this ends. It is common in thrillers, young adult fiction and literary fiction. It makes flashbacks and summary a little more awkward, because every step back in time needs a shift into the past tense, and it can feel breathless in a long book if every scene is pitched at the same urgency.

A few honest questions help:

• Does the narrator know how the story ends? If they are telling it from afterwards, past tense is natural.
• Is reflection part of the book’s pleasure? Memoir and slower literary fiction usually want past tense.
• Do you want the reader to feel that anything could happen next, line by line? Present tense helps.

More than one narrator

Many novels follow two or more point-of-view characters. That works best when each one has a reason to be there: a part of the story only they can show, or a view of events that changes how we read the others. A useful test is to ask what the book would lose if you cut a narrator. If the answer is nothing much, their scenes may belong to someone else.

Keep the pattern readable. Alternating chapters, a name at the top of each chapter, or simply a strong change of voice all help the reader settle into each new section quickly. Keep an eye on balance too. If one narrator vanishes for a third of the book, readers notice.

In Author Sweets, each scene can carry its point of view, and the Plot grid lays the scenes out by chapter and by point of view, which makes it easy to see who carries which stretch of the book and where someone goes quiet.

The one-page test

The quickest way to choose is to stop deciding in the abstract. Take one scene you can already see clearly, ideally an important one, and write the same page three times:

1. In first person, past tense.
2. In close third person, past tense.
3. In whichever option tempts you most: present tense, omniscient, or a second narrator’s view.

Do not polish them. Write each one fast, in one sitting, then read them aloud the next day. Usually one of them sounds like the book, and the others sound like exercises. If none of them does, you have learned something about the scene rather than the narration, which is also useful.

If you need a scene to try it on, any of the writing prompts will do, and you can try the editor without an account if you want somewhere quiet to write them.

Changing your mind later

Sometimes a draft tells you the choice was wrong. A first-person narrator turns out to be the least interesting person in the book, or a present-tense draft starts to feel airless at the halfway point.

If that happens, finish the draft in the original choice if you can, and make a note of the switch for revision. Converting a whole book is a mechanical, line-by-line job, and it is far easier on a complete draft than on half of one, because you know by then what the book needs the narration to do. The guide to revising a first draft suggests doing it in the scene pass, after the story is settled and before you polish any sentences.