Choosing Story Perspective: Direct Versus Indirect POV

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her for a three-part webinar series POV Mastery, starting on Wednesday, August 21.

You’ve developed your central story idea, worked out your plot and stakes, know your characters as deeply as close friends.

But what’s the most effective way to tell their story?

Point of view is rarely the first storytelling element authors focus on when creating their stories, but it can arguably be the most important. Strong, clear, well-chosen point of view serves as a powerful guiding force for readers: inviting us into the story, setting the tone for the journey, and subtly directing how we experience it and how we react.

Point of view is your story’s voice and its vibe, an element invisible to most readers, but which permeates their entire reading experience. Choosing the right one and executing it well may be among the single most challenging and yet most impactful elements of your entire story. Poorly chosen or unskillfully executed point of view can leave readers lost, confused, or just plain detached, unlikely to finish your book.

So, you know, no pressure!

Let’s do a quick review of the various points of view, then look at a key distinction among them to decide which might best serve your story.

Direct and indirect POV

While there are three main categories of point of view—first person, second person, and third person—in today’s publishing market two are most prevalent: first person and third person. (There are always a few outlier novels written in second person, but they tend to be on the rarer side, so we’ll focus on first and third.)

Of the four POVs most commonly encountered in today’s publishing market, they can be broadly summarized as a choice between direct and indirect point of view.

First-person (“I/me”) and deep third (he/she/they or him/her/their) are more direct perspectives. The narrative voice is that of a character in the story, usually (but not always) the protagonist. Readers live the story directly through their firsthand, immediate perspective, and the narrative is written in the POV character’s voice.Omniscient and limited third can be characterized as indirect perspectives, where there is a separate narrative voice that is not that of the character, but has varying degrees of narrative distance from them.Omniscient point of view is the all-powerful “God” voice, able to see and know anything, go anywhere, travel in time, etc. It’s privy to any character’s thoughts and reactions, but only as an eavesdropper who can report on what they observe. Readers are not privy to the characters’ direct experience.Limited third is confined to the purview of a single POV character at a time. The narrative voice can see and know and report on only what is within that character’s perspective, although it is separate from the character and as such can “notice” things within the scene that the character can’t, like someone standing behind them. As with omniscient POV, limited third has access to characters’ thoughts and reactions, but only as an observer, not directly in their immediate experience—and in this case, only with the single POV character of the scene.

For a deeper explanation of these POVs, see Picking a Point of View.

Thinking of the points of view in these two categories—direct and indirect—is a great frame of reference for considering which might best serve your story and you as an author. Each has benefits and challenges that may determine what feels most comfortable for you, what best suits the story’s genre and feel, and which offers you the perspective and narrative power that allow you to tell the story as effectively as possible.

Direct POV

First-person and deep-third POV can create a strong connection between reader and character, but they also come with certain demands and risks. The deep intimacy of these voices requires profound character development, and can risk a myopic, navel-gazey feel that can compromise momentum with too much interiority (i.e., too much thinking, not enough action).

Direct points of view offer all-access passes to your characters’ immediate perspective. That means there’s no separate narrative voice: the character is the narrator, even in the slightly artificial remove of he/she/they pronouns in deep third. (For more on this sometimes tricky perspective, see Is Deep Third an Actual POV?)

That means every single development in the story must be framed through your character’s firsthand experience of it: their thoughts, reactions, emotions, what they make of things, how they are affected, how it impacts their behavior, etc.

All good stories require keen character development, but with direct POVs authors have to develop an especially comprehensive, minute understanding of who the characters are: their upbringing and how they were shaped by it; how they talk, what and how they think, how self-aware they may be, and how much of their true inner selves they share; their ideology, frame of reference, assumptions and illusions.

You must anchor yourself as the storyteller firmly within your POV characters’ immediate perspective: see through their eyes, think their thoughts, feel their feelings—and the narrative is filtered directly through their frame of reference.

The characters’ blind spots are also the narrative’s blind spots, which can be somewhat limiting for you as the storyteller, but can also offer you opportunities to create heightened suspense and tension by using this as a device to conceal story elements from the reader.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl builds much of its suspense this way in its first-person POVs, based on what Nick and Amy each know and don’t know in their constant cat-and-mouse game. Liane Moriarty uses deep third to similar effect in The Husband’s Secret, availing herself of each POV character’s limited perspective to create suspense, build secrets and unknowns to a climactic reveal, and slowly paint the full picture of the story one brushstroke at a time.

In determining whether direct or indirect POV is a better fit for your story, it’s also worth considering its genre, as well as the “feel” you want the story to have, your narrative approach. Perhaps because of the lack of a separate narrative voice, direct POVs may suggest a more casual feel to readers, less formal—as if we’ve been invited right into the character’s reality, rather than having it shown to us by a “gatekeeper.”

Any genre can be told in any POV the author chooses, but direct POVs tend to predominate in those where plunging readers directly into the characters’ perspectives creates intimacy that can heighten the reader’s engagement and their identification with the POV character(s), like young adult, mystery, women’s fiction, and romance.

Indirect POV

Limited third and omniscient, the more indirect points of view, allow the author a greater field of vision, a chance to tell the story through a wider lens. They may offer you more storytelling freedom—especially in the limitless perspective of the omniscient voice—but can also readily lend themselves to fuzzy, uncertain, or slipping POV that can leave readers feeling disoriented, confused, or removed.

Indirect POVs can risk prioritizing story action over character development and arc. With indirect POVs, authors must be especially careful not to simply describe or generalize story events, but to create a sense of immediacy and intimacy, despite that layer of narrative remove.

And because they are reporting on characters’ experience rather than directly sharing it, these removed perspectives can risk feeling lifeless and distant, full of emotive “tell” that may leave readers unaffected: “She collapsed in tears, sobs tearing out of her mouth.”

Because readers are deprived of firsthand access to the impact of story events on the characters, the risk is that we don’t feel the actual emotions of the story, just dispassionately observe how they manifest in the characters. If in direct point of view the author can let readers feel and experience the character’s emotions, in omniscient and limited third the challenge is to evoke it in them.

That can be more difficult from the narrative remove of these perspectives. You have to find ways to open the window into the characters’ inner life without breaching the boundary of their direct perspective—reporting on it rather than plunging into it.

The benefit to these more removed perspectives, though, is that readers can know more than the characters do, even about themselves—which can offer you as the storyteller opportunities to heighten suspense and tension with that juxtaposition, and deepen the story’s emotion and impact.

Ann Napolitano takes advantage of this in the omniscient Dear Edward, when readers know the passengers in the “before” section will all be killed save Edward when their plane crashes, but the characters have no idea. Bonnie Garmus does the same with limited-third POV in Lessons in Chemistry, for instance when readers know Calvin is dead before we see the news being broken to Elizabeth.

Because indirect POVs aren’t tethered to characters’ immediate experience, one of the author’s constant challenges in these perspectives is to orient the reader and keep their feet firmly planted in the story’s perspective. We need to understand the narrative viewpoint—the lens through which the narrative voice is observing the story events—without feeling as if the “camera” is swinging crazily around the room.

Indirect POVs entail a separate narrative voice, so they also require development of this added element of the story, in addition to developing each character’s distinct voice.

The narrative voice may reflect the feel of the story to help create the story world, as in many historical novels, where the language and syntax might reflect or evoke the sensibilities of the period. It may be an objective invisible storyteller, a neutral camera panning across the story’s panorama, as in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. Or it may establish a definitive “presence” or perspective from which the story is being related—as with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is ostensibly drawn from a self-referential guidebook by the same title, or the unusual first-person omniscient voice of Death in The Book Thief, or Yunior in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

As with direct POV, any story can successfully use indirect POV, but these removed viewpoints lend themselves well to genres where broader perspective is useful, and the story’s feel may be less informal and chatty: “literary” or upmarket fiction, science fiction and fantasy, action/adventure, police procedurals. It can also work well in suspense/thriller and horror.

POV consistency

Stories may incorporate both direct and indirect POVs—say, one story line in deep-third POV and another in limited third, as in Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. 

But some stories seem to flit between both within the same sections of the narrative. This can be the most confusing use of POV, because these stories seem to breach the boundaries between POVs in ways that can easily risk disorienting readers, creating a weak or unclear narrative perspective, or head hopping.

Delia Owens frequently jumps between omniscient, limited third, and deep third in Where the Crawdads Sing, for instance. Kevin Kwan rampantly leaps into direct POV even within indirect limited or omniscient sections of narrative. Even the venerated Jane Austen often blurs the lines between direct and indirect POV.

In trying to pin down the POV “rules” in stories like this—which may play fast and loose with them—authors can often feel confused about how to use POV consistently and clearly.

As with so many elements of storytelling craft, though, it’s not how well you follow the “rules” that determines how successful and effective readers may find your story, but whether or not they engage and invest in it. The only real rule in writing is, if it works, it works. And that’s often a subjective determination, heavily dependent on how clearly the author establishes the story’s perspective not just section to section, but even line by line.

Regardless of which one you’re using, POV is most successful when it doesn’t draw attention to itself or to the author’s hand.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us for a three-part webinar series on POV Mastery. You can enroll for a class specifically on direct POV, indirect POV, and/or Mixed POV—or register for all three with a discount.