Point of View and Story

Determining Point of View for your story can be incredibly challenging. It depends on several factors and can change the path a story takes in ways that you can’t predict.

Are you writing a romance? A fantasy? Epic fantasy? Cozy fantasy? Do you want one character to be the main POV, or are you planning on multiple POV characters? The answer to any of these can be dependent on the answer to the rest, and one musn’t forget the expectations that readers will have for your book based on these questions.

The fact of the matter is that the character’s perspective is the heart and soul of a story. Who they are and how they see the world will cause them to interact with events in ways that are entirely different than other characters, which will in turn lead to a story that is uniquely theirs. That is beautiful, but it can also be daunting.

If you don’t know your character well enough to know how they will react to the various things thrown at them (literally or figuratively), then the story will stutter and finally fizzle out. Neither does the book need to focus on every aspect of a character’s backstory in order to portray how they see the world. That can be overwhelming and is often unnecessary.

And don’t even get me started on Third person versus first person perspective!

– Advice from the Editor, from the desk of Evelyn Grimald Stone, editor and author.

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