What Can Viewpoint Give Your Story?
If you understand and can effectively use viewpoint, your story immediately becomes more compelling. This post explains how.
One of the most important decisions you’ll make as an author is the perspective from which you tell your story.
Viewpoint is not just a technical choice. It’s not only about the people and things we observe, but the deeper understanding and insights we get from watching them and interrogating their motives. It’s this subjective lens through which your readers will experience your narrative.
What Can Viewpoint Give Your Story?
Getting a grip on how to use perspective can change the way you write and connect with readers. So, how do you go about this?
-
Viewpoint Helps You Take The First Step
The first step is to select the viewpoint that best serves your story. Are you telling a tale of adventure, romance, or mystery? Each genre may benefit from a different narrative lens.
A first-person viewpoint can create an intimate connection, allowing readers to experience the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings directly. In contrast, a third-person omniscient viewpoint can provide a broader understanding of the world and its characters, making it ideal for longer stories or epic novels.
What kind of story do you want to tell? If it revolves around a single character’s journey, a first-person or limited third-person viewpoint might be most effective.
However, if your narrative spans multiple characters and subplots, an omniscient viewpoint can help knit the different story threads together.
Are you head-hopping? Avoid it with this blog post.
-
Viewpoint Allows The Reader To Experience Empathy
The viewpoint you choose can significantly influence how readers connect with your characters.
When you write from a character’s perspective, you invite readers to step into their experiences – their joys, fears, and struggles. You need this emotional engagement to keep readers turning the pages.
For example, if your protagonist is a young woman navigating the complexities of love and loss, a first-person narrative can allow readers to feel her emotions intimately.
But a third-person perspective can provide insight into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters. It can flesh out the emotional landscape of your story.
How to turn dull descriptions into dazzling narrative
-
Viewpoint Allows You To Play With Time And Distance
This is where viewpoint really shows its power. The distance between the narrator and the events of the story can create nuances of intimacy or a sense of detachment.
A close first-person narrative pulls readers into the action, while a more detached third-person perspective can offer a broader view of the story as it unfolds.
For a moment, think about how time erodes of bolsters your characters. If your story spans several years, how has the passing of time influenced them? A narrator reflecting on past events can provide poignant or ironic context and depth.
-
Viewpoint Gives Structure
The viewpoint you choose can also help decide the structure of your story. A tightly focused narrative may benefit from a single perspective, while a more complex tale might require multiple viewpoints to bring to life the richness of the plot.
You might choose to alternate between two characters’ perspectives, revealing their contrasting experiences and insights. This technique can create tension and intrigue, as readers ‘piece’ together the story from different angles.
-
Viewpoint Creates Your Atmosphere
Whether you choose first-person or omniscient narration, viewpoint helps creates an atmosphere for your novel, short story and screenplay — a singularly unique mood or ambience.
Do you want to evoke a tense, ambivalent atmosphere? Well, then an oblique or even unreliable narrator might be the answer.
If you prefer a less obtrusive voice, allowing your plot to shine as the ‘star’ of the story, that’s a sensible choice too. Every viewpoint should consider how it can enhance the setting, develop the characters, and improve the overall mise en scène.
Do you want to look at viewpoint in a different light? Read this blog post.
The Final Word
The viewpoint you choose is a reflection of the story you want to tell. It shapes the reader’s experience and influences how they connect with your characters.
Always ask yourself: Whose story am trying to tell here? This question will guide you toward a compelling and focused narrative.
By Anthony Ehlers. Anthony Ehlers facilitates courses for Writers Write. He writes awesome blog posts and workbooks too.
More Posts From Anthony:
- 6 Stereotypes To Avoid In LGBTQIA+ Fiction
- The Powerful Bonds Of Six Fictional Brothers And Sisters
- 5 Secrets To Writing A Strong Inciting Incident
- 5 Reasons To Start Writing A Story With Viewpoint In Mind
- 7 Extraordinary Authors With Extraordinary Word Counts
- The 5 Easiest Genres To Plot
- The 5 Toughest Genres To Plot
- Action Is The Hero
- 5 Fears That Keep You From Finishing Your Novel
- 5 Ways To Look At Viewpoint (Slightly Differently)
Top Tip: Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop.