Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Describing Points of View

Choosing what point of view your story is written in is an essential part to the start of any story. Many people will jump to the first person point of view, as it tends to be far easier to self-insert yourself into a character as opposed to sit above them, describing a scene in third.  

Originally, I wanted to write this chapter to specifically talk about the subtlety in writing between omniscient third person Point of View and limited third person. Many people "attempt" to write in third person omniscient... but write like a limited that randomly switches the PoV characters without warning. It's confusing, and I'll get more into that in a bit.  

Right now, I figured since we are talking about points of view, we might as well mention them all. Now, there are other factors to take into effect. You can technically have a 1st person PoV that is omniscient, for example, if your protagonist is god or god-like... or perhaps compiling a story in retrospect after talking to all the people in the story. There are many ways to play with many variations of PoV. Here are the most common ones.  

1st Person: 

As I've already mentioned, 1st person tends to be the first choice of most beginning authors. Many will find it easier to write in first person, because it's easy to just imagine yourself as the point of view character and all the actions being carried out through your eyes. This often coincides with self-insertion stories, such as romances where you're the leading lady (or guy) in a sordid love affair.  

This PoV is great if you're looking to create a strong emotional tie to a single character. While in first person, you are seeing everything out of their eyes. This can lead to some great writing and unique ideas as you play with their emotions, actions, and interpretations of the events around them. You're narration will take on the tone of voice of your point of view character, and will often display their thoughts as they deal with the circumstances of the story.  

Unfortunately, a lot of people who write in first person don't realize what that entitles. When you are in first person, that means you only see and know what your main character sees and knows. When you focus on the world around your character, you're only seeing and caring about what that character sees and cares about. To do anything else, whether it's awkward foreshadowing scenes, describing characters your PoV character by all accounts shouldn't be noticing, or making observations your character by all accounts shouldn't be able to make, can pull the reader out of your writing and introduce continuity errors.  

If your character is a rich, snobby priss... she's not going to notice the nerd who sits next to her in English, she's not going to see or describe the hobos she passes on the street, or if she does, it will be with distain. You see, everyone sees the world through rose-tinted glasses. You do it, and I do it too. And if you want to write a good PoV character in first person, you need to become pretty good at writing someone who identifies the world through their own unique spin. If they like a boy they see, they might describe him in depth as they eye him up and down, if they don't care about the girl in their checkout line, they aren't going to describe a thing about her.  

They also can only notice things you could generally notice in passing. I like to call this the "monk effect" based off of the TV show monk (or psych if you preferred that show better). In either one, the main character had the ability to notice details that no person in their right mind could possibly notice. For example, I'm not going to notice a dimples on the face of my rockstar love interest when I'm sitting in the crowd and they're on stage. I've never been able to tell someone's eye color from the other side of the room, and I doubt you could either... so when someone walks into the room, describing them as an <insert colored eyed> person would be impossible.  

On that note, even when talking to someone point to point, I never acknowledge eye color. You read about eye color constantly with romances, and if I was dating a girl at some point I would notice her eye color... but I'm not thinking about her eyes and that they are cerulean or whatever weird color you want to give them the second I meet her and it's rarely something I note in a person unless I'm really into them. The only reason I haven't written an elongated chapter on the overuse of eye descriptions in my book is because I've talked to a few girls on here who absolutely insist that they totally note the eye colors of every person they talk to. I find it hard to believe, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt that teenage girls in real life spend more time noting people's eyes than I ever have.