Writing Tips and Techniques (Writing Help)

How to do Point of View

        Often, I see confusion when it comes to viewpoints. Some people have one person's point of view, then switch to "no pov" then back to another character in the middle of a single chapter. Also, I'm going to talk about tenses. 

        First of all, there are three types of POV. There's no such thing as "no point of view."  

First Person

        First person point of view is when the story is explicitly told from one character's perspective. This is characterized by the use of words such as "I," "my," and "me." The story is read as if the character is telling the story.

Second Person

        Second-person point of view is the least commonly used. This is the author directing the reader through the story with the use of "you." You walk into a dark room, your phone screen being your only light.

Third Person

        Third person perspective is when an outside narrator tells the story. The two most common types of third person narratives are omniscient and limited.  Omniscient means all-knowing. This is when the narrator knows everything about every character: thoughts, feelings, actions. Limited third person is when the narrator is confined to one character. This narrator only knows what one character is feeling and thinking. By the way, if you have more than one main character, do not switch points of view mid-chapter. 

 Another issue I noticed on Wattpad is that sometimes people will write a scene from one character's point of view, then write the exact scene from another character's perspective so that it's pretty much a copy-and-paste replica of the previous chapter. Yeah, don't do that. Personally, I'll skip that second chapter once I realize it's the same thing as the other one. It's repetitive and unnecessary. 

There's no rule against having multiple character points of view, but typically, you should stick to one type of point of view. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, one of the first things you need to do is straighten you pov's out.

Tenses

        There are two tenses: past and present. You must choose only ONE. I can't stress that enough. 

        If you're unclear as to what I mean by past and present tense, it's the difference between "he said" and "he says." In past, the story has already happened. In the present, the story is happening as the audience reads it. 

        It doesn't make a huge difference whether it's past or present, but they do have different feels to them. If you're telling a first person, past tense story, whatever adventure happens, you know your narrator survives, so there's no surprise there. I tend to like past tense for short stories and present for novels, but that's just me. The choice has to do with author preference.