Screenwriters scrutinize Point of View because, as Robert McKee says in Story (a bible for screenwriters), it places the viewer's empathy close up, at a distance, or removes it, as in comedy, prompting us to laugh at the characters. Novelists should pay attention to POV the way screenwriters do.
Most novels use a 3rd-Person Limited Point of View (POV) - This POV follows one character's thoughts and actions using he or she as their pronoun of choice instead of I as with authors using 1st-Person.
If you use 1st-Person for YA novels, as I do, you'll be accused of having an unreliable narrator, because adults think they are the only reliable ones. They're so mature? Really? These days, you can't trust the journey all authors take you on, especially adult ones.
Any storyteller requires two gifts from their readers: Willing suspension of disbelief and empathy with the main character. If you receive these two gifts, nothing you write afterward should cause you to lose them.
If an author says, 'Joe swan to the island in the middle of the neutron star.' Most readers say, "Okay, then what happened?" Readers don't usually say, "Impossible." at a story's beginning. They give their "willing suspension of disbelief" to the author. But now the author has to make that impossible beginning possible and more believable with every page. The author must also say something about Joe that makes us hope he gets to the island. If she tells us his children are alone on the island, we might begin to empathetically root for Joe.
If the author doesn't follow through, she loses her reader.
Empathy is the easiest to lose. A few grammar errors, unclear sentences, or overly wordy phrases can pop the delicate bubble of empathy with the main character, and we're all back in the real world looking at words on a page. Ugh.
I think 1st-Person YA characters are more reliable, because there is nowhere in life where you're more flexible, and yet exposed to more change, than in those teenage years. I don't think it matters if your main character is telling the truth or what they perceive to be the truth if their story of entering adult society, or navigating their own, resonates with both adult an YA readers. Get the reader's empathy the best way you can and keep the reader hooked to the premise of your story.
Rule #1: Establish your Point of View (POV) character on the first page of your story without announcing it. Usually, your first pronouns do the job, but if you don't give the reader some time, place, and descriptive clues, they'll use their own imagination on the details and will be very disappointed on page ten when when the sex, hair color, and age of the main character finally conflicts with what they've imagined.
Rule #2: Only change your POV character at a scene break, or, better yet, at a chapter break, or, still better, never. Bouncing around might be good for the plot, but it can be hell on empathy. Just when you got interested in Suzie, you're asked to connect with her rival Lois. As an author, you need a really good reason to change POV, and then you must interest us in Lois as fast as you can. Remember, it's almost impossible for the reader not to like one of your POVs better than the other and sometimes that means flipping pages to get back to Suzie.
1st Person: Most stories I've read on Wattpad use 3rd Person - Limited by telling the story from outside their protagonist's POV. I'm most comfortable and familiar with 1st Person so I'll talk about that.
The benefit is strengthening the empathy between reader and protagonist. The drawback is that our main character can only guess at what other characters are thinking or meaning when they speak.
1st person writers have to use words like, probably, seemingly, or apparently (Present tense - Potential Mood if you read all of the last chapter) when guessing what is going on inside the heads of the other characters.
Also, our POV main character may have hidden agendas they are not even aware of, or believe things that are not, in fact, true. That's the beauty and difficulty of 1st Person.
Exercise #1 for 1st Person writers: Read one of your chapters and see if your main character tells you what someone else is thinking without using probably, seemingly, or apparently and fix it. Also, check if they relate a fact they wouldn't have first hand knowledge of. That psychic knowledge is forbidden unless your main character has superpowers of a psychic variety.
2nd Person: Rare in novels, but appears in poetry and songs. Uses 'you' almost exclusively, meaning the reader's POV. The benefit is immersion of the reader in the expository experience. The drawback is you are outside of every character's head and their internal experiences are all hidden. On Wattpad, some writers are crafting x-readers to put the reader, as a character, into their Fan Fiction. These are stories written in the 2nd Person. One example is "Supernatural the re-write" by Waters_2567 where the reader is another hunter joining Sam and Dean to stamp out evil.
3rd Person: Several varieties.
Omniscient-Objective(Dramatic): No internal thoughts - camera eye. Think movie.
Omniscient- Subjective: Over the shoulder - internal thoughts are okay The benefit, you can tell the reader what every character is thinking, but the reader won't feel quite as immersed the character's experiences as with 1st person.
This POV requires a narrator who is not a character in the story, but still tries to relate to only one character per scene as head-hopping (switching character POVs within a scene) can be terribly confusing for the reader. Italics can show internal thoughts as they happen during dialogue or action, or the narrator can explain, BUT explaining instead of showing violates the writer's maxim of 'SHOW don't TELL'. Omniscient sounds totally flexible, but is actually very hard to do well. Try 3rd Person Limited.
Limited: One character's thoughts - Think Harry Potter books.
I mentioned earlier the danger of overly wordy phrases destroying empathy. Grammatical Tightening will be the subject of the next chapter.
