How you frame your story powerfully influences the reader’s experience of it. As a writer, you need to know exactly how that framing works and what tools you can use to create a narrative voice that serves your story well. In this series, I’ll go over four key tools for creating a compelling narrative voice: perspective, tone, person, and tense. This first post is all about your perspective characters.

I have a quick note before we begin. Ideally, you should settle on your story’s perspective, tone, person, and tense before you start any serious writing. The best time to pick out these four aspects are when you have the general shape of your story in place, but you haven’t started any deep writing. You can still use this series as a guide to make sure you’ve made the right voice choices after you’ve started writing. Just know that it can save you time and stress if you sort out all these details first.

So, without further ado, here are some basics you need to know about your story’s perspective characters.

Picking Your Perspective Characters

Every story is told from a certain perspective. Stories can either be told through a point of view character’s voice directly or through a faceless, all-knowing narrator who describes the perspective character from a distance. I’ll cover the narrator’s relationship with the perspective character in the post on person.

For now, just know that there is always a perspective character, even when a faceless narrator is telling the story in third person. If the story focuses on a character’s experiences, then the story is being told from that character’s perspective, even if the narrator isn’t directly speaking in that character’s voice.

Your perspective characters are a major part of your narrative framing. They’ll also inform other aspects of your narrative voice, particularly your tone. Because the story’s perspective characters can have such a huge influence on your narrative framing and the story’s tone, picking your perspective characters should be one of the first aspects of voice that you settle on.

There are a couple questions you can ask yourself to ensure you’re picking the right perspectives for your story.

Who do you want to tell the story through?

This question is your simple starting point. The most common perspective to focus on is the story’s protagonist, for obvious reasons. The story is about the protagonist, so it makes sense to tell that story through the protagonist’s experiences.

That being said, some stories involve multiple protagonists. And sometimes it’s interesting and helpful to slip into the head of a villain or side character.

What changes if you describe an event from one character’s perspective or another’s?

Let’s take the classic folktale Little Red Riding Hood as an example. How does the story change if you tell it from the grandmother’s perspective, the hunter’s perspective, or the wolf’s perspective? What would happen if some scenes were from the wolf’s perspective while others were from the hunter’s? Or if some scenes were from the grandmother’s perspective while others were from Little Red’s? How do these perspective shifts change the story’s emphasis and the reader’s experience?

Perspective shifts can also facilitate building suspense. Suspense is all about controlling how much information the reader has access to. How could you use perspective shifts to hide or reveal information in a way that builds the story’s stakes and suspense?

For example, what would happen if you wrote Little Red’s “What big eyes you have!” dialogue from the grandmother’s perspective as she’s listening in the belly of the wolf? How would that perspective and framing affect the scene’s building suspense? These are the questions you can use to figure out whose perspective serves the story and specific scenes the best.

How many perspectives do you want to include?

I’ve just described how multiple perspectives can benefit a story. But you should also know how multiple perspectives can be damaging too.

Switching perspectives is like falling asleep in one place and then waking up somewhere else. Those transitions can be jarring. The reader will need to reorient themselves with every perspective shift.

Sticking to one character’s perspective avoids any risk for clunky transitions and keeps the reader deeply embedded in one character’s experience. That intimacy with the perspective character can be incredibly immersive. Your guiding question should always be, what will serve my story the best? An immersive single character perspective is often an excellent choice.

On the other hand, the key benefit of having multiple perspectives is that you’ll be able to show the reader events that go beyond one character’s experiences. Some stories greatly benefit from having a wide breadth of events and experiences to explore.

Ultimately, there’s no one rule that fits all books. Whether it’s better to have one perspective or multiple will depend on the story you want to tell. One perspective is best for intimacy, multiple perspectives is best for breadth. Personal narratives benefit the most from that intimacy, whereas highly complex plots often benefit the most from multiple perspectives. Your guiding question should always be, what will serve my story the best?

If you do find that the benefits of multiple perspectives outweigh the risks, then you need to ask yourself the following question.

How many perspectives do you really need?

The more time that the reader spends within a character’s psyche, the closer the reader will feel to that character. With every perspective shift, you risk reducing that intimacy and immersion. That’s why, if you do have multiple perspective characters, it’s usually best to stick with only a handful of them.

Two or three perspective characters can be manageable. If you want to have more perspectives than that, ask yourself if that many perspectives are truly necessary for the story. If they’re not, they’re probably not worth the risk that they’ll jar your reader and lower immersion. The best guiding principle is to only use as many perspectives as the story needs. If a new perspective isn’t necessary, it’s probably not worth it.

Of course, you may decide that having five or more perspectives is absolutely necessary for your story. In that case, you’ll need to be careful to ensure that your perspective shifts don’t negatively impact the reader’s immersion.

I’d recommend you do some prep and reading. You can study some masterful multiple‑perspective books to learn how those authors pulled it off. Cloud Atlas, A Game of Thrones, and The Night Circus are some such multi-perspective books that you could start with. Ask yourself, how did the author keep you invested in that many characters? How did they facilitate smooth transitions between perspectives? And how did they keep you hooked? If you didn’t like how the author managed multiple perspectives, then what do you think the author did wrong? And how can you learn from their mistakes?

Does adding this character’s perspective damage the story’s suspense?

Earlier I described how switching perspectives can help you build suspense. But you should know that perspective shifts can also deflate suspense as well.

Even beyond the mystery genre, what keeps readers hooked is the story’s mysteries. We call a story’s central mystery its driving narrative question. Here are some common driving narrative questions: will the hero save the kingdom? Will the two lovers overcome the barriers keeping them apart? Will the protagonist survive their current calamity? Every story has some mystery that only gets resolved in the final climax and ending.

Switching into another character’s perspective can give the reader information that resolves the building mystery and suspense too soon.

Take the story Pride and Prejudice as an example. If the story had switched into Mr. Darcy’s perspective, the reader would know from the start that Mr. Wickham is not the nice, respectable gentleman he appears to be.

Lizzie would still believe Mr. Wickham’s account of Mr. Darcy. She would still be perplexed at how Mr. Darcy could treat Wickham so cruelly. But the reader would not share in Lizzie’s bafflement because they would already know that Mr. Wickham is a manipulative liar.

Lizzie would be tricked, but the reader wouldn’t be. Lizzie would be shocked when she realizes, too late, that Mr. Wickham poses a threat to her sisters’ safety. But the reader wouldn’t be. Only Elizabeth would be surprised when Mr. Darcy shifts from appearing cold and prideful to appearing warm and empathetic. The reader, who’d likely be quite bored at this point, would just think to themselves, she’s finally figured it out.

In short, if the story had switched into Mr. Darcy’s perspective, it could have ruined the building suspense and final plot twist. That’s why, in multiple perspective stories, you need to ensure that you’re not revealing too much too soon. Otherwise, you risk deflating your story’s suspense before it’s even had a chance to build up.

Summing Up

After working through these questions, you should be better prepared to pick and manage your story’s perspectives. In short, there are three guiding principles you can take away from this discussion.

First, there are pros and cons to writing in one perspective or multiple perspectives. Sticking to one perspective maximizes the reader’s intimacy with the protagonist. Having multiple perspectives maximizes the range and variety of narrative events that the reader has access to. When picking your perspective characters, ask yourself what would serve your story the best: intimacy or breadth?

Second, you should only include the perspectives you need to tell the story. Having fewer perspectives makes it easier for the reader to stay immersed in the characters’ journeys. That’s why it’s a good rule of thumb to keep your cast of perspective characters as small as your story will allow.

Third, be wary of perspective shifts that could damage your story’s building suspense. It’s easy to accidentally deflate your building suspense by switching into the mind of a character who knows something important that the protagonist doesn’t. Be careful about sharing perspectives that could reveal too much too soon.

I hope you’ve found this discussion helpful. If you have any other questions or insights on how to manage your novel’s perspective characters, feel free share them in the comments below!