So, you’ve got a great story idea for a Beatles fanfic. You know the plot from beginning to end, you’ve created your non-Beatles characters, and you’ve done your research on the Beatles themselves (don’t forget this step!). You know all the details about when and where the story is set. You’re ready to write, right?

Not quite. First you have to decide who’s telling the story.

Every story, whether written or oral, is told by someone. Sometimes the narrator is obvious, sometimes not. Whom you choose as a narrator or narrators affects everything from what events they can tell your readers to the words and attitudes they use. To help you decide which viewpoint is best for your story, I’ll briefly describe the three most commonly used viewpoints: omniscient, first-person, and third-person. I’ll also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The first viewpoint we’ll discuss, omniscient, is a truly god-like viewpoint. Using this viewpoint, an author can show the reader nearly anything and range far in space and time. One example of omniscient viewpoint is the opening paragraph of Aviva Rothschild’s With Strings Attached, where we see what happens on several widely scattered planets at the same instant. I used omniscient viewpoint in Act One of To Thine Own Self Be True. I had to show that my characters’ actions affect a wormhole connecting our universe with a parallel one, but I didn’t have a viewpoint character at the wormhole when it reacted. Using an omniscient narrator for that scene solved my problem. A final thing that omniscient viewpoint allows you to do is peep into several characters’ heads at once. If, for instance, you’re writing a romance and it’s important to your plot that the characters misunderstand each other, you can switch between them as they argue so the readers can see exactly how the misunderstanding occurs as it occurs.

If omniscient viewpoint is so powerful, why not use it all the time? Well, if your shifts from character to character are too frequent, you can confuse your reader or jar them out of the “suspension of disbelief” necessary to read fiction. (More on this later, when we discuss third-person.) But the primary disadvantage of this viewpoint is that it distances the readers from the characters. If you can pop into any character’s head at any time, it’s harder to identify with any one of them or feel what they feel. Omniscient narrators can tell you what happens, but they may not show it as well as a more limited narrator could. If you’re familiar with the writing adage, “Show, don’t tell,” you’ll understand why this viewpoint is less popular than first- or third-person.

First-person is a more immediate viewpoint than omniscient. In this viewpoint, the narrator is one of the characters and tells the readers the story directly. The reader identify very closely with the character, but the writer has to as well so that the character’s voice, not the writer’s, comes through. This is why I wrote Move Over Ms. L. as a first-person story; Joanna’s voice was so strong she made me write it that way! The character’s voice can make or break the story; Lisha Goldberg’s stories wouldn’t be as funny as they are if someone else told them to us or if she told them in third-person.

First-person viewpoint can be a very rewarding one to use, but it does have its drawbacks. The reader may wonder why the character is telling this story in the first place, especially if the character reveals intimate or embarrassing details. Some writers will justify this by writing the story as a letter or letters (as in Lisha Goldberg’s Dear Sir or Madam) or as a journal. We learn at the end of Move Over Ms. L. that Joanna’s story is her recorded journal, which she plans to give to her son Paul so he can understand how he came to be. A first-person narrator has other disadvantages. If you tell the story in past tense (which is the most common and preferred way) the narrator had to have lived through the story (barring any strange life-after-death experiences), so you can’t believably threaten to kill him or her. It’s also not fair for a first-person narrator to withhold important information from the reader; the reader has to learn things as the character does. Finally, with a first-person narrator, it’s vital that the writer maintains the same voice throughout or risk making the reader realize the character is really not the person telling the story. And if you are alternating two or more first-person viewpoints, each narrator has to have a distinct voice so the reader can keep all of them straight. See Cheryl Mortensen’s Walkabout for an excellent example of how to do this. If you choose to write in first-person, make sure you tell us only what the character can know – and don’t forget to give us the character’s attitude towards events as well.

The final viewpoint, third-person, combines the best of omniscient and first-person viewpoints. As with omniscient viewpoint, you as the writer can switch among several viewpoint characters, though you can’t use all at once. And as with first-person viewpoint, you can delve deeply into your characters’ thoughts and make the readers experience events as your characters do. Examples of third-person stories include James Ryan’s I Read the News Today, Margaret Racine’s Mysterious Doings, Cheryl Mortensen’s Second Chance, the previously mentioned With Strings Attached, and my own The Movement You Need and To Thine Own Self Be True.

Although third-person viewpoint is considered the easiest viewpoint to write, there are still some things you as a writer must do to write it effectively. First, you must make sure that if you are writing in third person, you stay in third-person. For instance, if you’re writing a John romance, you can’t write a scene from his girlfriend’s point of view and suddenly insert a couple of paragraphs from John’s point of view into it. (It’s questionable how much you’d want to get into John’s surrealistic thoughts anyway, no matter how much you love him! And yes, he’s me own favorite…)

Why is staying in a single viewpoint for each scene so important? Remember I mentioned the term “suspension of disbelief” earlier? As a writer, you are creating a world every time you write a story; some story worlds are very close to ours, others may be quite different. Your readers must suspend their disbelief and mentally leave our world to enter yours; they depend on you to set the rules for the story world – and then abide by them. This is why it’s so important to get the details of the characters and setting right. If your characters are contemporary 1960’s characters living in the 1960’s, it’s cheating to give them cell phones. The same rules apply to keeping your viewpoint consistent from scene to scene. If you start a third-person scene in Ringo’s viewpoint and switch to George’s halfway through, then you’ve cheated too. If you make too many viewpoint shifts, your readers may decide they can’t believe in your story and defragment their hard drives instead. Each scene should be in only one viewpoint. If you need to switch viewpoints, do it at a scene break – and identify the new viewpoint character immediately, so the reader knows who he or she is.

Although switching viewpoints in the middle of a scene is a common mistake in third-person it’s not the only one. As with first-person, in third-person you can only tell your readers what the viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing about a telepath, your character won’t know other characters’ thoughts. You also can’t say (if you’re in Paul’s viewpoint) that Paul didn’t see the pretty girl waiting outside the studio; if she didn’t make it into his consciousness, she can’t make it into ours. (It would be fair to say he turned away from her or was distracted by something else, however.)

I hope now that you’ve read all this, you have a better understanding of the importance of viewpoint to your story. If you’d like more information, I recommend Orson Scott Card’s book Characters & Viewpoint, part of the Writer’s Digest Elements of Fiction Writing Series and a book I referred to while writing this article. Other books in this series with useful chapters on viewpoint are Ansen Dibell’s Plot and Monica Wood’s Description. And if you haven’t read the stories I mentioned above already, please take the time to do so; they may help you decide what viewpoint will help you tell your own story in the best way possible. Now stop procrastinating and go back to writing. And may the Muse be with you.

Sandra Ulbrich started her writing career in high school, when she made up her own lyrics to songs. She soon graduated to writing sonnets, villanelles, and free verse. After obtaining her bachelor's degree in molecular biology/English and a Master of Technical and Scientific Communication degree, she worked as a teaching assistant, a science writing intern at the National Cancer Institute, a technical writer, and a proofreader. She is currently a lab technician at an enyzme-producing company. In addition to writing poetry, Sandra has also written a fantasy novel called Day of All Seasons, which has been submitted for publication. She is currently writing a sequel, called Fifth Season. When not writing, Sandra enjoys listening to classic rock (especially the Beatles), reading, gaming, attending cons, and chatting with her friends.