POV + Verb Tense: How to Actually Choose (Part 2)
The Interrogation Phase – Finding the Right POV Before You Rewrite The Damn Thing
Last time, we talked about the what of POV + verb tenses. We covered the many, many options available, how each works, and the kind of impact they have on the narrative and reader experience.
This time, I want to go into the how of POV + verb tenses. When do you actually make this call? Or fail to. Or spiral through seven different re-writes and only crawl out from under the draft with something cohesive after deleting 40,000 words in a blind fury because you will COMMIT dammit!
Two Kinds of Writers, One Kind of Problem
If you’re like me—leaping from POV to verb tense like a chaotic gremlin until a full novel has appeared— here’s some questions to ask yourself:
Why do you hate yourself? Just write from 3rd person omniscient past tense like the rest of the world, you pretentious—
Wait, that’s not helpful. Let me start over.
If you’re like me—leaping from POV to verb tense like a chaotic gremlin until a full novel has appeared—you need one goal: choose the POV that actually serves the story you’re telling.
Commit now before a full rewrite. That way you can confidently make the change and stick to it. So I’m going to provide a series of questions to ask yourself about POV and some exercises to help you make that choice and stick to it as you revise.
But before that…
I’m told there’s another kind of writer out there. One who is more sensible and organized and not bat-shit insane. One who comes to the question of POV earlier in their draft before writing upwards of 50k words.
Perhaps this writer is now struggling to enter the first draft because they aren’t confident in their POV. They’ve read horror stories (on this blog) about having to rewrite entire novels and now the idea of making the WRONG choice keeps them from starting chapter one. Instead, they’ve been tinkering with the world and making more and more detailed outlines and character bios.
You know, procrastinating on not actually writing the story.
Both kinds of writers are grappling with the question: “How do I know the Correct POV + Verb tense for my beautiful novel?”
The answer is, you don’t know.
Art is not objective. There is no right or wrong way to tell a story. No Correct POV + verb tense for particular genres, story types, or character archetypes. The rules are never hard and fast, which is why some AI tools really struggle to grammatically edit creative fiction.
The correct POV is the choice you commit to.
So if you are struggling with the choice, either in your mind or on the page, let’s interrogate the story and find out which POV is the best choice for your project.
Interrogating the Story: Choose Your Narrator Like A Bomb’s About to Blow and You’ve Only Got Ten Minutes to Learn the Truth
Step 1: Shine a bright light in that punk story’s face and figure out what reader experience it’s giving.
What do readers expect from the story?
Mystery stories can support a very distant, unemotional narrator in a way that would kill an adventure story.
The liberties a narrator can pull in a rom-com story are very different from what readers will accept in historical romance.
Is there an underlying theme the story’s POV can help convey?
The opening of my romance novella, “October Surprise,” features a cold and distant narrator opening a blackmail letter. It reads like a political thriller until the narrator devolves into a sniveling romantic. Works great. I’ll tell you more in the Case Study.
What emotion will the story evoke from the reader?
What POV + Verb Tense supports that emotion?
Horror and YA work very well in 1st person since emotions are running so high. Present tense can really serve a story with a short time frame. 1st person, reflecting on the past opens up a huge array of feelings from that character to play with.
How much does the reader need to know?
If the narrator knows the big reveal and is hiding it from their audience, a reader might feel cheated. Imagine if The Sixth Sense was from the little boy’s POV; he knows all along. It’s got to be from the Doctor’s POV.
Since 1st person naturally limits what someone knows, it’s become the default voice for pulp crime stories.
A chatty 3 rd person narrator is (usually) hiding NOTHING from the reader, so you see it frequently in comedy and in fantasy stories as a means for the writer to explore and share bits that are not neccesarily plot relevant. It’s rare to see that voice in a mystery or a thriller, where hiding the truth from the reader is key… unless of course, you’re Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Lemony Snicket and feeling like playing tricks on readers.
Step 2: Using your most Authorial Voice, demand knowledge about the characters. Be Loud and Threaten to Smash the Keyboard.
How many main characters are you juggling?
JUST ONE?
That’s your POV, punk. Experiment with 1st and 3rd until you can choose. Why are you giving me so much grief?
Because sometimes, a narrator witnesses another person’s achievements or fall, and it’s really effective, like in The Great Gatsby or Sherlock Holmes. Okay, good point. Experiment with that narrator and try to keep them from overshadowing your larger-than-life character!
So many characters, I think I dropped a few in Albuquerque.
Can this story be told from just one POV?
Keeping a story to one POV will generally keep it shorter, smoother, and easier to talk about and write, so a good choice for multi-character stories might be 3rd person close, with clear signals about the spotlight character.
3rd person, limited, past tense is the more common, most flexible, and familiar to readers.
Do their experiences of the same event vary enough to warrant different POVs?
Especially consider this if you have a group of many characters together experiencing the same journey. If we are all teenagers in a cabin in the woods, having different POVs might be an unnecessary complication, and distract from rather than heighten the fear.
Do you gain anything from letting the reader know what all your characters are thinking?
The main gain (besides additional stories) is dramatic irony. Letting the reader know something is happening that the characters don’t know can be exciting and devastating, but so can a surprise.
Vast perspective. You can get world-altering scope with many POV characters across large distances. In such a large sweeping novel with a lot of characters that dip in and out, the clear choice is 3rd person, omniscient, but remember you can still play with that. See Case Study: 3rd person Omniscient: Lord of the Rings Vs The Hobbit.
Are these many points of view heightening the effect of the story? Are their voices separate or do many of them share similar verbal ticks? Is each arc distinct and meaningful or are you accidentally telling the same story over and over?
If two characters are serving similar roles in a story (for example if the hero has an old wise mentor in one location and a second older wiser mentor in another) see if you can combine them. Or else see their difference through the hero’s POV.
Do any of your POV candidates have wrong knowledge?
This can be a good thing. I love being in a romantic lead’s brain while they stress over the very thing the other lead adores about them as you’ll see in the case study about Freeing the Witch.
This can be a bad thing. If all your characters are trapped on a boat and one of them is a vampire feeding on the others, you don’t want your reader to know that… probably (unless that’s the experience you’re trying to give your reader).
Is there anyone who CAN’T tell the story?
Sometimes a good place to start is to eliminate who you don’t want to be a POV, so you can access the other narrators for their usefulness. Does someone have a secret to keep from the reader? Does a character have too similar a voice to another more important character? Does a character stay very stable and therefore not have as interesting an arc as someone else?
If you’re telling a realistic story about four teens who get lost in a forest from the POV from three 1st person reports after the fact, readers are going to be super curious about that fourth character.
Whose POV is the most engaging…
Over the course of the whole story?
Who changes the most over the arc? Who has the most to lose?
Who is present for most of the action?
At the most pivotal scenes?
How does this scene differ from character to character? Who can tell the story at this moment of intensity to ratchet up the tension?
For example, in A Game of Thrones, at Ned’s execution, G.R.R. Martin had at least three POV characters he could choose from. Circe, the villain victorious but likely paranoid. Ned is resigned to his fate, honorably accepting death and the sudden end of the chapter after a sword swing would be intense. But is it more intense than Arya, Ned’s daughter? She’s witnessing this moment from the crowd, lost and helpless, thinking her father might escape at the last second. It’s devastating and one of the reasons the multiple POV works so well for Martin in his continent-spanning epic.
If most of the story’s key emotional intensity is coming from the same POV, you likely have a 1st person narrator or a 3rd person limited. But if the story can deal more emotional damage with more POV characters, do it.
Step 3: Your story is beginning to break. Offer it a light snack and tenderly inquire if there is an in-story reason for the character to narrate in 1st person.
Are they experiencing the story as it happens with the readers without the benefit of hindsight?
1st person, present tense, aka stream-of-consciousness narration, allows readers to experience the action with great immediacy and emotion. It’s grown in popularity, especially in YA, Contemporary RomComs, and more recently in Thriller, since it creates such intense psychological POVs.
1st person, past tense without reflection is a very traditional narrative style and there’s no shame in choosing a straightforward approach. Most 1st person narrators are doing exactly this, so it's classic and easy to access.
Are they remembering the past and processing some difficult decisions? Are they trying to justify their past mistakes or entertaining themselves with happy memories?
1st person, past tense, looking back with the hindsight and emotions of an older and wiser person is a more complex lens.
Mrs. deWinter thinks, perhaps erroneously, that telling her haunted past will liberate her from the shadow of Rebecca. The 1st person POV looking back into her past augments the burden of this story and makes it linger and haunt the reader.
This is a narrator who knows the ending, so you’ll need to decide what they are hiding from the audience and when they are revealing these secrets.
Sometimes spoilers can be effective: the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Hadestown all tell us this love story don’t end well and it only heightened the tragedy.
What additional value is a reflective 1st person narrator bringing to the story?
Are they lying? Unreliable narrators are often 1st person reflecting on past events.
Just for laughs is value, by the way. The nostalgia added by an older narrator remembering his childish obsession with a Red Rider B.B. gun is what makes A Christmas Story a classic.
So is the unease of sympathy we feel when someone is being baldly honest about something … awful. Consider Humbert Humbert in Lolita tells us in the first line his love is a “sin of the soul” Then before the end of the chapter he reveals a little more by describing “plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” The indisputable truth comes shortly after in Chapter 2, "her daughter Dolores Haze was a lovely, dreamy child of twelve..."
A 1st person POV, providing commentary on their younger self can distract from the emotional intensity and give a reader too much distance from the narrative. Make sure these minor detours serve the story before you build them throughout the narrative.
Are they telling the story to an audience?
Is this a memoir, written for the lover who jilted them or for the children who will mourn them? Is this a journal left for any survivor who needs to be warned about an unearthly horror?
Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” goes between 1st person present, to past tense, and back because there is a madman standing in front of YOU (and you might be his doctor. His whole narrative is aimed at convincing YOU that he is not insane even as he confesses over and over again to murder. Highly effective.
Step 4: Still finding this to be a hard nut to crack? Let it off the hook, for now…
Experiment with the POV in writing exercises:
Pre-Writing:
Pick a key scene, maybe the ending. Something with high stakes, high emotion. Set a timer for 15 minutes and write that scene without regard for correctness or word choice, just get as many words as you can on the page in the first POV you’re considering (1st or 3rd). Once it’s done, rewrite the same scene from the opposite (3rd or 1st). If you are considering multiple characters, write the same scene from the other character’s POV.
If that’s unfair because this other main character doesn’t have the same stakes in that moment, do they have a moment with similarly high stakes/tension that the other character could not write? Congratulations, you either have a dual narrator, or a 3rd person limited that moves between two or more characters.
Now, put that scene into your draft, and start writing the rest, because you can’t revise a draft that isn’t written!
With Existing Draft:
Take an important scene already written in one POV and rewrite it from the other POV, then do the reverse. These scenes should be either pivotal to that POV or your favorite darlings that you can’t imagine cutting. The ones that bring you the most pain to change. Remember you’re playing right now. No choice is being made, yet.
Set a timer for fifteen minutes and force yourself to do this work. Oftentimes, it's the dread of the rewriting that hurts, not the actual change.
When you’re done, you’ll have a sense of how difficult it will be to translate from one to the other and vice versa. And hopefully will reveal which feels more native to the story.
Final thoughts
So whether you’re knee-deep in a 40k fever dream or paralyzed by the thought of picking the wrong lens before you start—remember: POV isn’t a technical decision. It’s emotional. It’s about what your story wants to reveal.
Next time: What to do when you’ve already written the wrong version. (Spoiler: You’re not doomed. You’re just revising.)
Over the next couple of months, Lane and I are going to be working on a book together. My plan with this section of the substack is to write about that journey from the opening outline to the finish and then through the revisions. If that sounds like something you want to see, make sure you are subscribed!
And if you’re looking for a professional developmental editor or a book coach, I’m on Fiverr!