How to find the narrative point of view for your novel
BY Anna Davis
28th Aug 2025
Figuring out the narrative perspective for your novel is crucial to its planning – and for many writers, it’s the key to everything. When you’ve settled into the right voice(s) for your story, you can find the process comes alive and the novel really starts to fly.
Many writers launch into their novel entirely instinctively in whatever voice and perspective feels natural to them, and simply don’t look back. I find this wonderful! However, there are also writers who end up making major changes to the narrative perspective at rewrite stage. Taking time at the outset to think through the implications of how you're telling your story can save you a great deal of time later on.
The governing principles for all the decisions you make around narrative voice and perspective should be:
- What narrative perspective(s) and voice(s) will enable me to tell my story to the best effect?
- What narrative perspective(s) and voice(s) help my writing to flow?
Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently used forms of narration:
First person narration
I/me/my
Here we experience the story entirely through the eyes of your character – usually the protagonist. In first person, there is no barrier between character and reader – no elegant storytelling voice to mediate and articulate the character’s account of events.
A first person narrator can bring intensity to a novel – think of Jane Eyre locked in the red room or agonising over Mr Rochester. There can be a confiding or confessional feel – as with Martha, in Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss. There can also be intimacy and humour – such as you’d find in Marian Keyes’ novels about the Walsh sisters, with their chatty feel.
A first person narrative must have the distinct flavour of the narrator’s voice and thought processes. This can be a huge strength for the book – but it also means you can’t step out of the character’s mindset, voice, vocabulary and expression in order to, for instance, use the dazzling metaphor you’ve just come up with that would not be natural for the voice of the narrator. And bear in mind that if you have one first person narrator, you can only show scenes where that character is present. You have to stay in role.
Think about whether you’re confident to inhabit the character to the fullest extent. When the voice is very different to your own, you might struggle to deliver it convincingly across a whole novel – for instance, in the case of a character much younger than you. If you think this could be an issue, consider using a third person close narration instead.
When writing in first person, you can find yourself leaning into a storytelling mode, which feels natural in this voice. Your character might become discursive, musing on various issues, and working through their feelings about what’s happening in the story. This can work to the advantage of your novel, but it’s important to remain firmly rooted in your story and make sure you don’t start wandering far off the point.
Unreliable first person narrators
Writers often talk about their unreliable narrator. But I'd say all first person narrators are unreliable. Certainly they should be, to maximise the potential of the subjective narrative voice. Any narrator in a novel who simply dishes up straight truth without bias, omission, embellishment, perhaps even downright lying, has to be a rather boring narrator. When in first person, you’re writing a sort of testimony – and it’s up to you to make it a fictionally interesting testimony by playing as many tricks as you can.
Naïve first person narrators
This is where the character telling the story doesn’t fully understand the events they’re relating – or their implications, and the reader is very quickly some way ahead of them. The novelist will create drama and intrigue in the space between what the narrator knows and what the reader knows. Often the naïve narrator is a child – for instance the five-year old boy at the heart of Emma Donoghue’s Room.
Sidekick Narrators
Your first person narrator doesn’t have to be the protagonist, but can be another character, who is close to the protagonist and able to tell their story. This could be useful if you want the intensity, partiality and unreliability that comes from a first person narration but you also want to keep your protagonist a little mysterious and unknowable. Famous novels narrated by sidekicks include the Sherlock Holmes stories, related by Watson and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, narrated by Nick Carraway.
Third person narration
He/him/his, she/her, they/them/their, it/its
Close Third Person (single viewpoint)
Many readers like books in which the storyteller is ‘invisible’ – and that’s often the effect of simple third person close narration. The storyteller sits back and allows the events and characters to come forward. Here we’re still getting the story entirely from just one perspective but the character’s experiences are mediated through an authorial voice. This opens up a little more distance from the protagonist. In close third person, your narrative voice should be unobtrusive – for instance, it shouldn’t intervene to assert disembodied comment, such as: ‘She never went back there – and a good thing too.’ If we’re looking out through the eyes of the viewpoint character in first person, then we’re sitting on their shoulder in a close third person narration – and we remain there, on that shoulder. We don’t hop over to sit with other characters and have no access to their thoughts.
Close third narrations often incorporate free indirect style, where the protagonist’s thoughts are blended in with the third person viewpoint so that the reader is about as far into the head of the character as we can get without being in first person. An example:
- Third person: Why was this happening? he wondered. And when would it be over?
- Free indirect: Why is this happening? And when will it be over?
Close Third Person (two or more viewpoints)
You might find you want to make use of more than one character viewpoint in your novel – but bear in mind that sharing a character’s perspective has the effect of elevating their importance in your story. Each time you think of adding in a new viewpoint, consider what it contributes to your story. Does it add value or does it dilute intensity? Examples of a close third person narration with more than one viewpoint include You are Here by David Nicholls and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – with each of these books focused on a pair of characters, and using the viewpoint steadily rather than ‘head-hopping’ – which is where you move around rapidly between two or more perspectives, and which can feel dizzying to the reader. Personally I would suggest sticking with one character’s viewpoint for the entirety of a scene.
Omniscient Third Person
This is the most free-floating form of narration, and can be freeing and empowering to you as a writer. You can move in and out of characters’ consciousness at will, and can make all-knowing Godlike pronouncements if you want to – such as, ‘He had no idea of the disaster about to befall him.’ In a way, omniscience is the closest narrative form we have to a traditional storytelling voice.
Sometimes, however, omniscience can leave the reader feeling they’re not accessing any one character’s thoughts and feelings in a full and satisfying way – and an omniscient voice can be overly intrusive. To make your omniscient narration feel masterful and disciplined – rather than sprawling and incoherent, you may (perhaps ironically) want to set yourself some rules for its use, and ensure you stick to them. Tessa Hadley talks about the importance of making your ‘contract with the reader’ very early on – by which she means that the first scene or couple of scenes should embody the way the narrative perspective will operate throughout, so the reader will know what to expect and can settle happily into the story.
Multiple Narratives
You can choose to deploy multiple story-threads in your novel, narrated through different character perspectives, whether using first person, third person or indeed both! When done well, the effect can be rich and varied – but here again, there are significant challenges: You’ll need to work hard to ensure that the narratives all add up to a cohesive whole, with each strand essential to the overall story. You’ll also need to make sure that all threads are equally compelling, or readers will skip ahead – and that the voice and perspective of each strand is sharply individuated from all others.
There are further narrative perspectives that I haven’t talked about here – including second person, first person collective, and various other tricksy species! Suffice to say you can deploy any weird perspective you want to – and if you’re determined enough and dexterous enough, you’ll succeed. As with every other situation in novel-writing, when you make an off-the-wall decision, just check in with yourself about why you’re doing it, and whether it’s the best way to tell your story.
To find out more about how to find the right point of view from which to tell your story and get your novel off the ground, join our Starting to Write Your Novel course.