Choosing a Point of View

This exercise is all about experimenting with different viewpoints and for this exercise you will need to select a scene from your current work in progress. Somewhere near the beginning would work well.

Read through the scene and think about how you would rewrite it in a different POV. You can choose from:

• First person POV
  "I, me, we, and us' are the pronouns used when telling a story from the main character/narrator's perspective.

• Shifting first-person
  This is where more than one character speaks in first person, which gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of more characters, rather than seeing and feeling everything through your main character's experience

• Second person
  "You" will be your go-to pronoun for addressing the reader.

• Third-person limited
  This sticks very closely to just one character's thoughts and feelings

• Third-person omniscient
  This shows us what many characters in the story are thinking or feeling. Omniscient means 'all-knowing.'

Choose one of the above and rewrite your scene using that point of view. 

What were the challenges of writing in a different POV? What were the rewards?

This is a useful exercise, especially if you are feeling a bit stuck with your story. Many authors have often commented that switching up the point of view can often unlock a story. 

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Clare Povey is the editorial and communities manager of the Writers' & Artists' website and author of children's fiction. She fell in love with France as a child, inspired by the stories in her local Barking & Dagenham Library, and by discovering the vocabulary in Usborne's First Thousand Words in French. The magic of speaking another language eventually led to her living and working in France, and writing her debut series, the Parisian-based The Unexpected Tale of Bastien Bonlivre.

*Photo by Saketh Garuda via Unsplash