Every story needs a viewpoint, and most of the time, that means a point of view character. This is often taken for granted, even though we’re never really taught the basics. Instead, authors just have to figure it out by feel. This week, we’re working to correct that as we go over viewpoint fundamentals. Who should your POV character be, what should they sound like, and how can you describe them? Also, why they should totally be Sam Smorkle the random goblin.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is–
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And–
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: Well, I know that I’m sitting at a computer talking into a microphone, but I can’t see either of you, so for all I know you’re speaking to me from Antarctica.
Oren: Yeah. I’m really mysterious. You can’t see what’s going on inside my head.
Bunny: I’m actually a penguin. I’ve been a penguin this whole time. I cleverly misled you by calling myself Bunny.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: That is a good reveal.
Bunny: Yeah. I didn’t reveal this until four fifths of the way into the book, but you know…
Oren: You should definitely surprise reveal the species of your main character three fourths of the way through the book.
Bunny: Yes.
Oren: I swear half the weird questions I see on various writing subreddits are “how do I conceal this essential piece of information about my viewpoint character?” And it’s “no, you don’t.”
[Bunny and Chris lamenting dramatically in the background]Bunny: Oh, stop. Bad. Retreat.
Oren: That’s the neat part. You don’t.
Bunny: And don’t mislead people into thinking your character’s a centaur either. Going to centaur school.
Oren: That was a funny example, right? Because he is like “I’ll have to go to centaur school!” This is from A Spell for Chameleon. In the first couple pages, when it was still kind of cute/funny, and not like gross/creepy funny. And he has that line where he says “I might have to go to centaur school”. You eventually could figure out it means a school run by centaurs, but since we’ve had no description of what he looks like at that point, it could just as easily be a school for centaurs, of which he is one of them.
Chris: So this time we’re talking about viewpoint characters, some basics, and questions that people ask and things like that.
Let’s start at the top with the obvious. What is a viewpoint character?
Oren: It’s the person that you shoot the point of view gun at from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
[Chris and Bunny chuckle]Bunny: Or maybe it’s the personification of a pretty overlooked point on the side of a highway.
Chris: Oh yeah, that sounds good.
Oren: It’s very nice. It’s very scenic.
Chris: Yeah, so it just means the narration is supposed to be in their head to some level, reporting what they are thinking or feeling and nobody else. So stories that don’t have narration don’t technically have them.
Although in a show you can see that scenes might follow a character, and so it kind of feels similar to that character having a viewpoint, but it’s not technically the same because we don’t have their thoughts.
Although with voiceover…I don’t know, maybe with enough voiceover, you could call it a viewpoint character.
Oren: The new Murderbot show looks like it’s going in that direction just based on the trailer, which it can probably get away with better than most because it’s using them to make jokes, which, sure. Generally speaking, that much voiceover is not a good idea. But if it’s funny, people will accept that.
Chris: And we call this type of narration limited, because the narration can only relate what the viewpoint character knows and nothing else.
Bunny: Because Chris is trying to take away your rights. Rise up!
Chris: because I’m a prescriptivist!
Oren: Your rights to just say whatever you want in the book.
Bunny: Use the chaotic viewpoint! Do not be restrained.
Chris: And a lot of times we do find people making mistakes in manuscripts where they accidentally slipped up and described a thought or a feeling of another character.
It’s not that you can’t describe how other characters are feeling, but you always have to have citations. Basically how your viewpoint character knows that. So instead of “she was sad” if in this case she’s not a viewpoint character, you’d be like “oh, she looked sad” or “she seemed sad” or “she didn’t smile so I guess she was sad” or “she must have been sad because she didn’t smile”.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: Whereas if you just state outright in your narration “oh, she was sad”, you seem to be declaring that as though you automatically know it. And that doesn’t work if this character is not your viewpoint character.
Oren: And it might be worth covering why we say that. Because this isn’t just something we decided on one day. There are some reasons. The most obvious reason is that it is giving up a big advantage of using the limited viewpoint in the first place, which is that you can get deep into a character and understand who they are and immerse yourself in them and sympathize with them a lot and all that good stuff.
And the more that you bring in stuff that that character doesn’t know, the more distant you’re getting. And at that point, it starts to raise questions about why you picked a limited viewpoint to begin with. And then of course there’s also confusion because if you introduce something that the viewpoint character doesn’t know, readers then have to wonder how do they know that? Do they know that? Or is the book just telling me that? Does the character know?
And it creates all kinds of issues. The story would just be smoother without them.
Chris: Generally the readers need to know how they should interpret narration. And so if you have a viewpoint character, the idea is that when the reader reads narration, that is supposed to be, at some level, a reflection of the character’s experience.
And that can read very differently than if there is an outside narrator, like an omniscient personality, narrating the story. That can mean different things. The narration can be saying different things that way.
And if you do want to have a lot of emotional intimacy with a character and you want the reader to get really attached to them, get familiar with them, bond with them? Then you want the reader to be in their head a lot, knowing what they’re thinking and feeling. At that point it’s a lot more convenient to stick to “yes, everything is happening from their experience” as opposed to–A lot of omni-narration actually will do that, but you have to start from the idea of a personality outside the character’s head and then smoothly dip into their head and back out again. And it’s almost more work.
And also having a viewpoint character with limited narration does help writers focus on what’s important because a new writer doesn’t necessarily know what they should focus on in their narration and what’s important to the story. And I do think it can be very helpful.
So yeah, it helps build more emotional intimacy. And at the cost of giving up, the convenience of being able to just say whatever you feel like in the narration.
Oren: Don’t worry though. Authors will find plenty of ways to go off on random tangents that they shouldn’t in a limited viewpoint. [Bunny chuckles] Authors are creative that way.
Bunny: They will not be stifled by words like “limited viewpoint”.
Oren: Look, a limited viewpoint character can think a lot of weird random trains of thought is all I’m saying.
Bunny: Yeah, but it’s not the same. Limited is different from some other things. It’s different from close narration. Apparently people are using the word “deep POV” a lot. Apparently they’re not very consistent about what it means.
Oren: Yeah, I see it come up sometimes and it is usually in the form of people complaining about it and they don’t seem to know exactly what it is.
They seem to be conflating limited and close narration. And close narration specifically refers to how much the narration is just the character’s thoughts, which is usually paired with limited, but they’re not exactly the same thing.
Chris: Yeah. So close is a matter of narrative distance. We’ve talked about narrative distance before.
Every single time I have an article on point of view, I have to tell readers again what narrative distance is. It’s kind of a pretty technical complex topic, but it’s basically where the narrative camera is.
Does it feel like you’re looking at the character from like hovering in the air far above the city, or does it feel like you’re looking down at the character from somewhere like a foot above their head? Or does it feel like you’re behind their eyes?
Bunny: Is it Stardew Valley, Call of Duty, or Hades?
Chris: [Excited] Yeah! That’s great. So if it’s really close, that’s the feeling that you’re right behind their eyes. And that generally means that you’re using limited narration. Although, again, omniscience can do it temporarily if it’s careful.
But at the same time, limited can get surprisingly distant. So an example: Gideon the Ninth, a really popular book, is in what I would call “distant limited”. It’s not like super distant because you can only get so distant and [still] have a viewpoint character. But the narration doesn’t entirely feel like it’s Gideon thinking those things or talking about those things.
But at the same time, it still is limited because it restricts itself to what Gideon knows. And if the narration is full personality, the extra flexibility of not having to use Gideon’s personality can be used for things like humor. I personally do wonder, well, maybe you should have just gone with omniscience instead, since we were already not fully in Gideon’s head.
Why restrict yourself to limited, to only what Gideon knows? But it’s not super bland. Distant, limited can be really bland sometimes, but can also be done with personality. And there’s tons of books like that. There’s tons of books that have distant limited, and sometimes they’re bland, sometimes they’re not.
A lot of times I don’t think that that’s an optimal choice, but nonetheless, it’s not uncommon. So, that’s the difference between limited and close. Where is the camera exactly and what information do you have access to? It’s also a little different from does it feel conversational? People talk about a first person narrator being the person talking like it’s dialogue, but that’s not true in many stories.
Sometimes a narrator will sound more conversational, like they’re talking to somebody, like they know they have an audience often, and sometimes it doesn’t sound like that. And that’s completely different from whether it’s limited.
Oren: So my first question is: who should your viewpoint character be?
Can it be just some rando? Can it be Sam Smorkle, the goblin we saw in the tavern once?
Chris: Depends. Is Sam Smorkle the goblin your main character?
Bunny: It’s always Sam Smorkle the goblin.
Oren: Obviously not. No, I would never tell a story about Sam Smorkle. He disgusts me.
Chris: Awww, poor Sam Smorkle.
Bunny: [Sad] Noooo. Look, if Sam Smorkle is in the story, it’s automatic. That is your viewpoint character now.
Oren: You don’t understand my art. It’s a deep commentary by making you view the story through the eyes of the detestable Sam Smorkle, who isn’t there and doesn’t see any of the things that happen. I am telling you a deep commentary on the nature of fantasy. I’m ready to write my thinkpiece.
Bunny: I have to get on Substack, I guess.
Chris: No, no. Again, people will tell you different things. My opinion is that your viewpoint character should always be the main character and if you have multiple viewpoint characters, you better be writing an ensemble.
We’ve talked about multiple viewpoints and how there are a few situations in which I think they’re a good idea, but most of the time I don’t think they’re a good idea [chuckle].
But basically, I really, really think that the viewpoint character should be the main character. We even had this as an example in our unworkable story choices episode. [Like] the Watsonian POV. Just say no to Watson’s.
Oren: Yeah, just say no to Watson’s.
Chris: [apologetic] I’m sorry.
Bunny: If someone approaches you in a back alley and opens up their trench coat and there’s a Watsonian viewpoint inside, just say no.
Oren: Just dare to say no.
Chris: The reason is that readers just grow more attached to the viewpoint character, which is just really important. It’s really important for having people be engaged with your stories, for them to like your main character. They will like the viewpoint character better. I’m sorry, Robert Jackson Bennett, but I care more about Din than Ana.
I know Ana is your favorite. [Bunny and Oren laugh in the background] I can tell. And she’s fine. But Din is where it’s at. I’m sorry.
Bunny: [emphatically agreeing] Din is where it’s at.
Oren: Din’s my special boy. [jokingly threatening voice] You give Din more to do, you hear me? You give him more to do, Robert.
Bunny: You turn this around, Robert. [chuckle]
Chris: And also readers reasonably expect them to be important. I do think that setting your viewpoint characters also is a signal to readers about which characters are of central importance, and that readers will generally, purposely get more attached to them.
They’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have some, it’s not like completely voluntary, but there is definitely some level of choice involved in who the reader gets attached to. Hence why when a show kills off too many characters, people stop getting emotionally invested. Because they choose not to, ’cause they know they’re gonna get burned after a while, for instance.
Oren: Yeah. I’m not convinced people can make the choice to get attached to a character that they don’t like at all, but I know for sure the opposite works where they can decide to not get attached to someone who they might otherwise have liked.
Chris: Yeah, I do think there’s an element of, okay, we know this is the main character. If we want to like the story, we might try to cut it a little slack. The point is that it is also beneficial. So, yeah, definitely the viewpoint character should be your main character.
Bunny: And you can also turn an audience against your viewpoint character, to be clear. They get a little bit of automatic sympathy because they’re the main character. You know, you wanna root for the person whose story this is, or [the person] who is your primary eyes through which to view the world in the story. We’re just more intimate with them than we are with any other character. So of course people are going to find them more sympathetic.
But if your character is a jerk, you can lose goodwill pretty quickly. And if the main character’s a jerk and people don’t like the main character, that’s probably a recipe for them putting down the book, more than disliking any other single character.
Oren: Yeah. The stakes are certainly very high.
Chris: Looking at you people who are writing villain protagonists. It’s not impossible to do, but…
Oren: There’s an audience for that. I’m not convinced that’s the best move, to be intentionally limiting your audience to only people who like that kind of story. But you know, you do you.
Chris: Yeah. So make them your main character. And if you wanna know who your main character should be — most people already know that — it’s the character you like, it’s the character that’s affected by problems in the story, and ideally, kind of at the center of the problems and has some ability to actually create change and solve the problem, which Sam Smorkle the goblin probably doesn’t, unfortunately.
Oren: Poor Sam Smorkle. He’s doing his best.
Chris: And be well positioned for likability, which in many cases means they’re in some sort of sympathetic position, which is why we like underdogs. Underdogs are always our heroes.
Bunny: In my experience, and I don’t think this is universal, but at least in the sorts of writing circles I’ve run in, it seems like a lot of people conceive of their main character at the same time as they conceive of their story’s premise.
So usually I think people who have, at the very least, a little writing experience have a decent sense of who should be there and who will be the most well positioned to be the main character. Now, that’s not always the case, and it can change if they start writing the story and end up liking another character way more than their original viewpoint character.
Oren: The biggest concern I’ve run into is less that they just don’t know who their main character is and more that they start off with one main character, but then end up getting attached to someone else as the story progresses. Stories take a long time to write. You get new ideas, you introduce a mysterious secondary character and you’re like “Ooh, they’re mysterious and cool, not like my boring old main character that I know really well”.
That’s what I’ve found to be the biggest problem.
Chris: Or sometimes they have multiple viewpoints and you can convince them to cut those viewpoints down, and you have to choose which person is the —
Sometimes what happens — again, a lot of times when people have multiple viewpoints — is they end up with separate storylines because the viewpoint character also makes it so that you have to feature events that include the same character, and that’s really useful for plotting because it kind of forces writers to make their stories more cohesive and make everything interconnected.
And so what usually happens when you have multiple viewpoint characters, and sometimes writers use them on purpose for this purpose, is that now that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they can be on different continents. They don’t have to have anything to do with each other. So although things they’re experiencing also don’t have anything to do with each other, and so basically we have two different stories that we’re just kind of hopping back and forth between, and they’re very disconnected from each other.
I really do think that lowers engagement, so I don’t recommend it. I think it would be better just split them up and make them each their own story. It’s fine. But again, in some of those cases, we’ll recommend cutting down the number of viewpoint characters. And often because they have completely different storylines, one of them will just be working a lot better than the other one.
And we could be like “Hey. Your story would be a lot stronger if you just focused on this storyline with this character, ’cause that one is just working better” oftentimes.
Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about when you are picking your main character and figuring out their viewpoint is that by picking someone to be your viewpoint character, what you’re basically doing is you are making them sympathetic and relatable over making them mysterious.
Which is a thing that I think a lot of writers struggle with because they’re used to TV or film where the main character can also be mysterious because we can’t see what’s going on inside their heads. So halfway through the movie, we could reveal that they’re a vampire or something, which probably wouldn’t work in a book.
In a limited POV book, it would be really weird to wait that long to reveal that they’re a vampire, unless they themselves did not know.
Chris: Yeah. So you kind of have to give up what we call those meta mysteries.
Bunny: That’s okay. All of the advertising material will reveal it anyway.
[Oren and Chris laugh]Chris: That is true. Yeah, you have to give that up, but it’s worth it. The trade off is totally worth it.
But in any case, another issue that we have with viewpoint characters — this came up in my Revenger critique recently — is just don’t let your viewpoint character disappear. They should have a presence in the scene. It should feel like they’re there. And if they seem to just disappear from the story, it’s not good because where did they go?
This reminds me of Project Hail Mary. There are all these flashbacks, the main character remembering things. And then there’s one flashback where the main character just isn’t there. All the flashbacks are his memories. How is he not there? But as far as we know, he’s not even present. [Chris trying to hold back laughter] And it’s like we just wanted to have that scene and didn’t have an excuse to have the main character there, so we just thought he’d just slip it in and maybe we wouldn’t notice that the main character was missing.
Oren: Maybe he just heard about it by description and he’s just remembering having heard about it.
Chris: This tends to happen if the scene is about watching two important people talking to each other and the viewpoint character is mostly watching them. This is when this tends to happen a lot.
Bunny: Don’t let them just be a camera.
Chris: It can be hard to figure out what they do. Ideally they would participate in the conversation. Failing that, like maybe your viewpoint character is actually eavesdropping, so they probably shouldn’t chime in, you can at least have them react to what they hear, give some emotions, and if you create a pause in the conversation, you can use that to have them think about what they’re hearing a little bit.
They can at least react.
Oren: Definitely a “less is more “situation. For me, this has always felt normal because I just think of it in terms of role playing games, and if my players have to sit and listen to two NPCs talk to each other? Nu-uh, they’re gonna be outta there.
Chris: Except for when we had that fantasy arbitration.
You were so self-conscious about that, but we all loved it. We’re like, yeah, no, we’ll just sit back and watch the GM talk to himself.
Bunny: We were so invested.
Oren: Well, that was three NPCs that I had spent a huge amount of time getting you involved in. One of them was your love interest and the other was your evil frat lady, bad guy.
There was a lot of effort that went into that scene. I would not have tried that at the beginning of the story.
Chris: The other thing is if your viewpoint character disappears, what you’re left with is what I call film POV. And this is a disparaging term and it’s a reminder that narration has some advantages over film.
Film isn’t just better. Sometimes people need reminders of [that]. I’m just laughing because there was some suggestion by tech bros that they would have a startup where they would turn books into a multimedia experience. Whatever that means. And it’s like, no, people actually do like reading books.
Oren: Yeah. Whatever that means.
Bunny: It probably involves NFTs.
Chris: But not just inferior films, okay? That’s where basically you don’t get to show any character’s thoughts or feelings because there’s no viewpoint character anymore, and it’s not good. You should avoid that.
Oren: They’re just hanging out, you know, they’re just vibing, just chilling. Don’t even worry about it.
So on the topic of viewpoint characters disappearing. In Revenger, it was notable that this was definitely supposed to be the start of an arc where the main character discovers her identity and learns to assert herself. And that’s a legitimate arc. But they don’t have to be non-entities before that happens.
I would argue that no one is actually a non-entity inside their own head, unless they’re some kind of weird alien or robot or something. If they’re like a normal person, they will have an internal life of some kind, even if they have an arc about finding who they are or whatever. In that early scene, the problem is that the sister just kind of takes over and the POV character is just like, yeah, whatever. Has no thoughts or opinions on things.
If we wanted to start that arc of her having to like discover her own identity, what you might do is have her be initially reluctant, but then decide actually, yeah, I’m gonna be super gung-ho about the sister’s plan, and that would show that she has an arc, that she needs to learn to be her own person instead of just kind of being nothing.
Chris: What we really needed there is some thoughts and motivation from her, whatever they were, because her sister is basically manipulating her. This is Adrana and Fura. Fura is the main character, the viewpoint character, and we have no idea what she’s thinking or feeling, but we can see that her sister is manipulating her into something that she seems to not wanna do, but she also isn’t really fighting back.
So there could be multiple things going on there where a) she actually does wanna do this, but she’s supposed to be responsible so she thinks that she shouldn’t, but she secretly does want to. So she’s not fighting too hard. Or she really doesn’t want to, but she feels a lot of pressure, she wants to make her sister happy.
There could be all sorts of things happening inside her head as this occurs, but if we don’t know, she just feels like a sack of nothing. We don’t get to bond with her. We don’t get to understand her. We don’t develop as much attachment to her. So we can’t just leave it blank. There has to be something there.
Okay, so a few common questions. The biggest question that everybody always asks is, how do I describe my viewpoint character?
Oren: You don’t. You never describe them. Don’t mention what they look like at all.
Bunny: They might be a penguin.
Chris: Honestly, if it’s a short story, you might not have to.
I do think that it matters, but I think that at novel size people do expect you to describe your viewpoint character.
Bunny: Or you could be like John Scalzi and not describe anyone, including the main character.
Oren: He doesn’t have time for that.
Bunny: Some sassy eyeballs named Jamie.
Chris: I think Jamie is supposed to be gender ambiguous, but even a gender ambiguous character, you could still say a few gender neutral things about that character’s appearance if you want to.
Bunny: Murderbot is also–
Chris: Murderbot is non-binary, I think. Whereas Jamie is ambiguous, as in Jamie could very well have gendered pronouns, we just don’t know what they are.
Oren: Murderbot is actually the same. Murderbot’s gender identity is not stated, at least not in the first book. People had to go and ask Wells in an AMA about that.
And that was how we found out that Murderbot’s pronouns are “it” because that’s just not anywhere in the book.
Bunny: That one’s complicated because the other characters do refer to Murderbot with “it”. The thing is that we don’t know if that’s what Murderbot wants.
Oren: Right. Whereas with Jamie, John Scalzi is repeating his trick from his Lock In books.
But with that one, it was a little clearer because the character was largely represented by a humanoid robot that they piloted around, whereas this character does not do that. It is a little harder to figure out that that’s what’s happening. You have to pay a little closer attention.
Chris: I didn’t notice at all, but that’s partly because I was listening to an audiobook that was narrated by Will Wheaton and that gives me a specific image.
In the first scenes, what Jamie says and what Jamie’s doin, it was hard for me to not imagine Jamie as a guy.
Oren: Well, the thing that got me about it was that my old spoilers, I guess there’s a rude, evil tech bro in the story. And the way he talks to Jamie, it just doesn’t make sense to me that he’s talking to a person he sees as a woman this way.
Chris: Right. And the way Jamie talks to him also.
Oren: He talks to Jamie like one of the bros.
Bunny: To be clear, this takes place in the real world. It takes place in 2020 explicitly, so you don’t have the ambiguity of maybe a gender egalitarian setting.
Oren: I’m willing to conceive of the possibility of some asshole techbro who talks to women like they’re part of his asshole techbro circle.
Not like that couldn’t exist. It just did not seem likely without any attention called to it.
Chris: Right. I suspect that was accidental on Scalzi’s part, that Scalzi was just writing from the perspective of a man. Since he’s a man and might not have realized that that would come off as gendered.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think I agree with Oren as well. I think I did just implicitly be like the way Jamie is acting in this first scene and that sort of exchange with the first asshole tech person did strike me as I can’t really envision Jamie as a woman in this case, just because of the dynamics of that.
Oren: Or at least not someone that other people perceive as a woman.
Chris: But in any case, I didn’t notice that there was supposed to be gender ambiguity at all when I read that book or listened to that book for the first time and learned it later.
Bunny: Hire Will Wheaton. That’s our advice.
Chris: But in any case, my point is you could still describe Jamie in ways that, if you wanted it to be ambiguous, it would still leave it ambiguous.
So you don’t always have to describe your viewpoint character, but generally for a novel, people expect you to. You’ll probably get some comments if you don’t. You can do whatever you want with your own novel, but you’ll probably get comments.
So how do you describe your viewpoint character?
We’re assuming that this is something where you’re kind of in a close perspective and the narration is closely representing their thoughts and experiences and people used to have their viewpoint character look in the mirror, but that’s considered cliche now.
You just wanna find a reason to remind them about their appearance, so they think about it. So have them dress up, or maybe they get like dirt on their clothes and hair, or perhaps they have a friend or family member that they would reasonably compare themselves to in the way they look to. Instead of looking in a mirror, they can look at photos or paintings of people.
I have an article with a list of more ideas, but the key is to just [think] when does your appearance matter? When do you think about it? And then create one of those situations and get them thinking about it a little bit.
And then the last question people ask, does their narration have to be their thoughts? Like literally? The answer is no. Don’t overthink it. Exposition is important. It’s not supposed to be their stream of consciousness from their mind. Just have it generally reflect what they’re thinking about and you’ll be fine.
Bunny: Unless you’re James Joyce and want to confuse everyone.
Oren: All right. Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.