When intriguing characters with challenging goals appear in my random daydreaming, my mind fastens on them as I imagine their life. I am flooded with decisions to make. Which events from the past formed this character? What frustrates them? What  inherent weaknesses affect them? How are they going to grow enough to reach their goal? 

Once the plot for this character forms in my mind, I have another decision to make. Which point of view (POV) will I use to tell the story? The first person narrator is my go-to choice. Normally, I find this POV the easiest to write. I don’t have to worry about what to reveal to the reader. They are only privy to what my narrator knows. 

The main character for my most recent work in progress is just barely an adult, an outsider in a town that distrusts him, but a town that desperately needs his knowledge. However, he has little idea of the deceit lurking around him. This particular character would have to keep sneaking around in places where he would get discovered or overhearing conversations that he should not hear in order to comprehend the full danger. This kind of behavior didn’t seem to fit his candid manner. Therefore, I need another character’s viewpoint to reveal the secret snares that the main character faces to keep the reader in suspense. What are my other options?

Sometimes the best first person POV is an observer. I know this is contrary to the idea that the main character should propel the story forward. “Always start with the main character” is standard advice, and I want the viewpoint character to be the one with the richest inner struggles and conflicts. However, observers are the main characters who tell the story as they see it occur in many novels—from Ishmael in Moby Dick to Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby. 

I have written in the third person POV before and could attempt this again. Of course, my most frequent choice is third person limited. Like the first person viewpoint, it only lets the reader see what one character observes. I can include interior thoughts, expressed as if writing in first person and marked by italics. The third person deep POV is just a way of telling the reader of what the character is thinking, similar to first person POV. But, the author can do this for multiple characters, so it is easy to slip into head hopping if I am not careful.

In my case, I needed multiple third person POVs so that the reader would be privy to the knowledge of more than one character. The major difficulty with this style of writing is remembering to stay with one character’s thoughts until the end of a chapter (or at least the end of a section). Otherwise, I have the same problem as the author attempting the almost impossible task of writing multiple first person viewpoints. The readers’ heads keep spinning trying to figure out whose viewpoint they are seeing. That is even more challenging than the omnipotent third person viewpoint in which the author has the option of revealing anyone’s ideas and even the consensus of an entire crowd. With such freedom, third person omnipotent POV requires that I be discriminating and show only what the readers need to know.

Finally, I decided that the main character’s step-mother knew enough to introduce the conflict. Because she is ambivalent towards her step-son, the reader is never sure whether she will even warn him of dangers looming ahead or not. In her attempts to pacify the town’s leaders, she might not even protest their devious plans. Then, I could switch to the viewpoint of the main character, her step-son, as the conflicts heated up. However, I decided to come back to the step-mother’s POV at the end, even though she is a secondary character, because her role required the most growth.  

There are no hard and fast rules for choosing POV characters. Sometimes I just have to write scenes from one viewpoint and then another to see what works best. Whichever POV I select, it must compliment the story itself.