Point of View: Who Should Tell Your Story
Many writers pick a point of view based on how it sounds — first person feels more intimate, third person feels more "novelistic" — and switch it midway through a draft when something isn't working, without really understanding why. Point of view isn't a stylistic option: it's a structural decision, because it determines exactly what the reader can know at every moment of the book. Choosing it well, early, avoids half the rewrites that come from "this scene isn't working" without knowing why.
What point of view actually decides
The right question isn't "how do I want to write" but "what does the reader need to know, and when." If the plot depends on a secret the protagonist doesn't know but that the reader needs to suspect before he does, to build tension, a point of view locked onto the protagonist alone makes that tension impossible to build — the reader knows exactly as much as he does. If instead the plot depends on the ambiguity of what the protagonist actually knows, a locked point of view is the only one that works: opening it up to other characters would reveal the answer too soon.
That's why the choice should be made by looking at the plot, not the style: first decide what needs to stay hidden and from whom, then choose the point of view that makes hiding it possible — or impossible.
First person: closeness, at a price
First person ("I opened the door and saw her") is the most intimate point of view there is: the reader thinks alongside the character, literally in their words. It's the natural choice when the protagonist's voice is itself an important part of the book — how they think, the biases they filter what they see through, the irony or naivety with which they narrate.
The price is that the narrator can only report what they see, hear, or imagine: any information the plot needs has to reach them believably — it can't simply be told to the reader because "they need to know it." A first-person narrator who learns a crucial detail through too convenient a coincidence leaves behind a sense of shortcut that the reader notices, even without being able to name it.
Close third person: the most common choice, and why
Close third person ("she opened the door and saw her") follows a single character at a time — at the scene or chapter level — but without using their exact words. It's the most widely used point of view in contemporary fiction because it takes the best of both worlds: the psychological closeness of first person (the reader knows only what the character knows, feels what they feel) with the freedom of language of third — you can describe things the character wouldn't know how to put into words, because it's no longer them narrating in the first person.
The typical risk is point-of-view slippage, or head-hopping: sliding for one sentence into another character's head ("Marco smiled, though inwardly Elena didn't believe him") inside a scene that up to that point had stayed locked on one character's perspective. The reader feels it as a small jolt, even without being able to explain what went wrong — they've momentarily lost their certainty about who's watching the scene.
Multiple points of view: when you need them, and what they cost
Switching from one character to another — chapter by chapter, or in marked sections — lets you show events a single protagonist could never see: the same scene from the other side, an antagonist acting when the protagonist isn't present, two parallel plots converging.
The cost is intimacy: every time the reader leaves one character for another, they have to rebuild their attachment from scratch, which is why ensemble novels work better with a few carefully chosen viewpoints rather than many used sparingly. The practical rule is that every point of view has to earn its space: if a character gets only a single scene from their perspective in the whole book, that scene would almost always have worked told from someone else's point of view, and the switch cost more than it gave.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change point of view partway through a novel if it isn't working?
Yes, but first understand why it isn't working: the problem is almost never the person (first or third) but what that point of view lets you reveal or keeps you from revealing. If a scene "won't turn," it's often because the point of view chosen for that scene doesn't have access to the information the scene needs to communicate — and changing person doesn't fix that, while changing character does.
Does second person ("you open the door") make sense in a novel?
It makes sense when the estrangement effect it produces is part of what the book is trying to do — for example, in a story that wants to put the reader in a role of complicity or direct discomfort — but it's the hardest choice to sustain for an entire novel, because the effect that lands for one page risks exhausting the reader over three hundred. Use it when the content calls for it, not for originality's sake.