Two of the first decisions in any novel are whose point of view you’ll tell it from and who your main character (MC) is. Let’s dig into both. Get ready to put your amateur psychologist hat on. 🧠
Who is telling the story?
The simplest answer is your main character, right? But that’s not always the case. Plenty of books have multiple point of view characters, by which I mean the reader gets to experience the story through the eyes of more than one character. This is often, but not always, done by switching point of view (POV) from chapter to chapter.
So there’s your first choice: are you going to tell the story through multiple points of view or just one?
And then, for each POV:
Are you telling the story in first person (I) or close/limited third (using the character’s name but in their head, interpreting events as they see them)?
There are other choices: second person POV, which uses ‘you’, and omniscient third, in which a god-like narrator who can see into everyone’s head directs the action. These POVs are uncommon because they are much harder to pull off but they can be powerful when done well.
If you’re just starting out, I strongly recommend choosing first or close third as your POV, regardless of how many POV characters you have. If your book demands a different choice, it will let you know. And speaking from experience, you can switch POV at any point in the process—I went from first to third and it didn’t damage me too much. 😅
(Also, this is obviously a serious simplification of a much more complex craft topic, but today we’re focused on decision-making to get things going.)
Who is your main character?
Or, who are you going to put through the wringer?
I’m not a huge fan of the endless questionnaire-type worksheets that I’ve seen. A lot of that information, while fine to know, isn’t all that helpful. Is their favorite cereal or last pet’s name important to the events and emotional turmoil you’re about to put them through? Great! That’s need to know.
Chances are, however, you’re spending time jotting down that they hate Skittles and love sunflowers and avoiding the juicy, important, and HARD work of really figuring out what makes them tick.
Give them a name. Figure out how old they are at the start of the novel’s events. Then think about:
- What do they want more than anything in the world?
Don’t be afraid to go deep here. You’re identifying a key piece of your MC’s identity, and likely something they’ve kept hidden from the world because of fear, shame, or some other negative emotion(s). This isn’t “Ella wants a cinnamon bun soooo badly” unless what’s really going on is that Ella wants a cinnamon bun soooo badly because her father used to make the best cinnamon buns and so they represent safety and comfort, which Ella is desperate for because she has found herself in a series of relationships with all the wrong people who represent the opposite of safety and comfort.
- Why do they want this thing?
If you were to ask your MC this question in an interview, they may not be able to tell you, because again, it’s often buried deep. They may not be able to articulate it or they may not even be aware of their reasons. But you need to be.
Just as your ‘why’ for writing the novel is going to keep you going over the course of this long messy process, your MC’s ‘why’ is what is going to keep them pressing forward when everything goes sideways (and it will go sideways because that’s what the journey is all about).
Let’s stay with Ella—she wants safety and comfort because it’s been missing in her life and therefore she’s been living in a constant state of anxiety. She’s sick and tired and burned out and knows that her life can’t continue this way because it will kill her. She wants to remember what it is like to feel calm, to not constantly have to monitor everything she says and does.
- What do they think will happen to them if they get it?
The simplest answer is that getting what they want will solve all their problems, whatever those problems are. Can you see why that’s not really helpful? So get as specific as you can at this point.
For example, Ella believes that if she can figure out how to feel safe, she’ll be able to breathe. If she can find safety and comfort, she can start again, get her life back on track. She’ll be able to smile when she looks in the mirror. (Bam! Did that stop you like it did me? Not only does it speak to part of Ella’s emotional journey—finding self-love and self-confidence—but it also gives you an image to hang an ending off of. See how powerful this work can be?)
- What’s stopping them from getting it?
If this really were as simple as the external desire, we wouldn’t need to write a book about it. Ella could go to the bakery and get her freaking cinnamon bun and maybe it wouldn’t be as good as her dad’s were, but the itch is scratched and we all go on with our day.
But we know by now that it’s about much more than that.
Maybe she’s afraid of what will happen if she walks away from her current life—even though the known is terrible, the unknown can be scary as well. Maybe she feels like she doesn’t have any options. Maybe she doesn’t trust herself to be alone because she fears it will be worse than being with someone who isn’t good for her.
Think about these questions from both an external (what is happening in the world around them) and internal (what’s happening inside their heads/with their emotions) perspective. Using Ella as an example:
- External: Ella wants a good cinnamon bun.
- Internal: Ella wants to feel safe and comfortable in her own skin.
(Thank you for bearing with me while I riffed—and yes, I just made that example up; no, it is not part of any of my books, new or old.)
I hope you can see a couple of things happening here.
By identifying your main character’s circumstances and obstacles, you’ve automatically given yourself some plot points. The external elements that you generate help you start to build your story events.
You’ve also started to build stakes and some force of opposition internally, which gives your novel the emotional weight that is going to keep a reader hooked.
You may not know all of this information when you set off, but you must have some ideas to start playing with, otherwise, your book can easily turn into a plot-only mess that reads like “and then this happened, and then this happened…” (I should know, that was essentially the first draft of my book!) Plot is important but without meaning, it’s just events strung together.
To get at this critical info in greater detail, I highly recommend Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story and Story Genius. (NOTE: these are affiliate links to bookshop.org; please support your local bookstores and libraries when you can!)
If you’d like to take the “what do they want, and what’s stopping them” work further, the free Stakes Mapping Workbook helps you build stakes at the personal, relational, and thematic levels.