Perspective
It is this element of your writing style that will decide how you will show the story to your readers. You may be asked, “What perspective are you writing in?” and you may not know how to proceed to answer this question. It's a question often asked when you are negotiating with an agent or editor and there's a reason why they're asking. Point-Of-View or perspective hints at what writing style to expect. Like readers, agents and editors also lean towards a preference or may be stronger at editing on POV than the other. Let me enlighten you, all they're asking is how close are we to the main characters. The perspectives are referred to as First-person, Second-person, Third-person, and I've added my own of Narrative. So what is the difference? As I implied, this expresses how close the reader gets to travel with the main characters throughout the story, so let's walk through these!
First-person
You will be writing a lot of I, me, my, mines and other words that make it as if the reader is the main character. You ahve to be careful not to be overly descriptive and self reflective. This is a great POV for those who want to limit the interaction between the reader to the world and plot through a singular character's mindset and experience. It's very common in Young Adult category to see first-person POV and less so in Fantasy genre. It doesn't mean you shouldn't or couldn't use this in a Fantasy piece. The best advice here is to be aware of the voice you want to create, the immersion you are hoping for the readers to have, and how much control you want to have on what is revealed on the page. Often its easier and faster to hook a reader into your character using this POV.
Remorse heavy on my heart, I stared at my pale childlike hands. They were no different from an eight year-old boy’s hands, but these were mine at the age of twenty-eight.
Second-person
This is the hardest POV to write in with use of you and your being the front runner. It's common to see self-help articles written in this format, but rare in the fiction world unless it falls under the Choose Your Own Path category. Writers have to be very clever on sentence structure and delivery. A pitfall is the overusage of You/Your as a sentence starter. In some cases, there's a conversation unfolding between the reader and author/character/narrator. The aim here is to bring the reader into the story as their own character and presence. Sometimes this is combined with the usage of first-person to help vary how the writing unfolds. A great example of this is the novel "You" by Caroline Kepnes with line like so:
“You are a woman and I am a man and we belong in the dark together.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You
Third-person
In this writing perspective you will find yourself using a lot of He/She, His/Her, Their, they, and other words needed to make it seem as if the reader is looking over the character’s shoulder all the time. This frees you up and works great with a large cast of characters like in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. You can show or follow important world and plot events by following the more relevant character. In the case of a large cast of character, be sure to establish a character or two that will serve as anchors. These are characters you often circle back to and have the highest stakes in the plot like with Frodo and Jon Snow. This is a more common way of writing. Agent's recommend this POV often for Fantasy and even Romance that head hops between the two love interests.
His blue eyes were bright with the innocence of his kindhearted nature. Behind him was a toboggan with branches bundled on it, he was out collecting wood for fire.
Narrative
This uses the third-person perspective, but it has one major detail: a narrator. Often we see a narrative perspective for fairy tales or children stories, but they can be very handy in any genre for that all-knowing feel or watching the story play out like a movie. A lot more uses of The green frog, the boy sat, and so on. There's a particular feel for this and it has a very interesting setup. If you are looking for reading material, Gone Girl (which is a great example of an unreliable narrator) and The Alchemist are very narrative meets third-person feel to their styles. Usually this is more based on the type of story, whether its a Fairy Tale or even Dystopic pieces tend to have this built in so they can establish world or plot elements faster.
Once upon a time, there lived a little old lady in a great big boot for a house.
Another great example is a stronger narrative like seen in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events where the author or narrator has a strong place in the world as a character. In fact, his name is involved and he's framing the story in active role as if investigating what has happened. The story may be told in a third-person POV but the narrator shifts the POV to a Second-person feel asn Lemony Snicket talks to the reader to prepare them for the Unfortunate Event that you are about to witness.
“It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
Tense – Past, Present, Future - And Passive Voice!
To be honest, this is where I have the hardest time. It’s not that I don’t know the difference, but in the heat of getting that first draft of a novel down, I tend to let loose a bad habit of mix matching tenses. We learned it more in the sense of tenses involving the word itself: ran, run, running. What they failed to tell me in class was how drastically this changes the way my story is told and read. Some words that you will find that have a lot of pull on your tense are has, have, will, did and so on. The other factor in distorting tenses is the ending in your verbs: -ing versus -ed. Considering I completely stink at this, I will do us BOTH a favor and give you a very solid source that dives deeper than I ever could dream to achieve here. As a snap shot, here's a great list from nownovel.com:
Past (simple) tense: Sarah ran to the store.
Present (simple) tense: Sarah runs to the store.
Future (simple) tense: Sarah will run to the store
Past perfect: Sarah had run to the store.
Present perfect: Sarah has run to the store.
Future perfect: Sarah will have run to the store.
This article does a great job at addressing the importance of clarity as well as it's ok to mix tenses. The key is 1) be consistent in usage and 2) know when to mix and do so with purpose. If the characters or story is reflecting to a past event, then past tense will unfold. If they are talking about their plans, future tense will come into the writing. Every writer and their writing style has to figure out what combination makes their storytelling the best for them and their readers.
Writing Tenses: 5 Tips to get Past, Present and Future right: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/writing-tenses-past-present-future/
Granted another trick that's been shared at a TON of workshops and authors is the "by zombies test" which says if it works at the end of a sentence its passive or even past tense. The neat thing is that there are several tools out there to help authors, including grammarly and prowritingaid.
Check out this resource: https://datayze.com/passive-voice-detector.php
That doesn't mean you can't use it. Just be aware when you are using it and know how to use it in ways to push a story forward. If I have characters talking about the past or reflecting about the past, of course it's going to be past tense. When I was first writing ten years back I couldn't tell these things apart. Now I can, and still run programs and snag BETA readers to help catch what I've missed.
