Viewpoints

One of the hardest decisions for me when writing a story is to decide whose viewpoint I'm going to use to tell it. There are various ways to tell a story, which are adequately described in many different places on the internet, but when I'm writing longer stories, I tend to opt for a third-person restricted viewpoint. I'll use first-person for short stories sometimes, but that's usually when I want to make a stylistic choice in the way it's told, especially when a story's best told in a certain vernacular.

The issue with using third person restricted, though, is that you have to decide who is going to be your viewpoint character. The natural choice is to imagine it's best to do it from the view of the lead protagonist, but sometimes having them centre stage right from the start means that you can lose a lot of the mystery around them, placing them up front and centre from the beginning. The best example I've seen of that is in Doctor Who, comparing 'Rose' (the first episode of the new version) with the TV movie starring Paul McGann.

The TV movie had the Doctor as the central character, but also the main viewpoint character and narrator. That meant that all the mystery was stripped from him the moment he started explaining all about his background, the Time Lords, regeneration etc etc The new series, however, chose to tell the story from Rose's perspective, where she meets a mysterious stranger and gradually learns who he is, where he comes from and what he can do.

That's what I've realised my story needs to do. I wrote the first chapter of it from the perspective of the main character, then realised when I was writing the chapter that follows on from there that her story (or at least that strand of it) was best told by a character she encounters in that chapter, who then becomes involved in the plot. In Doctor Who terms, she's the companion - someone who can have things she doesn't know explained to her for the benefit of the audience.

(It's also worth noting here that no character - and no person - ever thinks they're anything but thestar and protagonist of their own story)

Which means, in passing, that I have to go back and rewrite chapter one at some point, but not while I'm pressing on with telling the story at the moment. A good day's writing and I'm now at 10,869 words. Today and tomorrow should hopefully be good for writing, and then there won't be anything on Saturday because I'm out all day, so I need to build up a buffer to not fall behind schedule.