Choosing a Viewpoint Character

In most cases, the viewpoint character of a novel (the one whose eyes we witness the events through) is the same person as the novel's protagonist (the character the novel is 'about'). And so the first question to answer is not who to choose as a viewpoint character, but who to choose as a protagonist.

1. Who to Choose as a Protagonist

Put simply, the protagonist of a novel is the character whose story lies at the novel's core. Who they should be is usually obvious, right from the time you first come up with the idea for the novel. But if your leading man or woman isn't yet obvious to you, the following example should help you to make a decision:

Imagine you are writing a novel about a family: a father, a mother and their teenage son. The father gets falsely arrested for a crime he didn't commit, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to the court case. It also concerns the mother and the son trying to hold things together back at home while the father is in jail.

Who is the protagonist of this novel? The answer, of course, is that it could be any of the characters...

• The father is the most obvious choice. He is the one who has been arrested, after all, and whose liberty is at stake if he isn't found innocent. All protagonists need a goal, and to encounter opposition when trying to achieve that goal, and in the case of the father the goal is to prove himself innocent with the help of his lawyer - not an easy task when he has obviously been framed.

• If you decide to make the wife the leading character, the novel changes in nature. One of her goals is to see her husband released, but there isn't much she can actively do about this - and so the court case aspect of the novel becomes more of a subplot. Her primary goal is to hold the family together in her husband's absence, and so the focus of the novel shifts from the legal side of things to the domestic front, where the wife has to keep her son on the rails and also find a job so they can survive financially.

• If you told the story from the son's point of view, what would his goal be? It could be a million things, but here is one idea: the boy sees himself as the man of the house now, and therefore the one who must hold the family together while his father faces a hopeless-looking trial and his mother struggles to put bread on the table. When he gets in with the wrong bunch of kids, the temptation to join their gang and make some easy money from crime is too great to resist.

You can see that who you choose as a protagonist will fundamentally alter the kind of novel you write. Make one choice and your novel ends up one way, make another choice and the book you produce will be totally different.

So if you have come up with a bunch of characters but you are unsure whose story to focus on, sketch out all the possibilities like I have done above and then go with your instincts.

• If I were to write the novel above, I would make the wife the protagonist - for no better reason than her story is the one that interests me the most.

• You might decide to go with the man or the boy, and you would be just as right.

• Alternatively, you could decide to make all three of them equal protagonists, giving them a third of the novel each in which to be the viewpoint character.

There is no right or wrong here.

Like I said, the sections on How to Plot a Novel and Creating Characters will be looking at protagonists in more detail, so if you still have doubts you will find your answers there. But hopefully the example has helped the majority of you to make up your minds as to who your leading character(s) should be.

The next step is to return to the whole point of this article and discuss who to choose as the novel's viewpoint character...