What POV is best for your romance novel?

Let’s talk narrative voice and how to use characters’ perspectives to get them a happily ever after in a romance.

First-person POV, second-person POV, and the various third-person POVs are different kinds of narrative voice. (I’m going to use voice and POV pretty much interchangeably here.) So let’s go through each one and discuss how they work and when to use them in romance.

First-person POV

With first-person POV, you’re in a character’s head and they’re using “I” to narrate the story. It’s basically like the character is talking to the reader directly and telling them every thought that crosses their mind.

E.g. “I caught his eye from across the room.”

When should you use first-person? When you want the reader to be incredibly close to your protagonist(s) and have the reader feeling/thinking/seeing/etc. everything that the character is. This works great for high-angst stories when you want the reader to have visceral reactions to the story, or if you have lots of world-building and want to create a visceral, immersive experience for your reader. First-person has been the most common POV lately in certain contemporary sub-genres (dark romance, some adult contemporary, mafia), New Adult, fantasy, and YA.

People have big feelings about first-person (and about third-person, for that matter): they either love one and hate the other. Do not get super caught up in this—you’re never going to please everyone. (More on this near the end about which POV you should choose.)

Second-person POV

Second-person is tricky, because the narrator doesn’t have their own individual voice, but is talking directly to another character by using “you.”

E.g. “You caught his eye and beckoned him over to you.”

It’s very hard to do second-person, and you need to have a good reason to do it to justify it over the course of a whole book. I see it mostly in fanfic when there is a self-insert Reader or original character, but I would not recommend it for published romance. (You can get away with it in literary fiction, maybe, but not in romance.) Where I think it can work in romance is when you need to hide the identity of the narrator, e.g. a baddie in a mystery/thriller, especially if they’re sinister and threatening to the protagonist(s). I’ve seen it done in romantic suspense with an occasional POV of the stalker or the killer. Again, a very tough sell, and you’d have to really convince me it needs to be there.

Third-person limited

In third person limited (or close) POV, you use he/she/they/etc. to refer to the POV character(s). The character is telling you their thoughts and feelings, but unlike in first-person, there’s mediation between the character and their actual emotions through the narration. 

E.g. She caught his eye and beckoned him over. His expression went from confused to surprised to...pleased? Whatever he was thinking, he schooled his features before approaching her.

Third-person limited is common in historicals, contemporary (rom-coms, some adult contemp), and paranormal. This POV is great if you have an unreliable narrator who’s clearly misreading the signs they’re given, or if you want a bit of a wider narrative lens than you’d get in first-person.

Deep POV

Deep POV is a subset of third-person limited. You are deep (duh) in a character’s head and immersed in their thoughts and feelings—basically like first-person POV except using third-person pronouns and only a tiny bit of mediation through the narrator. There’s no “she felt” or “she thought”—those filler words aren’t necessary in deep POV. 

E.g. She caught his eye and beckoned him over. He looked surprised for a moment, and her heart jolted. Was he nervous around her?

If you’re using third-person in romance, you probably want to be using deep POV—romance is all about character and emotions, and you get more immediate access to them with deep POV.

Third-person omniscient

Third-person omniscient POV is a narrator who is not a character in the story but has access to the perspectives of ALL the characters, and the characters are still referred to as he/she/they/etc. The narrator can give each of their perspectives as needed. It gives a bird’s-eye view of the story and characters, but it’ll never get deep into any character’s thoughts and feelings.

E.g. She caught his eye and beckoned him over. He was bewildered that she wanted him, of all people.

Third-person omniscient was popularized by Jane Austen—and you know I love my girl Jane, but unless you are actually Jane, you probably want to avoid omniscient and stick with limited or deep POV. Omniscient is just not in fashion at the moment, and most people will mistakenly believe that you’re head-hopping (which is also not on trend).

What’s the difference between head-hopping and omniscient? Head-hopping happens when you switch from one character’s deep POV to another within the same section. In omniscient, you’re not in deep POV so your narrator can easily move from one character’s perspective to another. The difference is very subtle! But you can only do limited OR omniscient—not both in the same story (usually).

Head-hop:

She caught his eye and beckoned him over. His expression went from confused to surprised to...pleased? He plastered on a smile, knowing that this could be his chance.

Omniscient:

She caught his eye and beckoned him over. He was bewildered that she wanted him, of all people.

What voice should you be writing in?

Any POV is doable if you write it well. I have my own preferences for POV, but when it’s done well, I don’t even notice what POV the book is being written. You need to know the voices of your characters and how to express their POV in the way that works for you, for your reader, and for your genre. And you’ll need to look at comps, books like yours (in the same genre with a similar vibe to you and targeting for similar readers) to see which POV is used most often.

The question I get most often from clients is “should I write in first- or third-person? I don’t like one of them, but that’s the one that seems to be selling most.” Unfortunately, I can’t answer that for you if you’re self-publishing because it’s ultimately your choice whether you want to write a POV that feels easy and brings out your best writing or a POV that might sell well (because wow, some readers will not even pick up a book if it’s in a POV they don’t like, or will rate it low because of the POV they don’t prefer).

I spoke about this more in-depth here—but if you don’t want to watch a video, basically the point is that there is value in doing the POV that works best for your creativity because you’ll attract people who are into that AND trends get started by people doing something different and outside the market-prescribed box. But there is also no shame in writing to market either! It really depends on what your goal is.

Should you use single or dual/multiple POV?

This is a separate question from voice, but just as important. When should you use just one narrator, and when should you use more than one?

Single POV—where you only get one character’s POV for the entire book—is best to use when the story is very much about the arc of that one character, and the arc of the other protagonist(s) is secondary. More often, how I like to see it used is when the other protagonist(s) has something to hide or that can’t be revealed to the reader or to the POV character if we were in the other person’s head. So we can’t know that he’s harboured a secret crush on our first-person character since he was their childhood bully, but there should be signs that the first-person character misses entirely but are legible to the reader.

If you’re doing multiple POVs, how many should you use? Ideally I’d say just the main protagonists of the book, so for most romances, this is two. But for why-choose romance or a book that has two (or more) main relationships, you could have three or four or more. But then you as the writer have to keep track of all these voices, and that’s a lot of unique perspectives to juggle. Not every character needs a POV, so choose wisely.

With multiple POVs, I usually recommend keeping the voice the same for each POV, i.e. not using first-person for one character and then third-person for another. It’s absolutely possible to use first and third in the same book, but I personally find it jarring when it switches back and forth. It is, however, a great way to distinguish between different characters—we’ve all experienced the confusion of not knowing which character’s head we’re in in first-person because their inner narratives sound too same-y.

Each character should be distinctive in their voice so that you don’t have to flip back in the section to figure out who it is or look at the top of the chapter to see which voice is narrating. To me, this is lazy shorthand to tell the reader who the character is at each chapter/section break—it should be obvious from the way that character thinks and speaks, so make sure each character has their own unique quirks that set them apart.

Questions about POV or voice? Let me know!

Does your romance writing process need a change?

One of the things I find myself talking about a lot with my Series Architecture clients is—perhaps unsurprisingly—their writing process.

Whether you identify as a planner, a pantser, a planster, or chaos demon, your writing process is your own. Whether you’ve been writing since you were a kid or you just decided to pick up writing a year ago, you probably have a good sense of what’s going to work for you and what’s not when you sit down to write.

My goal when I’m talking to clients is never to force them into a process that doesn’t work for them. If you’re a pantser, planning everything is going to drive you insane; likewise, if you’re a planner, me telling you to just make it up as you go will probably send you spiralling. And no matter how many craft books you read, following one system the way that author prescribes is likely not going to fully work for you because it’s going to feel too narrow and not aligned with your own process.

This is not to say that your writing process should never change! Sometimes you need to evolve, and you always want to be improving, right? So what are the things you tell yourself you have to do when you’re putting a story together and when you write, and what would happen if you just…didn’t do them? Or what would happen if you tried something different that you believed you could never do?

For example, you might think, “working under pressure is great for me—it focuses me and gets me out of my head so I can just channel all my thoughts into prose.”

Or is it that you're actually just worried that it has to be perfect so you’ve been procrastinating on it for a long time, and then when you finally have to start writing because of the deadline, you’re frustrated that it’s not coming out the perfect way you intended, and so you have to settle for whatever you end up writing because time’s up? (Not speaking from experience here at all.) That pressure is maybe anxiety you don’t actually need. So what if you started early and broke down your writing into manageable daily word counts (500 words? 1000?) rather than cramming writing the last 30K in a week?

Another example: I used to just think “okay, I’m gonna write, and my brain will just take me where I need to go.” This, it turns out, was putting way too much stock in what my brain could do while writing. What actually would happen would be that I would stall out, start panicking, and then spiral into thinking I sucked, procrastinate because it felt so hard, and then get behind on everything. But surprise! I’m actually a planner/planster, not a pantser. Once I realized I actually need to outline quite heavily before I even start writing, everything changed. (Something I would have really liked to know before quitting my PhD dissertation.) I need to do the big thinking first and work it all out in my head to know where I’m going, and after that, writing is a breeze.

That’s the process that I’ve discovered works for me, and it may not work for you. But take some time to evaluate what you’re doing now and maybe try changing some things up—if they don’t work, okay, just go back to what you were doing before. Read some craft books and implement some advice in there that could naturally slot into your current process. Talk with other writer friends to see how they write. Adapt and evolve to keep growing as a romance author.

So that’s your challenge for this month: take a long, hard look at how you write, and evaluate what’s serving you and what’s not.

How can I help you write better, faster, stronger, harder? Head over here and see how we can work together!

Against AI

I’m going to come right out and say it: I am NOT a fan of AI.

I feel like you are probably subscribed to this newsletter because you care about craft, so I am probably preaching to the choir already, but let’s get into why AI should not be part of your creative process.

Using ChatGPT or any other GPT (generative pretrained transformers) or AI to produce writing is not a creative act. It’s feeding questions and/or keywords into a machine and letting the machine make connections between those keywords to produce something that looks like what you’re asking it for. On the surface, it can look…fine. But look closer, and you’ll find it’s derivative (obviously, since it’s being pulled from already created sources) or just not quite right.

(Have you seen AI art of popular book characters? They are all over my IG Explore page. They might look lovely on first look, but then there’s something uncanny and too polished about them, and they actually have six fingers or unnatural proportions. It just feels fake to me.)

AI does not value art or creativity. We go to museums to marvel that a human hand and a human brain created the masterpiece we’re staring at; we listen to music to be moved by melodies and emotions; we read books to be transported to new worlds that come out of someone’s beautiful mind. Storytelling is part of being human.* AI doesn’t care about the process of creativity or how it makes its audience feel—but that’s the whole point of any creative endeavour.

(*Let me dork out for a second, because this is the one time very specific information from my forever-unfinished PhD thesis about gossip and Shakespeare is ever going to come in handy: in my research on gossip, I came across this work by an evolutionary psychologist who argued that grooming in primates was a social act that eventually evolved into language and gossip and storytelling. It’s fascinating, honestly. All this to say, storytelling is deeply coded into our DNA as homo sapiens.)

AI gets the data it uses to provide the end product from datasets collected by companies like Google and Amazon and/or from scraping the internet for writing. So this can potentially be copyrighted work or work that no one has given the AI permission to use (like fanfic, for example). It’s not plagiarizing, per se, but it’s using what other people have already thought and created (and maybe not with their specific permission) to spit out something kinda similar. There are a lot of ethical and legal concerns that make using AI particularly fraught right now.

The thing is, AI is basically averaging out all the data it has and predicting what should come next. So what it produces is going to be average. It’s not the product of the human mind noticing something fascinating and then expressing it in a way that creates surprise and delight. It’s giving you what it predicts should follow, so total middle-of-the-road.

But that’s not what you want for your writing. The books that really stand out are the ones that are doing or saying something in a way that feels new and novel. You’re not going to get from an AI. It might be perfectly serviceable prose once you get in there and edit it, but it’s not going to blow anyone away. You’re a writer, and you can do better than a machine that’s only giving you the baseline.

You could get AI to write you a whole book right now if you give it enough information. AIs aren’t sophisticated enough yet to give you 80K words all at once, so you do have to feed it ideas scene by scene. In that respect, there is a human element to the process. And people are already doing this, to give an idea to run with or to get past a block and get some momentum back.

But you can see how this system could be ripe for abuse, especially as AI continues to develop and become more sophisticated. But if you’re a writer, the whole point of writing is to get something out of your head that only youcan express—it’s not to get a machine to do that work for you. You’re not writing because writing is easy to do—if it was always easy, you probably wouldn’t bother to do it because you’d be bored! It’s the challenge, the actual brainwork that makes it something worth doing.

Why would you want to be a writer if you’re not actually writing? If it’s for fame or money, good luck—that requires a lot more work than just writing, and you’re not going to get either of those things when you’re producing work that relies on the median. A unique voice and perspective in a messy story is always going to trump a competently written story that doesn’t bring anything new to the table. You’re not going to get that voice with a GPT.

AI is a tool of late-stage capitalism. It’s much faster for companies to chuck something into a machine than to pay people a living wage to create something new and different that hasn’t been tested to know if it’ll be profitable or not. We live in an era where there are constant reboots and remakes of TV shows and movies because nostalgia sells and it’s less risky than a new piece of media that could make them millions of dollars…or could lose them millions of dollars. But then when one of these new movies/shows hits different and does something innovative, it feels so fresh and exciting.

And look, I fully believe that we’re always telling the same stories over and over again—there are just new perspectives on them as humanity continues to develop. And in romance especially, where we’re often accused of this, we just keep configuring our building-block tropes in inventive ways that make things interesting. But with AI, these stories will become tired and clichéd because they're just recycling these old ideas and not coming up with those new perspectives.

At the moment, I’m not particularly worried about AI taking over publishing or putting writers or editors out of work. (So, like, the opposite of this guy.) AI is too clunky and too unrefined right now to replace actual humans. But we’re on a precipice, I think, and I would rather not feed the beast.

AI is all around us and is practically unavoidable (Google auto-filling for you when you go to search for something? AI. Even my social media marketing service just introduced an AI that can write your posts for you, which actually feels a bit...creepy to me), but I’m committed not using AI to actually create anything—all my words in my newsletter, my posts, my work all come from my brain, not from a machine. 

If you care about craft and creativity, I hope that you as a writer can similarly commit to not using AI to create, in solidarity with other creatives whose livelihoods may be threatened by AI (for example, artists who aren’t getting paid when people can just generate a relatively realistic AI image). This also means not letting anyone else on your team use AI—for example, cover designers using AI-generated images, or VAs using AI to write posts for you).

What do you think of AI? Do you see its potential, or do you fear our robot overlords? Let me know in the comments!

THIS FIRST APPEARED IN MY MONTHLY NEWSLETTER. IF YOU WANT TO GET THESE POSTS FIRST, YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE AND GET MY FREE ROMANCE TROPES WORKBOOK! SIGN UP HERE!