What Changes When You Switch

Once you've picked a point of view, the harder discipline is sticking to what it can actually know. A close third-person narrator following one character can describe that character's thoughts in detail — but the instant a sentence describes what someone else in the scene is secretly thinking, the point of view has quietly broken, even if the writer didn't mean it to.

This slip is easy to miss because it doesn't feel like a mistake while you're writing it — it feels like helpful information. "She smiled, though she didn't really mean it" is fine in her own point of view. "He smiled, though he didn't really mean it," written from her point of view, is a boundary crossed: she can't actually know that, only guess at it, and the sentence needs to say so rather than state it as fact.

Reading for the crossing

The fix isn't to remove the observation — it's often exactly the detail a scene needs. It's to keep it filtered through what your narrator can actually perceive: a flicker in his eyes that didn't match the smile, a laugh that came a half-second too late. The information survives; it just arrives the way your actual narrator would have picked up on it, through watching rather than through mind-reading.

This is what "sustaining" a point of view really means — not choosing one and never breaking it by accident, but noticing every time a sentence reaches for certainty your narrator hasn't earned, and rewriting it as something they could plausibly have noticed instead.