Committing to a Point of View

Have you ever been reading a scene locked tightly inside one character's head, only to hit a sentence describing something happening somewhere that character can't see, or couldn't possibly know? It's a small thing, but it snags — the scene suddenly feels like it's being told by someone else for just that one sentence, before snapping back into place. That snag is what happens when a point of view slips without the writer meaning it to.

The options, before the slip

Point of view has a handful of real choices behind it. First person puts you directly in a character's head (“I walked in”). Close third stays outside the sentence grammatically but still locks to one character's thoughts and knowledge (“She walked in, her stomach already sinking”). Distant third pulls back further, reporting what happens without diving into anyone's interior at all. None of these is the correct choice by itself — a piece can work well in any of them.

Why the slip is the real problem

So if none of the options is wrong on its own, what actually causes the wrongness a reader feels? It's switching between them without meaning to — a close-third scene reporting something the point-of-view character couldn't possibly perceive, or a first-person narrator describing their own face doing something they'd have no way to observe from inside their own head. Readers feel this as a vague wrongness even when they can't name the sentence that caused it, because the boundary the scene had been keeping just quietly broke. Before drafting a scene, it helps to decide whose head you're in and exactly what that means they can and can't know, then let everything in the scene pass through that one boundary.