The Ultimate Guide to Tense & Point of View | Writing Tips

Point of view isn’t a fixed menu of “easy vs. hard” choices—it’s a flexible tool that should match the specific story and the specific writer. The core message is blunt: there’s no universally best tense or perspective, only options that fit better (or worse) depending on what effect the narrative needs. That framing pushes back against the common classroom simplification that treats point of view as a handful of boxes—first vs. third person, present vs. past—arguing instead that point of view is a spectrum shaped by multiple variables like psychological closeness, temporal distance, and how much control the narrator has over what’s being revealed.

The transcript also challenges a widespread misconception about difficulty. Third-person is often treated as more “mature,” while first-person is dismissed as annoying. But the guidance insists that annoyance isn’t inherent to a tense or person; it comes from execution. A writer can produce a clunky, melodramatic first-person story—or a confusing, poorly filtered third-person one. A personal anecdote underscores the point: writing assignments done in third person because of perceived expectations would have benefited from first person instead.

From there, the discussion widens the lens. First-person, second-person, and third-person limited/omniscient are real categories, but they’re only umbrellas. The actual experience of a story depends on how close the narration stays to a character’s mind (psychic distance), how far removed the narration is in time (temporal closeness), and whether the narrator is “living” the events or “remembering” them. The result is that each story effectively generates its own version of point of view, even when it falls under the same broad label.

The guide then breaks down major combinations and their tradeoffs. First-person present tense is described as the most immediate and intimate, often used in YA because it mirrors how teenagers experience events—without the reflective distance of an adult looking back. Its strengths include immediacy and heightened emotion, but it carries risks: redundant details that a character wouldn’t bother to self-edit, melodrama from constant emotional intensity, and a need for diction that matches the character’s moment. It also tends to force more linear storytelling and makes context feel harder to deliver naturally.

First-person retrospective (first-person past tense with elapsed time) adds the missing ingredient: distance. That gap can reduce melodrama and increase sympathy because the character can recognize mistakes with hindsight. It also introduces complexity and unreliability: memory is inherently imperfect, and the narrator may shape the story for a purpose, audience, or theme.

Second person is treated as highly specific—use it only when the story’s needs truly demand it. Third-person present tense is rarer and can feel jarring because it blends present-tense intimacy with third-person distance, while limiting the ability for the character to be knowingly unreliable. Third-person past tense limited is framed as unobtrusive and practical for multiple viewpoints, with more control over psychic distance and easier structure. Third-person omniscient offers the widest scope, though it’s often used subtly enough that readers feel like they’re still in limited.

The closing thesis ties everything together: point of view is the form of the story. The right choice comes from asking what the story is, who is telling it, why they’re telling it now, who they’re addressing, and how reliable that voice can be. In short, the best point of view is the one that communicates the story’s angle and emotional effect most precisely.