POV and Prologues

These past lessons we’ve started filling out our Codex, and have some first scenes written down. Now, it’s time to look at how these two areas are linked.

Point of View (POV)

Point of View is the perspective from which a story is told. It’s closely linked with tense (whether we tell our story in the past or present tense).

For any project or novel, you can set a Point of View (POV) for the entire novel, or on a per scene basis. This setting is composed of a type (1st/2nd/3rd person) and a character entry from your Codex (unless you write in 3rd person omniscient).

Setting a Point of View for an entire novel

Let’s start by setting a POV for the entire project.

1. In the top left corner, click on the Cog icon to enter your novel settings

2. In there, navigate to the Writing tab. You’ll be greeted with some further options.

3. In the POV section, select the type and character from the dropdown.

Author’s note

In our Cozy Mystery novel, I have chosen Mia to be the POV character for the story, and 3rd person limited for the tense (as cozies are usually in 1st person or 3rd person limited).

Once you’ve set a point of view, this information is included for the AI (if you use it), and allows you to see your story split up in a per-POV spreadsheet-like view in the Plan Matrix (more on that later).

Setting a POV Character for a single scene

We now have set a default for all scenes within our project. However, if we want to override this for specific scenes, we need to do this individually:

Reusing Point of Views

When you repeat this for a second scene, you will see that the POV you selected earlier is present. All POVs that you select in your story will appear here for easy-access.

Author’s note

If you have two characters as the POV, I like to choose one of them to be the ‘novel’ POV, and then add the second POV in myself. This saves the time of having to set up both/all POVs manually.

Creating a Prologue

As mentioned in the last lesson, some novels, such as detective stories, have a prologue in another POV. If you were to move a chapter to the beginning of its act and rename it ‘Prologue’ (see below), it still has a number for a prefix. It’s still classed as chapter one, and chapter one will be considered chapter two.

Let’s correct this:

It’s that easy; your prologue is now a proper Prologue, and chapter one is now assigned correctly. The same premise can be applied to any interludes and epilogues you might have.

And that’s a wrap! You’ve now learned how to set a default POV for your entire novel, assign custom POVs to individual scenes, and correctly format a chapter as a prologue.