The Difference Between Point of View and Voice

 

Point of View Is Where the Camera Sits

Writers often confuse point of view and voice because they feel intertwined when you’re in the flow. You’re writing. The character is thinking. The sentences are doing their thing. It all seems like one big magical soup.

But point of view and voice are not the same tool. They’re partners, yes, but they do different jobs. When you separate them in your mind, you suddenly gain control. You stop guessing why a chapter feels “off,” and you can diagnose it like a professional.

Point of view is the technical choice. It’s the camera angle. It answers the question: Who is perceiving this moment? First person, second person, close third, omniscient, plural “we,” rotating perspectives. It’s basically the lens through which information is delivered.

Percival Everett’s novel James is a clean example of point of view doing a big, obvious job. It retells Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim - James - rather than Huck. That isn’t just a stylistic flourish. It changes what the story is allowed to notice, what it must fear, what it can safely misunderstand, and what it refuses to overlook.

That’s point of view.

It’s the seat you sit in while you watch the story unfold.

Voice Is What the Camera Sounds Like While It’s Sitting There

Voice is different. Voice is the personality in the prose. It’s the attitude, the rhythm, the emotional temperature, the choice of words, the sense of humor or bitterness or tenderness. It’s the story’s manner of speaking.

Here’s the twist that helps most writers: you can keep the same point of view and still change voice dramatically. And you can keep roughly the same voice while shifting point of view. They influence each other, but they’re not chained together.

A recent review of Grace Murray’s debut Blank Canvas puts its finger on this. The novel is praised not just for what happens, but for the way the protagonist’s narration feels - witty, sharp, emotionally numb, and psychologically revealing. That’s voice. The camera may be positioned with Charlotte, but the sound of that camera - the phrasing, the edge, the emotional distance - is what creates the reading experience.

If you’ve ever read a book where “nothing much happens” but you can’t stop turning pages, it’s often voice carrying you. If you’ve ever read a book with a perfectly fine plot that feels like chewing cardboard, it’s often voice failing to do its job.

A Quick, Useful Distinction

Point of view controls access. Voice controls impact.

Point of view answers: What can we know, and when can we know it?

Voice answers: How does it feel to be told this way?

Point of view decides whether we are inside the character’s skull, hovering above the town, or watching from the outside. Voice decides whether the telling is intimate, chilly, comic, furious, elegant, blunt, dreamy, or quietly savage.

This is why changing a story from first person to third person sometimes fixes nothing. Writers think they’ve moved the camera, but what they really needed to adjust was the sound.

How Point of View Creates Story Pressure

Point of view is a pressure system. It determines tension because it determines ignorance. If the narrator cannot see something, the reader cannot see it either. That limitation is not a flaw. It’s a weapon.

In Cape Fever by Nadia Davids, the narrative focus centers on a young woman navigating a volatile power dynamic inside a household. The review highlights the psychological intensity and the way the story is shaped through what the central figure observes, conceals, and withholds. That’s point of view driving suspense.

Notice what’s happening there. The power struggle isn’t only in events. It’s in perception. It’s in what the character understands, and what she chooses not to reveal, and how the narrative keeps something back.

That’s point of view as architecture.

How Voice Creates Reader Trust

Voice is the handshake. It’s the relationship. It’s the reason a reader stays with you even when the plot takes its time.

In James, the idea of “voice” becomes almost a theme of the book itself. Commentary and reviews often point out that the narrator modulates language depending on who is listening - performing one kind of speech in front of white characters while holding another, more educated register within his own world. That is voice on two levels: the narrator’s personal voice and the strategic voice he uses as a mask.

Now look at how brilliant this is as craft. The point of view says, “You are inside James.” The voice says, “Inside James, language is survival.” That’s not merely style. It’s meaning. It also reflects what Twain himself did in his writing, his life, and in his stage shows.

Voice doesn’t just decorate the story. It reveals the story’s deepest argument about life.

The Common Mistake Writers Make

Here’s the mistake I see constantly.

A writer chooses first person because they want “voice,” but they don’t actually have voice on the page. They have a first person camera with third person blandness. The sentences are neutral. The personality isn’t present. The narrator says “I” a lot, but we don’t feel a human being speaking.

Or the writer chooses close third person and accidentally writes omniscient commentary that doesn’t belong to the character’s inner world. The camera is supposedly near the character, but the narration keeps floating away into author lectures or tidy explanations.

In both cases, the problem isn’t the choice of point of view. The problem is that the voice and the camera don’t agree on who is telling this.

A quick test helps. Read a paragraph and ask: could this paragraph be narrated by a different character without changing many words? If yes, you likely have point of view without voice.

Voice, when it’s working, is hard to swap out. It’s specific. It’s inhabited.

A Practical Way to Think About It While You Draft

When you’re drafting, I want you to separate two decisions.

First, choose the camera. Decide where you are standing. Decide what the reader is allowed to know. Decide whether you want immediacy, distance, or flexibility. That’s point of view.

Then choose the speaker. Decide how the story “talks.” Decide what it values, what it notices, what it mocks, what it refuses to say plainly. That’s voice.

If you do those in the opposite order, you often end up with chaos. Writers will chase voice, then wonder why the plot keeps leaking information too early, or why tension disappears, or why scenes feel oddly flat.

You don’t fix that by trying harder. You fix it by choosing the correct seat, then letting the correct person speak from it.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Modern readers are spoiled for choice. They don’t just want story. They want experience. They want to feel like they’re being told something by a particular mind, in a particular way, for a particular reason.

That’s why the best contemporary fiction often gets described with the same word again and again: voice. It’s why reviewers praise books for “narrative control,” “psychological insight,” or a narrator who is “compelling” even when difficult.

Those are voice compliments, even when people don’t realize they’re saying it.

Point of view builds the house.

Voice makes you want to live in it.

And once you really get that distinction into your bones, your revisions become calmer, smarter, and much faster - because you stop trying to fix a voice problem with a camera change, and you stop trying to fix a camera problem with prettier sentences.

That’s when your writing starts to feel inevitable.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell