This first question was brought to you by qwertygirl123456.

How do I choose the perspectives of my stories?

When it comes to how I go about choosing the perspectives for my stories, there's really no universal answer.

Sometimes I write in third person, sometimes I write in first. Sometimes a story is written entirely from one person's point of view and sometimes, in the case of my 2050 series, it's written from the viewpoint of several different characters.

While there's no straightforward answer on how I make the decision each time, I do have a handful of general guidelines that I try to follow.

If the events of the story mainly impact a specific character, then I tend to tell it from the point of view of that one character. This is the case for my Perkins School series, wherein each book focuses on the perspective of whichever student is impacted the most by the plotline at hand.

If the characters are in different situations, or there's no way for one of them to know the backstory of another, then I tend to write from multiple POVs. Some people like that strategy, while it's also widely hated by readers and authors alike.

In my 2050 series, I write from multiple perspectives partially to fit in characters' backstories, but also to provide more insight into the mindsets of different characters. I've been told, at least in the case of that series, it works to make some of the characters more relatable than they would otherwise seem to be.

In a couple of my stories, I write in third person as opposed to first. That's normally a personal preference for authors, who usually prefer one strategy over the other. While I have a preference for first person narrative, third person also has its advantages in that you can focus on more than one character's perspective in the same stretch of writing.

The second question of this chapter is courtesy of ArchangelLaurianne.

Which characters are hardest for me to write?

The simple answer?

The characters that are hardest to write tend to be the ones who are most complicated, or the ones that readers may struggle at first to understand. Most are POV characters as of now, though some aren't. Ironically, a lot of them are also characters I enjoy writing, hence why a lot of them have their POV in the book(s) where they appear.

The most difficult characters for me to write as of now are Shemik Warszawski and Dimitri Orlov from the 2050 series, Josephus McGraw from my upcoming book Beyond, and Amber Greene and Creighton Hastings from the Perkins School for Self Improvement series.

Questions/comments? Feel free to leave them below.