Whose eyes do you see through?

One of the key decisions to make at the start of a story is whose eyes to see the action through. Viewpoint can make or break the success of your story, and choosing the right viewpoint character is crucial.

Viewpoint is the thing my creative writing groups get most hung up on.  The easiest way to think of it is to ask "whose eyes am I seeing through."  You should be telling the story as if it is unfolding in front of your viewpoint character, getting their reactions to events and literally seeing through their eyes.

Your story can be told in either third person - He looked at her, and thought she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. - or first person - I looked at her and thought 'what a mess'.  Second person is 'you do this'.  It's difficult to keep up for a whole story and not often used. Omniscient viewpoint is the author looking down on the characters and describing the scene, and again it's not much used these days.

In Panthera : Death Spiral I have four viewpoints.  Three are in third person past tense, and the fourth is in first person present tense.  I deliberately used that contrast to show how different Panthera, my sentient AI, was from the humans.

If you feel your story isn't working it's worth playing around with altering the viewpoints to see if that gives your story more punch.