How to create a scene with no viewpoint character?

[Greta Kreuzer]

Hi there, I have just started using this program in the last couple of days and am trying to figure out how to set up a scene without assigning a character as the viewpoint character. I'm interested in tracking the words and such per character in the project, but with the VP assignments it causes things to be tracked a bit strangely- for example, my first scene features two characters written in third person, and only one of them (the VP) has any words tracked in the characters tab. Wondering if this is a feature or not, or maybe if this is how it is works well for others! open to what others typically do for third party scenes, etc. as well. Thank you!

[Simon Haynes]

You can create a 'narrator', 'author', 'N/A' viewpoint and allocate that.

But if you have two characters in one scene in third person there's no way to split the word usage. You can allocate the whole scene to 'N/A' but the only way to do it per VP is to split the scene up further into new scenes.

It's a simple word count system, it just looks at the VP for a scene and adds the number of words in that scene to their tally. It doesn't try and figure out which sentence belongs to which character.

On Fri, 4 Jul 2025 at 11:12, Greta Kreuzer <greta.k...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi there, I have just started using this program in the last couple of days and am trying to figure out how to set up a scene without assigning a character as the viewpoint character. I'm interested in tracking the words and such per character in the project, but with the VP assignments it causes things to be tracked a bit strangely- for example, my first scene features two characters written in third person, and only one of them (the VP) has any words tracked in the characters tab. Wondering if this is a feature or not, or maybe if this is how it is works well for others! open to what others typically do for third party scenes, etc. as well. Thank you!

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[Christian Bieck]

When I write in 3rd person, I have one VP char per chapter, as I found this avoids confusion for the reader. (Meaning the way word count works in yWriter is fine for me.) The only time I might ever need anything different is if I decide to write in 3rd omniscient at some point, in which case the VP char would always be "the narrator". 

If I did want to track "char screen time" by word count, I'd probably do it externally per spread sheet. Pretty sure one of Peter T.'s handy tools works for that, at least to get it started.