I'm not talking about having two or three different main POV characters, where you tell the story through two or three different sets of eyes. I'm talking about just temporarily shifting POV to another supporting character, even an antagonist, to give depth to a story that one wouldn't otherwise have.

My story is structured in such a way that it needs to occasionally switch from the standard POV characters, Breyanna and Xennon, otherwise the story will not be as well understood by the reader, and it might begin to drag, and all around, the story and plot would lack a certain depth to it. There's a lot going on behind-the-scenes, and some of that I want the reader to know about.

So for example, I might tell something from the POV of the villain. Or I might tell from the POV of a supporting character that's doing something that the MCs are not present at. But I would not be dwelling within their head for long, just enough for the readers to see what I want them to see, and with some, I may only do it once. And then there is another character, Xennon's half-brother Gyn, whose POV I will be telling from more frequently, but not enough to label him as a standard POV character.

My question is, how should I handle this properly? It's one of those things where it could be either done well or horribly. My goal, of course, is to do it well. What should I avoid doing? What should I strive for? Do you know of any authors who do this well?

Sorry if this post is somewhat rambly.

I'll be interested to see the replies to this thread, because in my novel I was doing a similar thing, RedWing. There is a scene in which the storyline switches completely to the antagonist and his thoughts; devious plans and whatnot. I also switch to different characters along the way every now and then, and was wondering if I was doing it right.

*awaits answers with RedWing*

The Inheritance Cycle does this. (Pretty effectively too.)
He switches POV with chapter breaks. So it will go from Eragon to Roran, Eragon Roran Saphira and so forth.

I've read novels where a side character's point of view was only shown once or a few times, and it worked fine (I can't remember what books had it, though I seem to recall Frank Peretti doing it occasionally in some of his books.) The standard rule is that there should be a break in the narrative before a POV shift, and this can be either a chapter break or just a break during a chapter.

(As others in the Writing Circle the past several months could attest, this is one of my pet low-hanging-fruit.) If you're going to change POV, the two big things are that we-your-readers should never be confused about whose "head" we're in (which means first that if we're in some character's POV rather than the-unseen-narrator, describe things as that character would see them, and don't give us thoughts or sense-perceptions from another character, and second that you should make whose "head" we're in clear as soon as possible, usually by making a description of that character's action a part of the first sentence, but by the end of the story we should ideally be able to tell just from differences in narrative voice if you use that character's POV a lot), and that whenever you switch POV this should be as obvious as when the scene jumps in time or space (this is usually as easy as adding a typographical break, if your POV change isn't at the end of a chapter).

Oh I love doing this. I do it in the first book of my trilogy, the second book, and I already have plans to do it in my third book. I find that, if done properly, this adds incredible depth to a story. That being said, I use one pov per scene.

I plan to do this with my fantasy novel. I'll have the one main character, but sometimes the POV will switch to one of her close companions.

I'm never going to switch to the POV of the bad guy, though. (Remember, this is me personally. You guys can have your own opinions, I'm just sharing my thoughts on the matter.) It is one of my pet peeves when people switch to the bad guy. I think it kind of ruins things if you're telling the readers his plot. I think they should be kept guessing a bit. I don't like it when a book switches to the bad guy's POV, even if it is well done.

I shift to my villain's POV once or twice in each of the books in my series, just to add interest and depth. I keep what he's doing mysterious, though. I don't give anything away, really.
I find I have trouble NOT switching POVs without breaks, but usually I just start a new paragraph, because I don't want to have to tell that scene all over again in the next chapter from the other character's POV.
So I'll do it like this:
Bob saw the anvil falling straight toward him, and felt frozen in place.
Jim noticed the anvil falling out of the corner of his eye and did a double-take, then ran to push Bob out of the way.
The evil Doctor Porky laughed as he watched his evil plan come to pass.
Something like that, except better written.

While we can certainly write however we want to, I know a LOT of publishers and agents frown on multiple POVs in a scene, unless you have breaks or have a smooth transition where half the scene is told from one persepcetive, and the ending half has switched ot someone else (and even this method is very sketchy).

Like I said above, head-hopping is not advisable; what you're doing is a recipe for reader confusion. But all you need to do to make the transition clear is to add a "typographical break"---three dots, a horizontal line, an extra blank line---every time you switch POVs. (No, a new paragraph isn't enough ...)

Where'd you get the idea that you'd have to "tell the scene all over again"? A scene can start wherever and whenever you like, so it'd be perfectly reasonable to end a chapter at a cliff-hanger and start up the next chapter immediately thereafter but in a different POV. Or to start at the same point as the previous chapter, but summarize most of its action you'd described already in only a couple of sentences.

Well, what if I kill a character, and I want to show exactly how two different people react, but it's happening at the same time? Or something like that.

Like I said, you can start a scene whenever you like, so if one scene ends with the character's death in one POV, you can start the next scene just before or just after that event in a different POV.

Yes, but then I have to retell the scene over for each of the characters whose POVs I want to show... I really don't see what the problem is here, maybe I'm just thick.

Each scene begins and ends where and when you want it to; if you want us to see two characters' reactions to an event "from inside," you're going to have to describe the event at least very briefly at least twice. But that doesn't mean you have to "retell the whole scene" every time; each time what we need is context (so we can tell where and when we "are" and what's going on), and whatever new information you want to give---just like the second volume of a series or of a multi-volume story has to give some plot summary and description so people who haven't read the first volume in a while can remember what's going on, and people who haven't read the first volume at all aren't totally lost, but it doesn't have to tell the whole story of the first volume all over again.

When you're describing things from one character's point of view, we're "in that character's head"; if you suddenly start describing things from a second character's point of view (without ending the scene with a typographical break), readers will either not notice that the POV has changed or be confused for a bit. This is just one of the conventions of modern fiction, especially modern fantasy---unless you're writing in "third-person observer" (and so we're not "in anybody's head"), we need to have a firm grasp of whose POV you're describing things from at all times.

I've thought of an example using the parallel but different conventions of film. If you've seen the original Star Wars film, shifting POVs like your example does is like if, after the initial establishing shots of the blockade runner and the Star Destroyer, the film cut to an unrelated corridor in Coruscant, or something, instead of to the corridor inside Leia's ship.

Think of it this way, Notthatshort. Say you have a character who's POV you are reading. A character dies. So you see one character react. End the scene. Restart with your new character, and begin with something like:

He was dead. Every fiber of my being told me that ____ couldn't be dead.

_____________________

Your reader has just read that the character died. You don't have to repeat that when starting the next scene.

*kind of/sort of/halfway gets it*
What if it's not confusing, though?

Why don't you give us a short section where you use this?

I'm curious as to how you think it's possible to manage that.

In the "what is a scene" thread I defined a scene as (paraphrasing, since I don't remember how I put it there) an uninterrupted narrative with unity of place, time, and perspective. ("Uninterrupted" means that if you put in a typographical break, what comes afterward is automatically a new scene.) You can transition from a scene in one place to a scene in another, or from one time to another, with a bit of descriptive narrative, such as showing the character boarding a ship, describing a five-month voyage in a paragraph, and then picking the main narrative up again when she disembarks. But the thing about point-of-view is that you can't transition gradually from one to another like that; all you can do is indicate that "we're in so-and-so's POV now," which is actually far more abrupt than ending the scene properly, giving a typographical break, and starting again with the new POV, yet is easy for distracted readers to miss.

I think there's a term for narrating a story from different POVs. In literature class, we called it third person omniscient (not sure if that's a term all writers/editors use), meaning that the story can be told from any point of view of any character as chosen by the author. So you're in full control over what still happens and how much you will reveal.

I think writing in third person omnipresent is a bit more difficult as we have to work so that the transition from one character's thoughts to the other won't be so awkward. Christopher Paolini does this by giving each character its own chapter. There are, however, other authors that can smoothly transition from one character to another in just one chapter. This is one thing I want to learn how to do. I think all I've written so far are from third person limited.

Yes, but there are many things you cannot do, if you write from that position. It has to be structured like any other POV writting.

I would agree with y'all on POV changes. When ever I've come across writing technique that mentions POV changes, it has said that "head-hopping" is a bad idea. Personally, I like to keep my POV characters to a handful of people that are important to the story, and I only change to a different character at the end of a scene or chapter.

"Third person omniscient", you mean?

The thing about third person omniscient is that you're not writing from the POV of any of the characters, you're writing from the POV of an observer who knows everything including what all the characters are thinking at all times. So, just like any other POV, you need to make this obvious at the beginning of every scene you write in a third-person-omniscient POV.

And while it is a theoretical possibility, and not uncommon in "literary" fiction, as I said in my first comments above, third-person-limited has become the convention in the fantasy genre (I meant as opposed to third-person-omniscient and third-person-observer---the latter being the opposite of "omniscient," a narrator who knows nothing at all about the thoughts, motivations, and feelings of any of the characters---not as opposed to first-person), and like most conventions should be followed unless you have good reason not to.


Then that's not third-person-omniscient, it's third-person-limited with multiple POV characters---which is, as I said, the most common form in modern, recent, fantasy in my experience.

Thanks for bringing this up.

To put the position I've advocated above another way: Head-hopping in a third-person narrative, unless you've clearly established an omniscient narrator as the primary POV "character", is just as confusing (and thus contraindicated) as head-hopping in a first-person narrative. You wouldn't switch narrators in mid-scene in a first-person narrative, and the same reasons apply nearly as strongly to a third-person-limited POV.

Ooops... Yes, that's what I mean. (Edited already to avoid confusion.)



Ohhh, okay. I understand. So if you write from the point of view of the (for example) two major characters, then that's the point of view of an observer who is outside the story and knows everything that's happening?

Does this work in stories? Or does it make things more confusing for the reader?



You're welcome, and thanks so much too! I've learned a lot.

If you're writing "from the point of view of the two major characters," that could mean third-person limited, only having some scenes from one POV and some from the other. But if you mean that at all times you're telling the reader what both of the characters are thinking, then the only way to make that plausibly work is to have the point of view really be some omniscient observer---since the reader can only be "in the head" of one character at a time, and if that character's not omniscient, how could he know what the other character is thinking all the time? (And that knowledge should influence his actions ...)


Like Lady Arianna said, it's another possible POV, and has its own advantages and difficulties. It can work, but you have to make sure that you're not just writing third-person-limited (i.e. describing setting, actions, etc., "filtered through" a character---as that character would see them) plus descriptions of things (other characters' thoughts, motivations, etc.) that that character couldn't know, but instead that you're really describing things as they are (accurately and objectively). And it'll probably be somewhat confusing anyway, since (like stories told in the second person) real third-person-omniscient stories (as opposed to third-person-limited stories where the author makes POV mistakes or "head-hops") are quite rare nowadays. Not that this should stop you from using it, if you know what you're doing and it's what's best for your story.

While it's useful to distinguish between omniscient and limited perspectives, the truth is that shifting POVs are common in fantasy, and this kind of blurs the lines, in that:

1. Omniscient generally means that, in practice, the narrative doesn't give us access to any character's head. As in Father Brown, Beowulf, etc. It's a classic style that's not used anymore, but has influenced modern 3rd P limited.

2. In Limited, POV shifts are common (though typically short), which gives the narrative a similar meta-value to omniscient, in that we're not filtering information exclusively through one character.

But technically, modern writing assumes that we will use the limited. Unfortunately, people get bored if you don't. And they complain that they don't understand the motivations of characters, etc. Because most people who read fiction don't know how to analyze literature.

That's not to say that limited narrative with shifting POVs is bad. I'm just saying, you're stuck with it no matter how you feel. Which I think is good, because, while literature has lost much of its higher art, limited allows you to make moral points and arguments without expressly stating them. In fact, when limited is done well, it is, to me, the highest art form of writing styles. And this is partly because of POV shifting.

Just stopping in to tell you all how I normally write my POV.

I follow one character around in the third person, so "Balec opened the door", etc. When I reference things or people, I reference it in how the character would reference it. For example, art. In Balec's 3rd person POV, perhaps he is less appreciative of art than others, and would pass a painting and think nothing of it, as compared to the art-lover/more detailed-centered-character, who would take more notice of it, and thus, I would describe the painting in more detail.

When referring to people, if Balec meets someone, he may refer to that person as Mr. (Last Name here), as compared to, say, Mr. (Last Name here)'s brother, who would call Mr. (Last Name here) by whatever his first name is.

So, basically, on the reference of people, I base it off of familiarity, while objects or descriptions will be on the character's attention to detail.

I hope that makes sense.

This (which I refrain from quoting for the sake of the readability of the thread) sounds very much like a good start on "tight third person POV" as I've seen it practiced by the most competent authors I know of, and as I've tried to advocate in this thread. ("A good start" because the best authors additionally do things like adjusting vocabulary to not use terms the character wouldn't know, phrase descriptions as the character would describe the thing out loud or under his or her breath, and so on.)

Thanks, though I'm not sure if I've been very successful separating how I would describe things compared to the character.

It's not necessarily a problem if a character describes things precisely the same way you would, if the character is enough like you in background for this to be plausible. What is an issue is if different characters sound too similar to each other.

I've seen some people use this technique for mystery writing and it can be pretty sweet. Definitely adds depth.
-KatieGrace