Point of View #2
_Multiple POVs
Using multiple points of view within a story is complicated. After all, what you’re really doing is giving different versions of the same events from more than one unique perspective—or giving different sections of an event sequence from different perspectives. Either way, you’re telling two (or more) stories at once, given our understanding that every character’s response to plot and setting is a unique story. There are many different reasons writers do this, some legitimate and even necessary, but many more foolish and counterproductive. I believe strongly that switching point of view is only appropriate when no other compositional choice is available to accomplish a rhetorical goal.
The Danger of Switching Point of View
Essentially, when you switch point of view you have to start the mechanism of story over. While readers may be absorbed in your plot and intrigued by your ideas or setting, every time you jump them from a familiar head into a strange new perspective they have to orient themselves once more. They have to decide if the investment they had in the last story—the story told by the previous point of view character—should be carried over to this new story told by what is initially a complete stranger. Even a well-known character that has never served as a point of view window is, on this level of intimacy, an unknown to readers. Forcing a reader to go from indifferent to embracing a character always provides the opportunity for them to fail to do so. This results in their putting your story down.
Remember, every time a writer switches point of view the narrative process goes back to step one. A point of view character in conflict is forced to act, thus revealing her character, thus facilitating the reader’s suspension of disbelief and identification, which allows for the communication of the narrative’s emotive heart and the establishment of relevance. In short, every shift in point of view forces the reader to go through all this to care what’s going on. Now, when the reader switches back into a character she’s already grown to know and love, the process is much easier and more certain. But every time we drop a reader into a new point of view there is a chance we’ll never gain the identification we had with the previous window, and because the angle at which we view the story is the story, our whole narrative suffers.
As writers we must always remember how difficult it is to absorb a reader in our stories in the first place. It’s a remarkable achievement to create something in words with which a person can construct a rich, vibrant, and meaningful experience. Doing it once is hard. Every time you attempt it again in a story becomes exponentially more difficult. Think about it: every new point of view means less time devoted to fleshing out the experience of the previous POV character. Every story only has so much time and space to utilize, so every page and moment devoted to one point of view means by necessity neglecting all others at that moment. A story all from one point of view means total dedication to a character, and the most prolonged, intimate experience a reader can possible have with that character. The moment you add two points of view that absolute solidarity is gone; you have sacrificed potential of one character for another. Now imagine moving the points of view to three, then four, then ten. At some point you no longer provide enough time alone with any one character for the reader to identify with the story at all.
Even when this isn’t the case, how many stories told from multiple points of view end up feeling like pieces of a great story laced with fluff, mediocre filling, or even just uninteresting material? Have you ever read a story that shuffles you from the perspective of a character you love reading to someone you dread experiencing? I suspect we all have. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Timeseries is a good example that even fantastically successful series have this problem when split among many points of view. I’ve met few, if any, fans of the series that don’t admit frustration when they arrive at parts of the story in the points of view they least appreciate. This is what I call the Rand Equation—the more removed from the Rand al’Thor perspective, the more likely a reader is to get impatient or irritated. Perrin and Mat, only removed from Rand by a single degree, tend to keep reader interest well. Egwene, Nynaeve, and other central character outside the main trio tend to succeed less completely (the gender of the characters likely plays a significant role as well). The further out we go from these central characters, the less universally readers are engaged in the stories told from these perspectives. It’s unavoidable. We humans have favorites—teams, flavors, holidays, friends, foods, stories, and people. It’s no different with characters in our stories. And the more point of view characters we force our readers to identify with, the greater the chance they’ll never truly love any of them.
With that significant caution established, we can now talk about using multiple points of view for constructive purposes. And yes, you can use multiple points of view for great effect. Sometimes you don’t even have a choice. The trick is knowing when these instances come, and how to handle them when they do.
Logistical Points of View
The most common use of multiple points of view is due to logistics, i.e., the main POV character isn’t on scene for something that needs to be included in the story. When done well, this can flesh out a story, give it a wider scope and variety of perspective and nuance. When done poorly, this technique betrays its shallowness through cardboard characters. Trust me, if you use a new point of view character just to deliver information to your reader or fit in a cool plot event, your readers will know and your story will suffer.
Some stories simply can’t be told through a single perspective. Others aren’t done justice when viewed through a single pair of eyes. That being said, never abandon a primary point of view without first considering if there is any possible way to achieve your purpose through this primary and most important vehicle. If you can reach the same end without jumping heads, do it. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should have someone run up to tell your character all about how his wife has been kidnapped, and she said these things, and the kidnapper wrote “triage” on the mirror in purple lipstick. It does mean you should ask yourself these questions:
1) Why is it important for my story that the reader knows something (what happens in the new point of view scene) that my main point of view character doesn’t? If that distinction in understanding and conceptualization of the story isn’t done for a purpose, don’t shift point of view.
2) Is there a way my reader can learn what happens in this other scene as the main point of view character does, either by experiencing it or learning about the event through consequences?
3) Does the information in the scene I’m writing in a new point of view have to be presented to the reader right now, or could it happen at some other stage in the book? I may find that at other times my main point of view character may be a better vehicle to address this material.
4) If I am using a new point of view character at any time for any reason, what do I want to accomplish through characterization? Why is this section of the story in this specific character’s voice rather than my main point of view perspective? If the new point of view vehicle is not accomplishing something through characterization that no other character can match, including the main protagonist, the scene isn’t worth it.
Shifting point of view should always achieve both specific plot and characterization objectives. If it doesn’t, you’re better served to stick with your already established point of view. This means that if you have different individuals or groups that are split up, and you’re delegating necessary plot events in different areas, each point of view that you use has to reward readers as if it were an independent story. It doesn’t have to be independent on the level of plot, but it does in terms of reader investment in the story. You can’t count of people’s fondness for the character you left or their fascination with the plot to carry them through a new point of view that exists simply to show what’s going on over here. The new point of view character’s responses to plot and setting, her thoughts and feelings while we’re in her head, have to reward us for every page we read, just as your protagonist does. If this isn’t the case, and your point of view selection reads as a logistical necessity, identification crumbles and your story has stalled until the real story—the original point of view character’s perspective—begins once more. If it ever does.
When done well, using multiple points of view in multiple locations allows for a wider, often grander, scope of vision and a broader ranging plot. It will also flavor the narrative with other perspectives, lending distinction and allowing contrast. As long as reader identification and investment is maintained, using point of view for skillful logistics helps create that epic feel for which so many readers long.
But there are other constructive uses of multiple points of view beyond simple necessity of time or place.
Multiple Points of View for Contrast and Complexity
Whereas logistical point of view shifting changes perspective in time with plot and setting—either time or place or both—changing POV for contrast usually involves addressing the same scene through the eyes of multiple characters. This is a difficult technique that should be sparingly used, in most stories, but when done appropriately and well can be exceptionally potent.
Consider the story of the mother and the child fighting over the cookie from the first section of this essay (see POV as Story). Having read both characters’ perspectives brings a whole new facet to the story; neither the mother’s nor the child’s understanding of the plot events is complete or correct. They aren’t wrong, they are just idiosyncratic, and restricted by being formed of less information than the reader possesses. Seeing both characters so unhappy, and knowing that they are each unhappy in part because of their love for the other, makes the situation especially poignant. Such meaning cannot be communicated through a single perspective, and so attempting such requires utilizing multiple points of view.
This point of view technique carries all the requirements of logistical POV change, of course, as well as some additional considerations. First and foremost, this technique is completely predicated upon contrast and juxtaposition. Drawing connections between things that are clearly and substantively different is the key. If the two (or more) points of view you use are too similar the overall effect is diluted and the passage feels repetitious. Seek distinction in the characters you chose for perspective, even oppositional or antagonistic viewpoints. This is often why stories show both a hero’s and villain’s perspective overlapping the same events; it gives us a more holistic picture complete with powerful contrast. It is also a skillful way to communicate characterization. Portraying characters as antitheses or shadows of each other reveals character through inversion, which is a subtle way to reinforce more obvious characterization.
Whatever characters you chose to give perspectives on the same plot event or setting location, they cannot be selected in isolation. Using multiple points of view on the same section of a story is like putting photos up side by side—they’re only put together because of a greater statement doing so creates. This combined effect is never random, or, at least, shouldn’t be. The points of view must portray substantially different responses to the same stimuli yet act in conjunction to create a desired overall impression in the reader.
Because the narrative effect of each individual point of view must be understood in addition to their cumulative effect, this is a very tricky technique to master. Additionally, there are options that offer some of benefits of this dynamic without demanding you actually write a scene, in part of wholly, in two different points of view. Sometimes one character deals with a situation in real time whereas another will struggle with the material in contemplation. However it is handled, the point is to say something greater than either perspective alone can communicate. All of us, at times in our lives, are struck by the understandings that life and creation and all that goes with it is far larger and more complex than we can comprehend. Using point of view to provide contrast and variety of perspective in our stories can help capture that transcendent quality, the sense that more is going on than we can understand—we know this, because we witness how much the characters themselves don’t understand about what is going on. Be careful not to make your characters fools or, even worse, dismissive of their own consciousness; instead, make each characters’ understanding reasonable, even admirable, then show how even then it can be incomplete. Few things will make your story feel more genuine.
Communal Point of View
This is an almost never used (largely because it’s really, really hard to do well) version of point of view, so I’ll keep it short. Occasionally, a point of view doesn’t approximate the perspective of a person but rather a group. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtimeand Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood come to mind. Here the point isn’t to get the reader to identify with a person as much as it is to, at times, identify with a group or type of person. This is done through using omniscient perspective and commenting on multiple people, both by using their own thoughts and omniscient commentary, to create a collective impression. This story technique is almost always employed in service of overt themes and concepts rather than pure narrative, and thus is rarely used in really great, widely appealing stories. More “literary” readers are likely to be much more accepting of such a structure than others.
I include this point of view technique in the multiple point of view session because it delves into many different heads lightly throughout a story, but in essence it is really a single point of view—that of the omniscient observer of the collective. I urge writers reading this not to devote too much effort and consideration to this technique. If you ever conceptualize a story that needs it to fulfill the story’s potential, and I mean really needs it, the chances are that you’ve been writing long enough to give this a good go on your own. Even then, don’t expect your story to be as successful as it deserves, given the complexity of its composition. No human likes to be recognized only as a type, a class and version of a thing rather than an individual. Not surprisingly, we typically don’t like reading about such as well as actual people either.
Narrators
A narrator is simply one who tells a series of events—the person or perspective telling the story. In application, we only use this term when the identity and characteristics of the perspective in question is integral to the story being told. For example, most third person stories, while told from a particular perspective, do not develop that perspective with qualities of its own to shape the story. (All first person stories use a narrator, of course.)
So, when is using a narrator a good idea? Answering that can be tricky. My best advice is to use a narrator when the story you want to tell is significantly different from the most obvious interpretation of the plot. As we’ve established that point of view makes story because of the subjective uniqueness of the POV character, narrators are used when this subjectivity is by necessity unusually high. Stories that need narrators require the thick perspective filter to make their point. Think about a narrator as a unique canvas, more like a turtle shell than a blank sheet. The character of the canvas always shows through in the final product, meaning whatever you paint over it must work with the base in order to create a desired result. Consider two of the most famous narrators in literature, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby and Ishmael from Moby Dick, and their functions in those stories. Carraway provides a base of naive optimism, romanticism, and skittish ambition to Fitsgerald’s tale of the self-made prisons and hollowness of the powerful. The story is less about Gatsby’s life than Carraway’s witnessing of it, and the erosion of innocence that this brings. Gatsby really isn’t all that great, and his story alone would not have been sufficiently engrossing to enrich millions or readers throughout the years—not without Nick’s near worship to remind us of what Gatsby, and those like him, might have been. Similarly, Ishmael brings a rational perspective to Melville’s exploration into Ahab’s madness. His newness to the profession and awe of the overpowering presence of Ahab act as buffers, giving us the distance we need to taste Ahab’s damnable (literally) fury without drowning. These stories are not and could not have been a simple, objective relaying of the sequence of events contained within their pages. They mandated a particular lens through which they were transmitted.
When should you use a narrator? Like Fitzgerald and Melville, when the plot events require a consistent, specialized canvas to create the desired final product. Mostly, though not always, this will involve a first person story written from the protagonist’s point of view. When considering a narrator, however, realize that your choice of characters is of the utmost importance, and your decision should involve careful assessment of several specific characteristics.
Participant or Non-Participant Narrators
The first factor to consider when choosing a narrator is how greatly they participate in the plot events of the story. This is vital to understand, as the less participation the character has in the plot, the more their subjectivity becomes the story. Characters thrown off buildings or in the middle of divorces are, in many ways, acted upon and respond according to necessity of the situation. On the contrary, characters who hear about or witness such things from a distance are far less reactionary. They have time to think about what’s happening, to be self-conscious and aware, and their individual personality will color the telling of events to a greater degree without the same impetus of necessity that a deeply involved character would experience.
Most first person narratives chose the protagonist as the POV character, meaning they are constant participants in the events of the story. Such stories depend more heavily upon a good plot than stories with non-participant narrators because the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings are provoked by immediate experience. Most narrators will be significant participants in their own stories; however, occasionally using a non-participant of some degree provides special options. Like Nick Carraway and Ishmael, who becomes less a participant as the story goes along, a non-participant allows a plot to be assessed from a perspective very distinctive from those most shaping the plot. Again, as in all elements of narrative, it is a feature of distinction. Non-participant narrators are always significantly different from those shaping the plot in major ways. They consider actions and reactions in the story in ways that those in the thick of things simply cannot do, both because of who they are and because of their immediate involvement in the plot.
To break it down as simply as possible, a participant narrated story is about exterior events, when doing something important is part of the objective; a non-participant story is about an internal struggle, where the stakes are almost always a matter of belief and perception. While all good stories involve both aspects, non-participant narrators take stories as far and disproportionately inside the human mind and heart as can be done. Because of this, they are remarkably hard to write. Not even the best crafted plot can save a lifeless or poorly chosen non-participant narrator. Also, be aware that non-participant narrators don’t create a more potent feeling of intimacy than well-written participant characters. It isn’t the poignancy of the story that changes as much as its texture and the balance it keeps between beliefs and feelings, or the mind and heart. Because of this, I suggest non-participant narrators only be used when participation in plot events makes characters incapable of telling the story that you wish to share.
Major vs. Minor Characters as Narrator
There is a strong correlation between the participation level of characters and their significance in the story’s plot events: more participatory characters are more significant or major, while less participatory characters are increasingly minor. This correlation is so strong it is almost impossible to break, so much of the information about character participation above applies to this feature as well. Just keep in mind that the more major a character, the more they will be affected by plot events, whatever level of participation they take. A major character will be acted upon even when they refuse to act. The inverse is also true—the less significant the character to other characters and plot events, the less influenced they will be by factors outside their own personality. Minor character narrators are almost always low-level participants in the story whose function is to interpret things with a level of distance, which makes the narrative particularly dependent upon how the character confronts herself—her beliefs, assumptions, hopes, and fears—rather than exterior factors. Again, this is difficult to do well.
Objective or Subjective Narrators
This aspect of narrators is the most classically and theoretically significant, which is why my take may surprise some people: In my estimation, this distinction doesn’t exist, at least in most modern cases. I simply don’t believe objective narrators exist.
Think about it. A narrator is the person who tells us a story. Well, if they were truly objective, they would have no reason to tell what they witness, or witness it in the first place, or even find what they saw relevant if they did. An objective narrator cannot tell a story because she doesn’t see one, just a sequence of inconsequential events utterly lacking in meaning. Thus, I maintain, all narrators are subjective, if only in implication. Additionally, modern readers have far less patience for objectivity than they once had, so even stories with mild subjectivity are not welcomed. Our jaded times won’t allow us to trust the apparently objective. If something doesn’t have a slant, it doesn’t register as real. Because of this, the objectivity/subjectivity question is really a question of just how subjective you want your narrator to be.
As most stories use first person protagonist narrators, this means a subjective narrator who at least seeks to be objective as they try to figure out what is happening to them and how to respond to it. You can’t be lying constantly to a reader if you’re assessing things yourself simultaneously. The subjectivity of such characters is often communicated through their problem solving process. How do they face challenges? What emotions and thoughts come as they do so? In these instances, exterior plot events are powerful catalysts that provoke rich and subjective responses on behalf of the character. As narrators go, these objectivity-seeking characters are applicable to a wide variety of stories, genres, and themes.
Extremely subjective narrators tend to fall into two camps: victims or villains. This is because the objective truth in each case would so harsh as to off-put the reader. When the plot is too dark and depressing to hold a reader, the innocence of a narrator can disguise and soften the harshness, let it unfold to us gradually as it does to the character herself. By the end of the story, the narrator is always a victim of disillusionment to a degree, like Nick Carraway, though this often is compensated by earned wisdom. Similarly, a strutting protagonist like Humbert Humbert in Lolita would be absolutely impalatable if seen with an objective eye. It is only his distortion of events and his own role in them that interest readers enough to give him a chance (even then, many with good reason don’t). Narrators this subjective simply can’t be trusted, at all, ever, and the stories hinge upon that fact. In a way, these stories are puzzles or invitations for the reader to feel superior to the narrator—they either keep attention by making us figure out what’s really going on beneath the character’s interpretation, or they make that obvious to us, counting on our contrasting that with the character’s insight to drive home a point. Either way, these stories are always predicated upon the notion of distortion. The very fact that a reader can’t trust the narrator is the backbone upon which they are built.
Omniscient narrators, to whatever degree they exist, are dinosaurs. Very few modern readers have any tolerance for this device. Where once a godlike perspective (sometimes God himself) could weave tales of perfect trustworthiness, now this simply reads as false. The possible uses are much as they ever were: deity-like perspectives, sometimes aspects or forces of nature like a mountain or star, or nebulous, never-identified perspectives. Occasionally a significantly objective perspective can be gained by using a person so removed from the plot that they become trustworthy, either because a great deal of time has passed or because for some reason they lack the intense investment in the story to color it with their personality. None of these devices is trusted nowadays, in any genre. When used, objective narration is usually in experimental short stories more targeted at other writers than readers.
Choosing a Narrator Made Easy
If you suspect your story would benefit from a narrator rather than a more standardized point of view character, first consider choosing a standard first person protagonist perspective. In most cases, this will be most suitable. If not, consider the next most major character, and the next. If neither provide the canvas upon which you need to paint, change strategy and consider the antagonist or villain. If that doesn’t work, stop and ask yourself what you actually want a reader to get out of the story and why none of these participant characters offer that. Then ask yourself what type of person would. Ask how a character would have to be different to perceive the world—and your plot and setting—in the way you need to communicate effectively. Then invent that character. You can base the narrator on an already established minor character as long as none of the established attributes of that character take precedence over their delivering the perfect slant to the story. If you have to change them in some way, make them more intelligent or younger or of a different gender, then do it. By following this sequence of steps, you can determine the proper narrator for any story.
Using multiple points of view within a story is complicated. After all, what you’re really doing is giving different versions of the same events from more than one unique perspective—or giving different sections of an event sequence from different perspectives. Either way, you’re telling two (or more) stories at once, given our understanding that every character’s response to plot and setting is a unique story. There are many different reasons writers do this, some legitimate and even necessary, but many more foolish and counterproductive. I believe strongly that switching point of view is only appropriate when no other compositional choice is available to accomplish a rhetorical goal.
The Danger of Switching Point of View
Essentially, when you switch point of view you have to start the mechanism of story over. While readers may be absorbed in your plot and intrigued by your ideas or setting, every time you jump them from a familiar head into a strange new perspective they have to orient themselves once more. They have to decide if the investment they had in the last story—the story told by the previous point of view character—should be carried over to this new story told by what is initially a complete stranger. Even a well-known character that has never served as a point of view window is, on this level of intimacy, an unknown to readers. Forcing a reader to go from indifferent to embracing a character always provides the opportunity for them to fail to do so. This results in their putting your story down.
Remember, every time a writer switches point of view the narrative process goes back to step one. A point of view character in conflict is forced to act, thus revealing her character, thus facilitating the reader’s suspension of disbelief and identification, which allows for the communication of the narrative’s emotive heart and the establishment of relevance. In short, every shift in point of view forces the reader to go through all this to care what’s going on. Now, when the reader switches back into a character she’s already grown to know and love, the process is much easier and more certain. But every time we drop a reader into a new point of view there is a chance we’ll never gain the identification we had with the previous window, and because the angle at which we view the story is the story, our whole narrative suffers.
As writers we must always remember how difficult it is to absorb a reader in our stories in the first place. It’s a remarkable achievement to create something in words with which a person can construct a rich, vibrant, and meaningful experience. Doing it once is hard. Every time you attempt it again in a story becomes exponentially more difficult. Think about it: every new point of view means less time devoted to fleshing out the experience of the previous POV character. Every story only has so much time and space to utilize, so every page and moment devoted to one point of view means by necessity neglecting all others at that moment. A story all from one point of view means total dedication to a character, and the most prolonged, intimate experience a reader can possible have with that character. The moment you add two points of view that absolute solidarity is gone; you have sacrificed potential of one character for another. Now imagine moving the points of view to three, then four, then ten. At some point you no longer provide enough time alone with any one character for the reader to identify with the story at all.
Even when this isn’t the case, how many stories told from multiple points of view end up feeling like pieces of a great story laced with fluff, mediocre filling, or even just uninteresting material? Have you ever read a story that shuffles you from the perspective of a character you love reading to someone you dread experiencing? I suspect we all have. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Timeseries is a good example that even fantastically successful series have this problem when split among many points of view. I’ve met few, if any, fans of the series that don’t admit frustration when they arrive at parts of the story in the points of view they least appreciate. This is what I call the Rand Equation—the more removed from the Rand al’Thor perspective, the more likely a reader is to get impatient or irritated. Perrin and Mat, only removed from Rand by a single degree, tend to keep reader interest well. Egwene, Nynaeve, and other central character outside the main trio tend to succeed less completely (the gender of the characters likely plays a significant role as well). The further out we go from these central characters, the less universally readers are engaged in the stories told from these perspectives. It’s unavoidable. We humans have favorites—teams, flavors, holidays, friends, foods, stories, and people. It’s no different with characters in our stories. And the more point of view characters we force our readers to identify with, the greater the chance they’ll never truly love any of them.
With that significant caution established, we can now talk about using multiple points of view for constructive purposes. And yes, you can use multiple points of view for great effect. Sometimes you don’t even have a choice. The trick is knowing when these instances come, and how to handle them when they do.
Logistical Points of View
The most common use of multiple points of view is due to logistics, i.e., the main POV character isn’t on scene for something that needs to be included in the story. When done well, this can flesh out a story, give it a wider scope and variety of perspective and nuance. When done poorly, this technique betrays its shallowness through cardboard characters. Trust me, if you use a new point of view character just to deliver information to your reader or fit in a cool plot event, your readers will know and your story will suffer.
Some stories simply can’t be told through a single perspective. Others aren’t done justice when viewed through a single pair of eyes. That being said, never abandon a primary point of view without first considering if there is any possible way to achieve your purpose through this primary and most important vehicle. If you can reach the same end without jumping heads, do it. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should have someone run up to tell your character all about how his wife has been kidnapped, and she said these things, and the kidnapper wrote “triage” on the mirror in purple lipstick. It does mean you should ask yourself these questions:
1) Why is it important for my story that the reader knows something (what happens in the new point of view scene) that my main point of view character doesn’t? If that distinction in understanding and conceptualization of the story isn’t done for a purpose, don’t shift point of view.
2) Is there a way my reader can learn what happens in this other scene as the main point of view character does, either by experiencing it or learning about the event through consequences?
3) Does the information in the scene I’m writing in a new point of view have to be presented to the reader right now, or could it happen at some other stage in the book? I may find that at other times my main point of view character may be a better vehicle to address this material.
4) If I am using a new point of view character at any time for any reason, what do I want to accomplish through characterization? Why is this section of the story in this specific character’s voice rather than my main point of view perspective? If the new point of view vehicle is not accomplishing something through characterization that no other character can match, including the main protagonist, the scene isn’t worth it.
Shifting point of view should always achieve both specific plot and characterization objectives. If it doesn’t, you’re better served to stick with your already established point of view. This means that if you have different individuals or groups that are split up, and you’re delegating necessary plot events in different areas, each point of view that you use has to reward readers as if it were an independent story. It doesn’t have to be independent on the level of plot, but it does in terms of reader investment in the story. You can’t count of people’s fondness for the character you left or their fascination with the plot to carry them through a new point of view that exists simply to show what’s going on over here. The new point of view character’s responses to plot and setting, her thoughts and feelings while we’re in her head, have to reward us for every page we read, just as your protagonist does. If this isn’t the case, and your point of view selection reads as a logistical necessity, identification crumbles and your story has stalled until the real story—the original point of view character’s perspective—begins once more. If it ever does.
When done well, using multiple points of view in multiple locations allows for a wider, often grander, scope of vision and a broader ranging plot. It will also flavor the narrative with other perspectives, lending distinction and allowing contrast. As long as reader identification and investment is maintained, using point of view for skillful logistics helps create that epic feel for which so many readers long.
But there are other constructive uses of multiple points of view beyond simple necessity of time or place.
Multiple Points of View for Contrast and Complexity
Whereas logistical point of view shifting changes perspective in time with plot and setting—either time or place or both—changing POV for contrast usually involves addressing the same scene through the eyes of multiple characters. This is a difficult technique that should be sparingly used, in most stories, but when done appropriately and well can be exceptionally potent.
Consider the story of the mother and the child fighting over the cookie from the first section of this essay (see POV as Story). Having read both characters’ perspectives brings a whole new facet to the story; neither the mother’s nor the child’s understanding of the plot events is complete or correct. They aren’t wrong, they are just idiosyncratic, and restricted by being formed of less information than the reader possesses. Seeing both characters so unhappy, and knowing that they are each unhappy in part because of their love for the other, makes the situation especially poignant. Such meaning cannot be communicated through a single perspective, and so attempting such requires utilizing multiple points of view.
This point of view technique carries all the requirements of logistical POV change, of course, as well as some additional considerations. First and foremost, this technique is completely predicated upon contrast and juxtaposition. Drawing connections between things that are clearly and substantively different is the key. If the two (or more) points of view you use are too similar the overall effect is diluted and the passage feels repetitious. Seek distinction in the characters you chose for perspective, even oppositional or antagonistic viewpoints. This is often why stories show both a hero’s and villain’s perspective overlapping the same events; it gives us a more holistic picture complete with powerful contrast. It is also a skillful way to communicate characterization. Portraying characters as antitheses or shadows of each other reveals character through inversion, which is a subtle way to reinforce more obvious characterization.
Whatever characters you chose to give perspectives on the same plot event or setting location, they cannot be selected in isolation. Using multiple points of view on the same section of a story is like putting photos up side by side—they’re only put together because of a greater statement doing so creates. This combined effect is never random, or, at least, shouldn’t be. The points of view must portray substantially different responses to the same stimuli yet act in conjunction to create a desired overall impression in the reader.
Because the narrative effect of each individual point of view must be understood in addition to their cumulative effect, this is a very tricky technique to master. Additionally, there are options that offer some of benefits of this dynamic without demanding you actually write a scene, in part of wholly, in two different points of view. Sometimes one character deals with a situation in real time whereas another will struggle with the material in contemplation. However it is handled, the point is to say something greater than either perspective alone can communicate. All of us, at times in our lives, are struck by the understandings that life and creation and all that goes with it is far larger and more complex than we can comprehend. Using point of view to provide contrast and variety of perspective in our stories can help capture that transcendent quality, the sense that more is going on than we can understand—we know this, because we witness how much the characters themselves don’t understand about what is going on. Be careful not to make your characters fools or, even worse, dismissive of their own consciousness; instead, make each characters’ understanding reasonable, even admirable, then show how even then it can be incomplete. Few things will make your story feel more genuine.
Communal Point of View
This is an almost never used (largely because it’s really, really hard to do well) version of point of view, so I’ll keep it short. Occasionally, a point of view doesn’t approximate the perspective of a person but rather a group. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtimeand Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood come to mind. Here the point isn’t to get the reader to identify with a person as much as it is to, at times, identify with a group or type of person. This is done through using omniscient perspective and commenting on multiple people, both by using their own thoughts and omniscient commentary, to create a collective impression. This story technique is almost always employed in service of overt themes and concepts rather than pure narrative, and thus is rarely used in really great, widely appealing stories. More “literary” readers are likely to be much more accepting of such a structure than others.
I include this point of view technique in the multiple point of view session because it delves into many different heads lightly throughout a story, but in essence it is really a single point of view—that of the omniscient observer of the collective. I urge writers reading this not to devote too much effort and consideration to this technique. If you ever conceptualize a story that needs it to fulfill the story’s potential, and I mean really needs it, the chances are that you’ve been writing long enough to give this a good go on your own. Even then, don’t expect your story to be as successful as it deserves, given the complexity of its composition. No human likes to be recognized only as a type, a class and version of a thing rather than an individual. Not surprisingly, we typically don’t like reading about such as well as actual people either.
Narrators
A narrator is simply one who tells a series of events—the person or perspective telling the story. In application, we only use this term when the identity and characteristics of the perspective in question is integral to the story being told. For example, most third person stories, while told from a particular perspective, do not develop that perspective with qualities of its own to shape the story. (All first person stories use a narrator, of course.)
So, when is using a narrator a good idea? Answering that can be tricky. My best advice is to use a narrator when the story you want to tell is significantly different from the most obvious interpretation of the plot. As we’ve established that point of view makes story because of the subjective uniqueness of the POV character, narrators are used when this subjectivity is by necessity unusually high. Stories that need narrators require the thick perspective filter to make their point. Think about a narrator as a unique canvas, more like a turtle shell than a blank sheet. The character of the canvas always shows through in the final product, meaning whatever you paint over it must work with the base in order to create a desired result. Consider two of the most famous narrators in literature, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby and Ishmael from Moby Dick, and their functions in those stories. Carraway provides a base of naive optimism, romanticism, and skittish ambition to Fitsgerald’s tale of the self-made prisons and hollowness of the powerful. The story is less about Gatsby’s life than Carraway’s witnessing of it, and the erosion of innocence that this brings. Gatsby really isn’t all that great, and his story alone would not have been sufficiently engrossing to enrich millions or readers throughout the years—not without Nick’s near worship to remind us of what Gatsby, and those like him, might have been. Similarly, Ishmael brings a rational perspective to Melville’s exploration into Ahab’s madness. His newness to the profession and awe of the overpowering presence of Ahab act as buffers, giving us the distance we need to taste Ahab’s damnable (literally) fury without drowning. These stories are not and could not have been a simple, objective relaying of the sequence of events contained within their pages. They mandated a particular lens through which they were transmitted.
When should you use a narrator? Like Fitzgerald and Melville, when the plot events require a consistent, specialized canvas to create the desired final product. Mostly, though not always, this will involve a first person story written from the protagonist’s point of view. When considering a narrator, however, realize that your choice of characters is of the utmost importance, and your decision should involve careful assessment of several specific characteristics.
Participant or Non-Participant Narrators
The first factor to consider when choosing a narrator is how greatly they participate in the plot events of the story. This is vital to understand, as the less participation the character has in the plot, the more their subjectivity becomes the story. Characters thrown off buildings or in the middle of divorces are, in many ways, acted upon and respond according to necessity of the situation. On the contrary, characters who hear about or witness such things from a distance are far less reactionary. They have time to think about what’s happening, to be self-conscious and aware, and their individual personality will color the telling of events to a greater degree without the same impetus of necessity that a deeply involved character would experience.
Most first person narratives chose the protagonist as the POV character, meaning they are constant participants in the events of the story. Such stories depend more heavily upon a good plot than stories with non-participant narrators because the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings are provoked by immediate experience. Most narrators will be significant participants in their own stories; however, occasionally using a non-participant of some degree provides special options. Like Nick Carraway and Ishmael, who becomes less a participant as the story goes along, a non-participant allows a plot to be assessed from a perspective very distinctive from those most shaping the plot. Again, as in all elements of narrative, it is a feature of distinction. Non-participant narrators are always significantly different from those shaping the plot in major ways. They consider actions and reactions in the story in ways that those in the thick of things simply cannot do, both because of who they are and because of their immediate involvement in the plot.
To break it down as simply as possible, a participant narrated story is about exterior events, when doing something important is part of the objective; a non-participant story is about an internal struggle, where the stakes are almost always a matter of belief and perception. While all good stories involve both aspects, non-participant narrators take stories as far and disproportionately inside the human mind and heart as can be done. Because of this, they are remarkably hard to write. Not even the best crafted plot can save a lifeless or poorly chosen non-participant narrator. Also, be aware that non-participant narrators don’t create a more potent feeling of intimacy than well-written participant characters. It isn’t the poignancy of the story that changes as much as its texture and the balance it keeps between beliefs and feelings, or the mind and heart. Because of this, I suggest non-participant narrators only be used when participation in plot events makes characters incapable of telling the story that you wish to share.
Major vs. Minor Characters as Narrator
There is a strong correlation between the participation level of characters and their significance in the story’s plot events: more participatory characters are more significant or major, while less participatory characters are increasingly minor. This correlation is so strong it is almost impossible to break, so much of the information about character participation above applies to this feature as well. Just keep in mind that the more major a character, the more they will be affected by plot events, whatever level of participation they take. A major character will be acted upon even when they refuse to act. The inverse is also true—the less significant the character to other characters and plot events, the less influenced they will be by factors outside their own personality. Minor character narrators are almost always low-level participants in the story whose function is to interpret things with a level of distance, which makes the narrative particularly dependent upon how the character confronts herself—her beliefs, assumptions, hopes, and fears—rather than exterior factors. Again, this is difficult to do well.
Objective or Subjective Narrators
This aspect of narrators is the most classically and theoretically significant, which is why my take may surprise some people: In my estimation, this distinction doesn’t exist, at least in most modern cases. I simply don’t believe objective narrators exist.
Think about it. A narrator is the person who tells us a story. Well, if they were truly objective, they would have no reason to tell what they witness, or witness it in the first place, or even find what they saw relevant if they did. An objective narrator cannot tell a story because she doesn’t see one, just a sequence of inconsequential events utterly lacking in meaning. Thus, I maintain, all narrators are subjective, if only in implication. Additionally, modern readers have far less patience for objectivity than they once had, so even stories with mild subjectivity are not welcomed. Our jaded times won’t allow us to trust the apparently objective. If something doesn’t have a slant, it doesn’t register as real. Because of this, the objectivity/subjectivity question is really a question of just how subjective you want your narrator to be.
As most stories use first person protagonist narrators, this means a subjective narrator who at least seeks to be objective as they try to figure out what is happening to them and how to respond to it. You can’t be lying constantly to a reader if you’re assessing things yourself simultaneously. The subjectivity of such characters is often communicated through their problem solving process. How do they face challenges? What emotions and thoughts come as they do so? In these instances, exterior plot events are powerful catalysts that provoke rich and subjective responses on behalf of the character. As narrators go, these objectivity-seeking characters are applicable to a wide variety of stories, genres, and themes.
Extremely subjective narrators tend to fall into two camps: victims or villains. This is because the objective truth in each case would so harsh as to off-put the reader. When the plot is too dark and depressing to hold a reader, the innocence of a narrator can disguise and soften the harshness, let it unfold to us gradually as it does to the character herself. By the end of the story, the narrator is always a victim of disillusionment to a degree, like Nick Carraway, though this often is compensated by earned wisdom. Similarly, a strutting protagonist like Humbert Humbert in Lolita would be absolutely impalatable if seen with an objective eye. It is only his distortion of events and his own role in them that interest readers enough to give him a chance (even then, many with good reason don’t). Narrators this subjective simply can’t be trusted, at all, ever, and the stories hinge upon that fact. In a way, these stories are puzzles or invitations for the reader to feel superior to the narrator—they either keep attention by making us figure out what’s really going on beneath the character’s interpretation, or they make that obvious to us, counting on our contrasting that with the character’s insight to drive home a point. Either way, these stories are always predicated upon the notion of distortion. The very fact that a reader can’t trust the narrator is the backbone upon which they are built.
Omniscient narrators, to whatever degree they exist, are dinosaurs. Very few modern readers have any tolerance for this device. Where once a godlike perspective (sometimes God himself) could weave tales of perfect trustworthiness, now this simply reads as false. The possible uses are much as they ever were: deity-like perspectives, sometimes aspects or forces of nature like a mountain or star, or nebulous, never-identified perspectives. Occasionally a significantly objective perspective can be gained by using a person so removed from the plot that they become trustworthy, either because a great deal of time has passed or because for some reason they lack the intense investment in the story to color it with their personality. None of these devices is trusted nowadays, in any genre. When used, objective narration is usually in experimental short stories more targeted at other writers than readers.
Choosing a Narrator Made Easy
If you suspect your story would benefit from a narrator rather than a more standardized point of view character, first consider choosing a standard first person protagonist perspective. In most cases, this will be most suitable. If not, consider the next most major character, and the next. If neither provide the canvas upon which you need to paint, change strategy and consider the antagonist or villain. If that doesn’t work, stop and ask yourself what you actually want a reader to get out of the story and why none of these participant characters offer that. Then ask yourself what type of person would. Ask how a character would have to be different to perceive the world—and your plot and setting—in the way you need to communicate effectively. Then invent that character. You can base the narrator on an already established minor character as long as none of the established attributes of that character take precedence over their delivering the perfect slant to the story. If you have to change them in some way, make them more intelligent or younger or of a different gender, then do it. By following this sequence of steps, you can determine the proper narrator for any story.