Hi

Here goes my first posting on this website.. I recently finished writing a novel which I wrote from the first person viewpoint of five characters. I didn't plan to do this way intentionally, I started out trying to get to know the characters that way and then realised that I enjoyed the format and stuck to it. But recently I've read that this is quite ambitious for a first time novelist and I suspect they have a point. Although I believe it worked for me, and made the story what it is, I do wonder how separate/similar the characters may be.. So firstly, if anyone else had any thoughts on this in general, I'd be interested to hear.

Secondly, due to the format, I separated the book into eight parts; each part containing five 'chapters' from the characters. So when it comes to sending a sample off to agents, should I send them the first three parts?! I feel that to just send them the first three character chapters wouldn't give much insight into the book. Although the first three parts does work out to be a fair number of pages..

Many thanks for any help given.

I've written full-scale parallel 1st person narratives - The Mathematics of Love is one - and my rule of thumb is that you have to be able to tell which character's narrating within the first sentence, either by the tone of voice, or by names/places mentioned, or preferably both. If you can't, then the voices aren't differentiated enough. You can do it with some quite crude decisions about whether they write long, loose rambling sentences, long involved grammatical ones, short and punchy, short and tailing off... ditto vocabulary, syntax, and so on. You can always head the section with their name, to be absolutely safe, but if you absolutely have to, you haven't done enough. And besides, like most people's, my eye tends to skip headings.

Commercially speaking, David Smith's right, the risk is that the reader (and the writer) cares less about some than others, which I think is one of the reasons he's wary of it. All you can do is try very hard to care about each of them,. If you don't, ask yourself 'is this character earning their keep?'

Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers has ten loosely-linked characters going through the 2nd World War. Each chapter's from a different character's POV, headed with their name, though not 1st person, as I recall. A real technical tour-de-force of plotting and characterisation, and a fantastic novel.

As far as submissions go, I would say that the first thing to do is find out what each agent wants. However many chapters they want (my default is three if they don't say), I'd work out how much that would be in words (at, say 7,000 a chapter?), and send that kind of total in your sections. After all, if you've differentiated three voices well enough, they'll know you can do the others you've mentioned in the synopsis, without having a wodge of stuff on their desk to make their heart sink.
The temptation is always to send more stuff, but if you can't grab them with a small section, then you're not going to with more.

Good luck
Emma