My novel is written through the eyes of five or six different people, though the bulk of it is through 2 people only, the remaining three or four supplying only details/feelings which cannot be known or echoed by the two main narrators. Some of the minor contributors may only have one brief chapter.

I am torn between choosing one of my main narrators as the "first person" narrator, and making all the rest 3rd person, or leaving it as I have written it, each one narrating in the first person.

Pursuing this "first person" narrator approach I have, in addition to having a chapter heading where the narrator changes, ie Sue......David..... etc) tried to make it clear in the first few sentences that the narrator has changed, and who that person is.

Any views on the appropriate option here?

It depends on the story. If you've got an intricate plot, thriller/crime/adventure(fantasy, SF), which you need to show from various angles, then it can be useful to have several pov characters. If, however, it's mainly about relationships, then the reader may prefer to stick to just one or two characters who they can empathise with, and root for. Minor pov characters can be distracting, especially if written in the first person - you might prefer to write them in the 3rd person.
Sometimes there's a big temptation to give minor characters the pov so you can reveal things to the reader which they really don't need to know, and which would be better coming from the main pov character(s).


- NaomiM

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Also it should be obvious to the reader which character has the pov, without needing to be told via a chapter heading. If that is not the case, then consider having a cull of pov characters.
Stef Penny in The Tenderness of Wolves has about 5 pov characters, but each have their own chapter and each time it's obvious who has the pov.

The most fluent way to handle this would be in free indirect style, with an external knowledgeable/omniscient narrator, telling the story in third person. You still have to know which pov you're in, and handle the transitions in and out of different heads carefully so you don't get accused of head-hopping, but it works much more smoothly than alternating chapters of different third limited povs.

This would avoid the potential confusions of separate first person chapters. The latter can work IF the voices are very thoroughly and noticeably differentiated, but if they all sound fairly similar, then you're always at risk of a mildly inattentive reader suddenly realising they can't actually remember whose story they're reading.

Emma

Two people I think would be ok but you say there are five or six differing perspectives? That seems excessive. I'm with Emma on this, it would be much better to try writing this third person indirect, watching those transitions with an eagle eye because they can, just like two many first person narrators, throw a reader right out of the story.

I'd say, for argument's sake, keep what you've already written. Re-write it separately as third person indirect and then have readers compare the two. Whichever version the readers flag up as being the most accessible continue forward with for the rest of the novel. Your best bet is always to see what trusted and knowledgeable readers make of your work because they are the ones who will be able to clarify what is working and what is falling flat.

Going back to your orinal query,

I am torn between choosing one of my main narrators as the "first person" narrator, and making all the rest 3rd person, or leaving it as I have written it, each one narrating in the first person.

I realise I'm not clear what you see the options as being.

The usual options for the form of a narrative are:

first person in the voice and pov of one of the characters in the story, narrating what they know/see/think, from inside, and only what they can know/see of the others, and their opinion of those others, from the outside.

third person, 'limited' (or 'subjective' so that it's sticking to the voice and pov of a single character in the story, narrating what they know/see/think, from inside, and only what they can know/see of the others from the outside. This has some of the drawbacks and advantages of first person (at a crude level, the difference is only a matter of 'he' or 'she went' instead of 'I wnet', but you've got a bit more variety in thepsychic distance available to you. There is an implied, external narrator who's saying all this, but they have no personality or character.

third person objective: where nothing of the voice or thoughts or opinions of any character are given: it's as if everything that happens is either dialogue, or a commentary on the external action, by someone - an external 'narrator' - watching a film to a blind person.

If you want to work with more than one pov in third-person-limited-subjective, you have to jump from one to the other, and the safest, though not the only, way is by doing each one in a separate chapter. I think doing this in first person is going to be easy to make work, because of the potential for confusion, and also because in a first person narrative the jumps are going to be even more brutal, because you don't have the greater psychic distances available to you, to ease us into their head, and therefore into caring about them.

third person: 'knowledgeable' (or 'omniscient' where the implied, external narrator knows about more than one character's voice/action/pov/thoughts etc, and can move between them at will. They can also say things which no character knows. If we're trying to codify things, this is the only pov that can say things like 'little did she know' or 'she didn't remember when'... And how much personality or character you accord this implied narrator - how much they voice opinions about what they're telling, how much they slide towards what James Woods calls the 'essayist' narrator, is up to you.

I think it can work, if you're writing for a part of the market whose readers are reasonably willing to do some work to understand things, to, say, have one strand written in first person, and another in a more wide-ranging third-person, using free indirect style and giving the reader access to lots of heads. But there needs to be a very good reason for being inconsistent in how you ask readers to read the novel. Just because it makes it easier for you in plotting or whatever, isn't a good enough reason. I'd suggest asking yourself very deeply what first person gives the reader, why and where that's important. A knowledgeable third-person narrator, making full use of free indirect style, can actually give you everything a first person narrator gives you, plus everything that the first-person narrator can't, and all within a single, fluent narrative rather than a series of blocks.

Emma





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Doh! Typed exactly the opposite of what I meant:

I think doing this in first person is going to be harder to make work,

All of these points have been incredibly useful (not to mention complicated ) and today I have spent a lot of time revising the ms. As Ren mentioned, I have created it as a separate file for someone else to compare.

What I've done today is to keep one person as the "I" narrator, which is easy to do and easy to identify because all those chapters take place on the waterways and this person is the only narrator for all those scenes.

All the other "I"'s have now been changed to third person limited, (as Em suggested) and two narrators have been dispensed with, the information that they were responsible for imparting now having been given to others (as Naomi suggested).

So now it feels a lot tidier, and it wasn't as hard as I imagined to write in the third person about deeper issues and feelings. It also made it easier for me to invest more character into the principle "I" narrator, mostly through the use of dialogue, though I don't know why that should be.

Thank goodness for Microsoft Word!

One thing I did do was to change a character's name. I realised that two of the three main characters had a three letter name beginning with S - Sue and Sal. So I changed Sue's name to Rachel, and used Find and Replace to effect the change. I then had to spend a good while trawling through 70,000 words searching for words like "issue" and "tissue" and "pursue" which had suddenly morphed into tisrachel, israchel, and purrachel. No doubt there are others I haven't found yet. I'll remember to put spaces either side of the replace word next time.

Thank you everybody!

I realised that two of the three main characters had a three letter name beginning with S

That is so easy to do, without realising it. I had one story where they all began with H.