The plot of my novel involves members of a drama group and I would prefer to have chapters written from single povs for separate chapters. How many can I get away with?

I've been wondering about switching to a third-person pov, because I like nineteenth centry novels. Is that a good thing, though?

Sheila

chapters written from single povs for separate chapters.

Cornelia, do you mean several characters, each narrating different chapters in first person?

switching to a third-person pov,

PoV is a different issue from first/second/third person.

Forgive me if you know all this - someone else reading it may not. If the narrative is in third person, you've basically got various options:

third person, but sticking to a single character's PoV all through. This is basically the same as having a character narrate the story as "I did this, I saw him do that", but using "he did this" and "he saw her do that"

third person, sticking to a single character's PoV, until you switch clearly (often but not necessarily at a chapter break) to another character's PoV, which then holds till another switch.

third person, with a stronger senes that what's sometimes called an external narrator - the implied persona who is saying, " X did Y, Z shouted, 'A!' " Of course, logically speak, all third-person narratives have this implied narrator - someone is saying this stuff - but it's a matter of degree, how much that narrator comes through as an actually persona.

This narrator can, of course, know/say things that no one character - or no character at all - within the story, can know/see. So it can move at will from inside one character's mind/PoV, to telling some stuff that no character can know, such as what that character doesn't understand about themselves, or the fact that the enemy isn't yet visible over the horizon, and then into another character's mind/PoV.

This is your standard 19th century novel (despite books like Jane Eyre). With that kind of external narrator - often called 'omniscient' or sometimes 'knowledgeable', switching between different characters PoV becomes very fluid and natural when you know what you're doing. On the other hand, that kind of narrator got a bad name from the generation which was busy saying that Eliot/Dickens etc. were trying to be 'god-like' and say things about the world themselves, as well saying things about the characters. And there is still a strand of that in modern fiction - what James Woods calls the Essayist Narrator.

But even if you've no desire to explain to your reader that none of your characters has understood... whatever, it is hard to do well in purely technical terms, and many new writers do it very badly - commit the 'head-hopping' which is so disastrous. So some simple-minded editors/teachers/fellow-writers will tell you not to do it, when the real answer is to learn to do it properly. Many others will tell you it's "old-fashioned", which is complete bunk. It's true that the simplest answer to point-of-view problems, whith a book that's is to stick to a single one. But who said that writing should be simple?

And it certainly is the most fluid answer to your problem of wanting to write from several points of view. I'd suggest that more than, say, three first-person characters is going to cause your reader problems with knowing who and where they're with, unless you can characterise each first-person voice so fiercely that there's not a single sentence which another narrator could have said. Do the same in third person, and you have the scope (because of that implied external narrator who knows everything) to make sure that the reader always knows where they are. You'll find an awful lot of fiction written this way. And once you get into a full knowledgeable narrator there is in principle no reason you shouldn't write the whole of the grand row in the theatre foyer from the point of the hat-check girl...



Emma

Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves has about 5 pov characters, given alternating chapters. The main main character is told in the 1st person, the rest in 3rd.

I believe Dan Brown uses a dozen pov characters in The Da Vinci code, given alternating chapters, some of which are very short.

Emma, thanks for the detailed answer. I find different systems of pov hard to understand, so it's good to have a longish explanation.

The 'voice' point is a good reminder - I love to write contrasting character 'voices', but it's especially important in this novel.

The main feedback on my first draft was that the pov was all over the place in every chapter - maybe that's the 'head-hopping' you mean, but I'm surprised it gets past editors. So I corrected that.

I now have over half of the chapters from the pov of the main character, but not first person narrative. The other chapters are also third person but seen from the pov of three other secondary characters. There's also a character who appears only as a first-person 'voice' in a four translated interview transcripts that arrive in letters at intervals in the narrative. They count as short 'chapters' in themselves. The transcripts are enclosed with short letters from another character, who comments on them and who eventually returns to England, but his arrival is third person pov of one of the secondary characters.

Naomi, I remember the beginning of TW but not the rest. I will try to look at it. From the Dan Brown example, it is reassuring that multiple povs are all the rage. Crime novels often have alternating killer and pursuer/victim pov chapters, so I expect that's why it seemed natural to me. A major theme of my novel is partiality of pov - similar to Faulkner's or Kurasawa's multiple versions of events.

Meantime, for a reading group, I've just borrowed a copy of A. Trollope's The Warden.It has a distictive omniscient narrator who calls himself 'we', like the Queen, but seems to implicate the reader as one of a group of right-thinking individuals. He'd be roundly condemned nowadays for being all tell and no show in the first chapter.

Sheila

I love the books that tell the story through a single POV per chapter. Clever structure.
The Birthday Boys and My Sisters Keeper spring to mind.
HB x

Good to hear this, Helen, so thanks for the comment. I enjoying writing in different voices but so far have just practised in short stories. As Emma says, the voices need to be distinctive, so I'l be looking at a few examples, including, I hope, the ones you mention.

Sheila