How many POVs is too many?

[Sparkie]

Recently one of my workmates (a self-professed literary critic) made a comment regarding a story I showed him. The work in question was short, about 16,000 words, but made use of several POVs. While he stated that he found the characters interesting, he thought I used too many perspectives to tell the story. He may have a point - I was experimenting a little with that one - and it got me to thinking about how many POVs one should use when writing a 'fantasy epic.'

I am aware that a writer should have good reasons for using a particular characters POV. However, it seems to me that if you are trying to write something that is epic in scope, then using quite a few POVs can help to achieve a sense of scale and elaboration. Please don't get me wrong; I do NOT think that the writing style of Thomas Pynchon should be used as a template for writing fantasy novels. But I can't help but feel that a big story deserves more sets of eyes and ears, especially within the fantasy genre.

Am I just way off on this? Is there a limit to the amount of POVs that can be effectively used? How much perspective is too much?

 

[Cinder]

I'm 18 years old and not published, so I can't give you my perspective as a writer.

But I can give you my perspective as a reader.

Personally, I find books with multiple POVS quite ardous. I bought Nights of Vijilamur by Mark Charon Newton, and one of the reasons I had to put it down was the amount of different perspectives he used. There must have been over 5. Whilst the characters and their representation was interesting and well-written, I was left altogether quite confused. I much prefer to enter the mind of one or two characters and see them developed, rather than 5 and see them developed very little. If you understand me?

I'm a fan of fantasy epics, and I've never thought that using few POVs subtracts that sense of grandeur. For me, the "epic-ness" comes from the situation, the plot and the world itself. Not how many perspectives this world is viewed through.

But hey, this is only my opinion and it's by no means a professional one.

 

[Seth son of Tom]

I suppose there are two sides of the coin here. On the one hand, you have arguably the most popular epic fantasy series ever, the one and only Harry Potter. For virtually all of it, written with one POV; and absolutely masterfully done. On the other hand, you have things like A Song of Ice and Fire; also very popular (though certainly not on the same scale as HP). They were all written with about 8-10 POVS. I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that the one can be successful using few or a lot. Though, I would have to say that several POVS for a short story might be a little distracting; might be, not necessarily. I would say that the main things are to do what you want to do, but also make sure that you give each focal character enough stage time so that the reader can truly identify and feel with them. However, this is all just my opinion. Good luck with what ever you do!

 

[Kelise]

Some say it should only be 4-5 or so, but look at Robin Hobb. She has a large amount, just like in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Basically I think it comes down to talent. Some of the most popular authors can do it and do it well. Robin Hobb's first series only has the one POV after all, I think.

So I guess it's probably best left out of earlier works and only tackled once you have the experience to do it well, as it seems it's quite hard to do.

 

[Devor]

One is too many. Always write in Third Person Omniscient.

Kidding. You have to balance POV changes with character building. People have mentioned two of the three big sample stories already, so I'll remind you that Lord of the Rings waited until the Two Towers before really playing with POV changes. By that point you cared about each member of the Fellowship, and there was a clear severing of the group which initiated the change.

I think it's important to remember, the key question isn't about maintaining the epicness of the tale. The key question, I think, is about maintaining the integrity of the story and building on the momentum you generate. It's harder to do with many POV changes, so only make those character jumps when absolutely necessary.

I recently read Treasure Island, a relatively short Pirate novel I won't spoil and would recommend for everyone writing in fantasy. According to the Forward, Stevenson is said to have written the first half of the story, and then put it down for years because he fell into a rut with it. When he picked it up, he swapped POV for just a few chapters, and it invigorated him as a writer as well as the novel as a story. He had the opportunity to write in a new head and a new style for a moment, and it felt fresh. It also felt necessary.

So don't do POV changes just because you want to show off more of the epic battles. It can be just as meaningful and shocking just to see the effects of troops coming home, for instance. Change it because the characters, the emotional story, demands it. And for no other reason.

 

[Sparkie]

Basically I think it comes down to talent. Some of the most popular authors can do it and do it well. Robin Hobb's first series only has the one POV after all, I think.

So I guess it's probably best left out of earlier works and only tackled once you have the experience to do it well, as it seems it's quite hard to do.

Makes sense to me, I suppose. A good feeling for how different characters stories intersect and correlate with one another comes with time and practice.

 

[Reaver]

POV is all about perspective

I think that you should have as many POV's as necessary as long as you keep it flowing well. The important thing is that your story gets told. Have you thought about writing different stories from each of your primary characters' points of view? I have this epic story roiling in my head that has at least four main characters and this is an option that I'm seriously considering.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I would posit that a general rule of multiple POVs is that the more POVs you have, the harder it is to write the story well, because you have to develop multiple characters in the same space that you'd normally get to develop a single character. I took the leap of having four main POV characters in my WIP (although the epilogue, chapter 9, and prologue are each from the POV of a different character, not one of the main four). I think it's working okay; each main character gets 7-10 chapters from their POV, which is plenty of time to develop them.

But I wouldn't try to add characters just because it makes it more epic. Everything has to serve the story; if you have a POV chapter from a character just because you wanted another character's POV, that might not be a good reason to do it.

 

[Sparkie]

Everything has to serve the story.

Well stated.

Still, i'm not thinking that you need to have many POVs to have an epic story. I do believe, however that they can (and sometimes do) enhance the story being told.

 

[mirrorrorrim]

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with using many different points of view. In practice, though, I think it's extremely hard to do well. For almost every story I've read with multiple points of views, there inevitable comes a point in the book where a particular point of view simply stops interesting me. It becomes too slow, too redundant, or too unimportant. At that point, I stop caring about that character and his particular problems, and simply try to speed through these sections until I can get back to the viewpoints that are actually interesting. The easiest example that comes to mind are the Perrin sections of some of the Wheel of Time books. Rand was obviously the important character, so why was I reading about this other fellow, and one with an extremely annoying love interest that he's trying to rescue?

As an author, I don't think it's anyone's goal for the reader to become bored with her writing.

I'm curious, what's your reason for wanting so many points of view? If it's simply because there are things happening that you want to write, but that your one or two main characters can't physically be present for, then I would softly suggest that there are many narrative tricks that can remedy this, without resorting to other points of view. Another character can relate what happened. The main character can arrive after the event and try to piece it back together. These two can work in any type of fiction. Fantasy has even more techniques--visions, shared memoires, dreams, wandering psyches, scrying, flying, and probably dozens of other conventions. Plus, there are the hundreds of ideas that haven't been thought up yet.

On a different but related note, one of the hardest things about writing is making your reader care about the characters and world they're reading about. It's quite difficult to do a good job writing one perspective—capturing all of the thoughts, emotions, dreams, quirks, and flaws of a person can be quite daunting. You not only do this for the character you're writing, but for every character she comes into contact with, and you have to capture how her behavior changes when she's around each of these supporting characters. Orson Scott Card once said that you don't write one main character, but dozens—one for every person they're talking to. This can be done well with many characters—many of the great Russian authors, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, have pulled it off—but it isn't easy. And, no matter how well you can do it, it still usually takes quite a bit of time.

In addition to keeping the reader in your main character's head, which will help build attachment to and investment in the story they're reading (something that I feel is very important), using fewer perspectives makes your story feel a little more real. After all, in real life, we can't simply jump into the head of someone as soon as something interesting starts happening to them. Sometimes, not knowing what happened can be an important part of a story, and can be even more exciting (or epic, if you will) than actually being there to see it firsthand. Of course, you can always keep your characters in the dark in regard to something the reader knows, but I've always felt personally that this is a weak tool for building true suspense, and often simply leads the readers to frustration, since they know something, but have no way of telling it to the in-book characters. Instead, they have to watch as the fumble past (to the reader) obvious clues without piecing things together.

I could go on, but I think I've gotten across why I personally feel it's easier to use fewer perspectives. Of course, all of this is just my personal opinion and preference.

Thanks for listening!

 

[Seth son of Tom]

One thing that is worth mentioning, in my opinion, is that the better you know your characters and the better they are developed, the easier it will be to write from multiple POVS. I think that you should be able to know your characters well enough that you could write reasonably well from their point of view (maybe not well enough to be published always, but reasonably well). Every character should feel that they are the main character and that their individual story is being told. That said, I think that just because you can tell the story well from their point of view does not always mean that you should. I would say that one of the most important things in writing is to strike powerful emotions in your readers. If your character is miserable, your reader should be on the brink of tears. If your character is at peace, your reader should feel serene. And if they are going to feel with them, they need to have enough time reading about them and especially from their point of view. The more POVS you write from the less they may identify with and feel with each, which can be fatal. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that you should be able to write from every large character's point of view, but the more you jump around the harder it can be to impact your readers' emotions, which is of prime importance.

 

[Sparkie]

Great post Mirrorrorrim.

In response to your question, I don't neccesarily want to use a ton of POVs all the time. For me, it may be more about my reading preference, i suppose. Most of my favorite books use three POVs or more. I don't suppose it's a coincidence that writers with the skill to juggle many POVs are the same writers whose prose is a cut above the rest. My little story with six POVs is an attempt to improve my own ability as a writer. While I'm not sure how well my experiment worked, I have had success at least in one way.

This disussion has been a great experience for me. Thanks to all who've posted so far!

 

[Erica]

Hmmm. Six PoVs seems like a lot for a 16,000 word novella, but it may work fine for a 150,000 word novel. With short stories, most often the advice is to keep it to one PoV, but multiple main characters is fine for a novel. Not sure where a novella falls in that. Maybe a couple of PoV characters? Of course, there are always exceptions, and there are some who excel at breaking the rules. The goal is to keep the reader from feeling like he's being jerked around abruptly. When you switch povs, it shouldn't generally be done within a scene, for instance. And the reader should feel satisfied with the scene's resolution and yet be eager to visit that character's perspective again.

If your story has a lot of subplots going on, you may need several povs to get them all across. You may find that some of your characters will get more 'screen time' than others. That's okay too in my opinion. But if you switch PoV too much, or if your story is very perspective or character driven, some readers may find it disjointed.

I could never get into those old Niven and Pournelle Novels that had something like 10 PoV characters and where you switched sub-stories (and characters) every chapter. I had to constantly flip to the back to remember who was who (I'll admit I'm bad with names, but still) and there were some characters/stories I wanted to skip entirely.

 

[Philip Overby]

I personally like multiple POVs. As a writer and reader. I like to jump around to different parts of a larger story. In fantasy anyway. Some other stories I prefer one POV. It really depends on the writer, like some others have said.

I say use as many POVs as you need to. If that's one, then cool. If it's 28, then that's cool too. But if you do 28 POVs you better be really, really good.

 

[Elder the Dwarf]

In many stories I've read, the author will pop into a point of view of a minor character for a chapter, usually just to give another perspective/see the bad guy/whatever. It is pretty common for that character to die or become much less relevant at the end of one POV scene or so. From what you guys have said so far, I gather that is not something you are either used to or approve of. Or are you guys just talking about POV's that are used throughout the story?

 

[Reaver]

I totally agree with what Phil the Drill said: "...if you do 28 POV's, you better be really, really good." I've yet to see any mainstream fiction author do this so well that everything flowed smoothly. For example, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series...chiefly everything after "Wizard's First Rule". Just my opinion, but the entire saga got more and more convoluted and hard to follow with each book because there were an increasing amount of POV's.

 

[August Griffin]

I try to view this in proportions, based on how important the character is to the story, sixty, thirty, ten. Fifty percent of a book in the main point of view doesn't seem enough to impart the experience to the reader. So I say, sixty percent or more should be in the main character point of view.
After that, it is a matter of story telling, but no matter how you slice it, you are trying to keep that forty percent proportional.
The second most important character is the impact character. The maximum space that person could have is forty percent. The next likely candidate (for the sake of convenience) is the antagonist, or someone in the enemy camp, the maximum for them is still forty percent.
If you go to three swaps, think sixty, thirty, ten. The maximum proportion you could slice that forty into would be twenty-one, nineteen. Because one of those two should be more important than the other. Try to stay at three or less for the sake of balance.
So if you follow this rule into main plus four (5) swaps you've got a maximum potential for 12, 11, 9, & 8%. I say five is absolute maximum. Once you look at the numbers you see are you cutting the cake thin at this point. If your book had ten chapters, main has six, and everybody else has one. Because you want to start and end a chapter in the same head.
If you had twenty chapters, everybody else still only gets two chapters. Not worth it to me.
Assuming first and last chapter are in main, five swaps in ten chapters looks something like this: main-impact-main-antagonist-main-third important-main random-main-main. At least when we are painting with the big brush.
Compared to (60-30-10): main-impact- main-impact-main-impact main- antagonist-main-main.
So for me, three is the maximum, you could go up to five, but five is shaping the story too much. But you write first with the door closed. During that discovery phase, do anything that is helpful. After all, each character is the main character in their own head, and enters a scene with their own agenda, as mentioned.