A suitable number of POVs

[AJ Stevens]

As I plot my way through my work, it occurs to me that my POV is a little, well, all over the place. What does that mean? Well, it means I perhaps lack consistency in terms of my narrators, and I'm not sure how big a problem this is.

Having thought about it, I suppose there are a few things I can do, but I was wondering if there are specific techniques that any of you use. Perhaps primary, secondary and tertiary narrators, who have respective levels of 'screen time' or something like that.

Broadly speaking, I have between two and four 'scenes' per chapter, a scene being defined as a change in POV or a significant break in time/change of location. With a couple of exceptions, the POV changes from scene to scene. Furthermore, at the start of the book, I introduce a number of different plot lines, or threads, which I plan to see converge over the course of the book. The effect of that is I have six or seven different POVs before switching back to the first one, and thus far, I have twelve or thirteen overall. I'm a bit worried about a lack of continuity.

Some of those will get cut or combined or switched on second and third pass, for sure, but in a work of, say, 100,000 words, how many POVs is an appropriate number as a rule of thumb? I went through a few novels I've read and found it's usually between eight and twelve, but it seems structured. So, three primary POVs, four secondary and then other little bits here and there.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

For 100k I think it's an issue... or at least it likely it is, impossible to tell from the sidelines. Plus, if it isn't finished already, that many POV's might have a tendency to balloon your word count. I'm trimming 2 POV's to hopefully stay in the 110k range, otherwise I'd easily shoot to around 130k.

For me as a reader, that's a lot of POV shift, particularly in the middle of chapters. 3rd OM almost sounds like it could've been an option. But it's a judgment call on your end, you know what's going on, I don't, LOL.

 

[Penpilot]

To toot my own horn here, I suggest you read my article on the metrics of writing. The Metrics of Writing

Part of it talks about how Number of POVs affects the number of words you have to work with in a 100k novel. If you have 8 POVs in a 100k novel, it's not going to give each char a lot of screen time to work with.

With that said there is no standard number of POVs for a novel. It's the number you need to tell your story. I wrote a 110k novel with 2 POVs and another with 3. There are books with 1.

 

[Devor]

I loosely think the right number of POVs in a story is one. What I mean is, I think that each POV in a novel should have their own story arc, and if a character doesn't have that story happening with their POVs, I would question why they need to have their POV told at all.

There's a tradeoff with adding each new POV - strain on the readers, a change of narrative voice, the risk that one may not be as interesting as the other (which might change based on each reader), the time it takes to establish the new character as the MC in the reader's mind, and so on.

So for each POV, you have to ask, "What makes this worth the tradeoff?" The answer is usually that they have a good story to tell. If it's just, "I need a way to show readers this awesome fight scene" - probably, it might be better to skip it.

 

[AJ Stevens]

For 100k I think it's an issue... or at least it likely it is, impossible to tell from the sidelines. Plus, if it isn't finished already, that many POV's might have a tendency to balloon your word count. I'm trimming 2 POV's to hopefully stay in the 110k range, otherwise I'd easily shoot to around 130k.

For me as a reader, that's a lot of POV shift, particularly in the middle of chapters. 3rd OM almost sounds like it could've been an option. But it's a judgment call on your end, you know what's going on, I don't, LOL.

Agreed. I fully expect to end up writing 150k plus words and then trim what I don't want or need. So if I'm cutting down a third of my word count, I'd look to cut down my number of POVs by a third as well. Which might leave me with six or seven - a number I'm fairly comfortable with, but I've never done this before, so I don't know if that's something a 'generic' reader would enjoy.

I appreciate it's difficult without context. It was something which leapt off the page a bit at me as I was writing, so I was looking for a second opinion on whether it was a 'Whoa! Stop what you're doing and have a serious think about whether this is where you should be going' moment. I should point out that my chapters are fairly long, I think. Maybe 5-6k words each, so I feel there's room for some POV shift. Every reader is different, but for me, reading fifty pages of a single POV can be a bit of a slog.

I have four rough groups, and I'd like to get the views of all (or most) of them on the page in some fashion, as I feel it helps to blur the lines between good and bad. So I'm semi-committed to at least four POVs. The issue then, I guess, is what parts of the story I need to show explicitly, and which parts can be implied, and therefore removed from view, so to speak. Getting the narrator in the 'right' place to tell the story can be tricky!

 

[AJ Stevens]

I loosely think the right number of POVs in a story is one. What I mean is, I think that each POV in a novel should have their own story arc, and if a character doesn't have that story happening with their POVs, I would question why they need to have their POV told at all.

There's a tradeoff with adding each new POV - strain on the readers, a change of narrative voice, the risk that one may not be as interesting as the other (which might change based on each reader), the time it takes to establish the new character as the MC in the reader's mind, and so on.

So for each POV, you have to ask, "What makes this worth the tradeoff?" The answer is usually that they have a good story to tell. If it's just, "I need a way to show readers this awesome fight scene" - probably, it might be better to skip it.

Interesting. I've gone down a slightly different path, which might be rather ambitious, I admit.

My MC, if indeed I have one, doesn't have a POV. The story is his, viewed from the outside. He's the pivot, but it's more a case of how his actions weave together the stories of those around him. Which is probably why I'm in my current position.

Does that make any sense at all?!

 

[Demesnedenoir]

To me, for a first novel... neither of us is GRRM or an established writer... 4 seems very doable, pretty much what I am at now (4+1 bad guy +1 towards end, just a couple, and she'll take over a POV spot in book 2) although it gets awkward as they all come to one point together in the story, before splitting again. Four is pretty much bare bones for me, without those, the story wouldn't function correctly, which is probably the real answer of whether they should be there.

Agreed. I fully expect to end up writing 150k plus words and then trim what I don't want or need. So if I'm cutting down a third of my word count, I'd look to cut down my number of POVs by a third as well. Which might leave me with six or seven - a number I'm fairly comfortable with, but I've never done this before, so I don't know if that's something a 'generic' reader would enjoy.

I appreciate it's difficult without context. It was something which leapt off the page a bit at me as I was writing, so I was looking for a second opinion on whether it was a 'Whoa! Stop what you're doing and have a serious think about whether this is where you should be going' moment. I should point out that my chapters are fairly long, I think. Maybe 5-6k words each, so I feel there's room for some POV shift. Every reader is different, but for me, reading fifty pages of a single POV can be a bit of a slog.

I have four rough groups, and I'd like to get the views of all (or most) of them on the page in some fashion, as I feel it helps to blur the lines between good and bad. So I'm semi-committed to at least four POVs. The issue then, I guess, is what parts of the story I need to show explicitly, and which parts can be implied, and therefore removed from view, so to speak. Getting the narrator in the 'right' place to tell the story can be tricky!

 

[Devor]

Interesting. I've gone down a slightly different path, which might be rather ambitious, I admit.

My MC, if indeed I have one, doesn't have a POV. The story is his, viewed from the outside. He's the pivot, but it's more a case of how his actions weave together the stories of those around him. Which is probably why I'm in my current position.

Does that make any sense at all?!

So, sometimes the MC is Watson, instead of Sherlock, because it's just laborious to your readers to get inside Sherlock's head. But Watson still has his arcs. Ishmael still develops and follows his story even though he's not Captain Ahab.

It all depends. But if you're not developing these POV's fully on their own, and using them like a dozen Watsons to tell Sherlock's story, I would say you're taking on a challenge that needs a huge level of skill to pull off.

I mean, maybe you can pull it off, but to me, it's a big red flag.

 

[AJ Stevens]

Thanks everyone. I want to be ambitious and push myself, but clearly there's a balance to be struck. I probably anticipated this was the direction the discussion would go, but it's useful to have that backed up by people with a better grasp of this than me.

I guess the 'Watsons,' as Devor puts it, have their own arcs and I absolutely intend to develop them. The question is whether they're interesting, or not. Or indeed, whether they are distinct enough from one another, which is something I'm grappling with right now. And of course, whether I can pull it off. Time will tell, but it needs to be plausible to begin with.

Thanks again folks.

 

[Miskatonic]

To me, for a first novel... neither of us is GRRM or an established writer... 4 seems very doable, pretty much what I am at now (4+1 bad guy +1 towards end, just a couple, and she'll take over a POV spot in book 2) although it gets awkward as they all come to one point together in the story, before splitting again. Four is pretty much bare bones for me, without those, the story wouldn't function correctly, which is probably the real answer of whether they should be there.

And GRRM painted himself into a corner with too many POV's.

 

[Miskatonic]

For POV I just identify who the main characters truly are and go with that. Right now I have four but it may bump up to six. Four protagonists and two antagonists. Though I'm thinking I may be able to cut out one of the protagonists and narrow it down to five without it doing any real harm to the narrative.

How spread out the story is geographically can also play a big part in choosing the number of POV characters. Like in ASOIAF for instance, you have three main areas where the plot is taking place; Westeros south of the wall, Westeros north of the wall and Essos. So if you want to deal with those three areas during the same time period you'll obviously need a minimum of three POV characters. This is one of the reasons I have the number of POV characters that I do. I don't want to deal with second hand information through a character that is not currently located where certain events are taking place. I think having first hand accounts can be a lot more powerful in conveying importance. To use ASOIAF again as an example, if the only information you got from beyond the wall were raven carried messages to King's Landing there wouldn't be the same sense of urgency. To the people in King's Landing the white walkers are still a myth and nothing more.

You can also use one off POV characters if the story needs it. You see one chapter through their eyes and that's all that is necessary. If they pop up again you can just put them in a MC's POV chapter as a secondary character. Eye witnesses to certain important events that need to convey this information to a MC is a good example of this.

 

[Malik]

POV is meaningless. As long as you, the writer, know who's telling the story, you're solid. Multiple POV's over a long novel takes some chops. But that's fine. Get writing. The chops will come.

20 years ago, when I was in college, I never once had a comp or creative writing professor critique the number of POVs that any story had. "You have too many narrative shifts" is not a phrase I ever heard, not once, and I couldn't write for crap back then. ("Your narrative shifts are clumsy." Now, there's a phrase I heard a few times, especially from my writers' group.)

POV was, and remains, an attribute of a story; a stylistic consideration. We wrote in various POV's and narrative voices as exercises, in order to understand and identify narrative POV.

POV is not, and has never been, a rule.

It's a style. Not a rule.

Tell your story. You. You, right there, reading this.

TELL. YOUR. STORY.

The author's voice is the only one that matters. Sit down, pour us both a drink, and tell me a story. That's how authors have always authored. Maybe you're the story-teller. Maybe it's a character who witnessed everything. Maybe it's everyone in the book, all sitting in the room with us, telling their part. But that's who's writing the book. Once you have that, you're good. There are no rules on how you do it.

I had an editor tell me that I needed to rework all 97,000 words of my novel. Tight, clipped sentences. Page breaks for POV shifts. Dialogue that follows proper convention. I got to work and about ten pages in I HATED IT. My voice was gone; my opening read like every other book out there. Same pacing, same structures, same tone as anything you'd pick up at the drugstore.

I fired that editor. I paid him for his time and sent him packing. And I'll fire any editor who tells me I need to do it again.

Maybe he had a point; maybe that was making it marketable -- maybe that would have sold it -- but I quickly ran out of ****s to give. And if your editor makes you feel that way about your own work, then your editor's head is up his ass.

If you hate your voice, you're doing something wrong.

Tight third-person and straitjacket POV is auto-tune for your writing. Commercial houses require it because people are buying fewer and fewer books, and you, the new author with the groundbreaking 800-page Sasquatch teen romance space opera, are now in direct competition with anyone who ever banged a Kardashian in a nightclub bathroom and got himself a ghostwriter and publicist. You're going head to head with that spiky-haired douchebag, and also GRRM, for the one book per year that people are going to buy. That's why you're being asked for tight POV. People expect it, and people who expect things are stupid.

Who cares if stupid people like you? Seriously. "Stupid people don't like me." Holy ass. May God smite me with that problem.

Don't be liked. Write your stories down. Write them your way. Stylists are a dying breed.

If you're concerned about POV, then limit POV as an exercise, away from your novel, to help you understand what POV is and how it works. Write a story in one POV. Write a story in two. Write one in six. Write stories in different narrative voices, so that you can tell that they're being told by different people.

Then, when you've got a handle on POV and can recognize it, go back and read fantasy or sci-fi from before 2000, when this silly BS started to really rear its head -- hell, it doesn't even have to be SF/F; read Jack London or Louis L'Amour -- and see how they handled POV shifts. (Here's a hint: Jack London handled his the way I handle mine. Because the first things I ever read and loved were Jack London, and I even had a webpage deconstruct pieces of my novel and it came back with -- shock of shocks -- Jack London.)

Read The Princess Bride. Read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Go read the opening pages of Gravity's Rainbow and then tell me that POV shifts require paragraph breaks.

Read this short by Palahniuk, in which he not only changes POV in the middle of paragraphs, he switches from third person to second person and back. A lot. Drop him an email and tell him his POV and narrative voice are all jacked up and he should fix it. And make sure you post his response here, because I want to read it.

"Fantasy authors don't write like Palahniuk. Fantasy authors don't write like Pynchon."

BULLSHIT. They do. We just never read them. And that's our fault, not theirs. I like to believe that the world is brimming with Henry Dargers; it's the only way anything makes sense.

Find writers you like. Read them until they're your internal monologue, until they're thinking your thoughts, and then heat up their voice and bang on it until it's your voice. Then write your story, and see if you like how it sounds. If not, find another writer you like and start over.

Don't ever let anyone tell you your voice is wrong. Barring reckless and criminal murderizin' of the Queen's English and the breaking of basic inviolable rules that any college graduate should have a handle on ("You're thing's were put over their," "for all intensive purposes," and so forth) you're good. Everything else is just practice. The way you want to write may take more practice than the next person. Like I said, multiple POV's over a long novel takes some chops. But that's fine. Get writing.

 

[skip.knox]

I hear what Malik is saying, but the OP specifically asked if we had any techniques for managing multiple POVs. My assumption is he was asking for ways to cut back once he had decided he wanted to cut back.

I'm with Devor. Look to your story arcs, which is to say look to which characters have a story that needs to be told. Having characters who do interesting things, or who exist to show some interesting corner of the world, or who are present for some event you want to narrate, these are not sufficient reasons for a POV.

I am wrestling with one of these in my current work. I really like the character. He plays a key role in an important event. But he has no arc. He's there for the highly dramatic event. I can't quite bring myself to throw him out; I'm leaving him in place now hoping that my beta readers will make the decision for me. In my defense, I've managed to throw out two or three others, so I know I can do it. Their emaciated corpses stalk my idle moments.

 

[Malik]

I hear what Malik is saying, but the OP specifically asked if we had any techniques for managing multiple POVs. My assumption is he was asking for ways to cut back once he had decided he wanted to cut back.

My bad. I just re-read this whole thing; I got derailed by the time I had read through the rest of the thread.

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...

With my works...

It's one POV, one Chapter, for anything long enough (10,000+ words) to require chapters.

'Labyrinth: Journal,' apart from the epilogue and prologue, is almost all a single POV, because, well, it's a journal. (It's also a hair over 60,000 words.)

Its sequel, 'Labyrinth: Seed' is a different beast. Initially, I envisioned 3 POV's for about 80,000 - 90,000 words. While writing the rough during the November NaNo, it became apparent that approach had issues. There were things I couldn't write because none of the three POV characters could be present. So, I gave it some thought, and decided to go with three additional 'minor' POV's for the rewrite. None gets more than three or four short chapters, or more than 3000-4000 words total.

'Empire' is a series of novellas I have been mucking around with for years now. Six projected works total, with a final word count of around 40,000 words each, or 240,000 words total. Four and a half POV characters here. The lead character, Tia, probably gets about half the chapters. Her stalwart defender, Sir Peter, gets maybe a fifth of the total, while her oafish driver/petty magician gets another fifth. Rebecca, Tia's maid, gets maybe one POV chapter per novella, because most of the time she's with Tia - no need. The 'half' is a sequence of dreams/flashbacks Tia has involving the distant past of another character, that describe how that character came to be the way he is. Tia and company do interact with this character in the present, but he has no contemporary POV.