How many POVs do you really need?

I noticed a lot of writer on here are working on books with multiple POVs. I'm just wondering why and what you think that brings to your story that a single POV wouldn't be able to? It just seems like the more POVs there are, the more likely things like clarity, flow, voice... could get lost. It's really about the story. The POV is just how you tell it. My novel has one POV. That's it. Is there anything apparently wrong with sticking to a single point of view? Why do you all seem to want so many. I kind of think of it like when one person is telling a story it's pretty easy to follow, but when you have five people trying to tell the story, it can really muddy the waters. Just some thought. I realize I seem to be the odd one out among this crowd. Or maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that way lately. And it does have me questioning myself.

 

There's nothing wrong with sticking to a single point of view. For some stories, that's really the best (if not only) option.

I'll begrudgingly admit that a small part of why I do it myself is that I've seen others do it. I doubt I would have invented the device if it didn't exist, and may not have adopted it if it weren't so common. I enjoy stories with multiple perspectives, particularly when those perspectives are in direct opposition.

As a writer, I like having multiple characters, or rather character voices, to work with. It lets me look at the same thing from different points of view, enabling nuance. My non-short stories usually take place over great geographic distances, and I find it useful to have multiple sets of eyes so I can depict simultaneous events that no one character can possibly cover (discounting magic and such). Also, I tend to get bored with telling just a single story (unless it's relatively short) so I kind of need to mix and match several to keep my interest up. In theory, at least. I guess I just haven't found the right "one-man story" yet. And yeah, you can of course tell other stories without giving them distinct viewpoints. I just prefer my way.

So, nothing wrong whatsoever with a single POV. I've read many good/great books written that way. For me, though, that's a short story thing. Currently.

 

Well, one person can only be in one place at any given time. One person can only get so much done in X amount of time. Things are going to be filtered through their way of seeing the world and their way alone.

Multiple POVs let you widen the geographic scale; we can see events that we'd only be told about with one POV. Whatever needs to be done to reach a certain goal can be divided up and accomplished simultaneously rather than sequentially, allowing shorter passage of time in-story. With multiple POVs, you can explore themes and ideas that might not work if you were working with just one character.

My current project, a blending of heroic fantasy and superhero fiction, has two POVs: Zeno Citrelli and Isa Mori.

Spoiler

Zeno's family leads an alliance of the city's crime families. He's a veteran, well educated, but had a sheltered upbringing. Military service cracked his rosy worldview, sapping his faith, and seeing just how terribly his family hurts others pushes him to use newfound powers to take down the 'Committee'.

By contrast, Mori is an ex-slave blacksmith. Uneducated outside her trade, extremely pious, intimately familiar with the rough side of life. She only takes action when the Committee tries pushing her out of swordsmithing, the thing she loves most.

Their differences let me look at the setting and the plot from different angles. Taking out Mori robs you of the "little guy's" perspective. Take out Zeno and you lose insight into the Committee and the setting's politics.

They lend themselves to different arcs. Zeno grapples with just how much responsibility he bears for his family's deeds. Guilt leads him to fixate on the Committee as a threat to end all threats, and he almost ignores the danger posed by a new group until it's too late. Mori struggles with loneliness, and fills that void with people she ought to be more wary of. Events force her to reexamine her belief that everyone deserves a second chance.

Multiple POVs let me explore their partnership and how they view each other more intimately than one ever could.

With two characters, they could hit different targets at the same time and work toward different immediate objectives that feed into their wider goal. That loops into the geography and passage of time points I mentioned earlier.

Clarity, flow, and voice haven't been problems so far. Voice has been especially easy to differentiate, since they're so different.

There's nothing wrong with sticking to one POV if it works for the story. One has been fine for everything else I've written. I just think this particular project would be significantly inferior if I limited myself to one viewpoint.

 

To add to Equestris:

You get to show the thoughts and machinations of other characters, antagonists in particular. This particular exposition might be essential; this can apply to other sorts of characters too.

It takes more words to get the same depth of story, if you only have one POV to be the conduit for everything.

Mono-POV develops strong personal character relationships between the POV and non-POV at the expense of non-POV/non-POV relationships. Because to do that,your MC has to actually be present, and so you lose any sort of intimacy. And nor is it good for the MC to be an observer.

Just pros and cons to both, pick whichever is most appropriate. I do sort of have some personal experience because I previously had two POVs, decided to knock it down to one; the story is all the better for it,but those points I mentioned above are sort of my own personal observations from my own writing.

 

I think the biggest setback to having multiple POVs is head hopping. And, honestly, I'm not sure how and if I would be able to avoid that with multiple POVs. Writing a story is hard enough, and if I start giving every character a say in what's going on, I fear I won't really know what's going on anymore. I guess I sort of feel like if this is something I can't really do or will struggle with, I should probably avoid it. A single POV and can write almost without thinking. If I start to bring in other POVs or write in omni, than I have to slow everything down and think a lot more. And I do want to stick to what I'm good at because the whole idea is to sell my writing. It does make me question myself when so many of you talk about multiple POVs and I can't even imagine pulling off something like that.

 

LAFS has two POVs because it has two main characters, each with their own independent arcs. I tried to give them equal amounts of 'screentime' (words spent in their POV) so that things would be balanced -- I don't want either of them to seem like the 'real' main character. That turned out to be something I needed to work on more in editing, but that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.

And there's no headhopping. Their perspectives are separated by chapter breaks. It's really quite easy to avoid slipping into one character while writing for the other, because they have completely different voices and, well, perspectives.

 

Head hopping is fairly easy to avoid; only switch off POVs at chapter or scene breaks. If you can establish a pattern, even better.

 

It just seems like there would be a lot going on to do all that. I know it's been done, and I've read examples where it's worked. But I've also seen it not work. It just seems like such a sad and unnecessary way to kill a story. It would be for me at least.

 

It really depends on the story and what it needs. I personally love hopping from one character's PoV to another, especially if I get to write from the PoV of an antagonist. Whenever I've done that, it's been third person. I only now am writing a first person PoV story that sticks to one single character and we only get to see and learn about things from what she sees and hears, so that for me is a challenge in its own right.

 

Well, yeah. If there weren't a lot going on, more than one POV character could handle, I wouldn't have chosen to use multiple POVs.

Like everything in fiction writing, it comes down to execution.

 

One of the things I might do to my first draft is eliminate my second POV. I switched between a 46 year old director and his fourteen year old star. A back and forth through out the novel. Unfortunately I think it's one of the reasons my first draft is so bloated.
The trouble is the two characters aren't always together in a scene and even if they are scenes are constantly echoing each other to show the others reactions -- it would be if Nabokov decided to write Lolita from the viewpoint of both Humbert and Lo -- there would be Humbert rhapsodizing one moment and Lo's mental eyerolling the next.
I don't have a problem with multiple character viewpoints, I managed it with one novel and it's one of my favorites. It can actually build tension because you're constantly cutting away and drawing it out but it can be hard to do. I feel like someone always gets neglected.
The reason I picked a multiple pov for my current WIP is I was nervous about holding one pov and not doing it justice.

 

Head-hopping is overrated. I've read many best-selling books that head-hop all the time.

It's only really a problem when you do it without knowing why you're doing it or how to do it right.

However, I have about a dozen PoV characters in my current novel, and I can safely say that's probably a really, really bad idea. I was glad when I reached the point in the story where most of them were dead.

Having too many PoV characters is probably my most common flaw. The last book I wrote with a single PoV character took about fifteen years less to complete than this one.

 

I usually do only third person reasonable close. Only one POV.
To experiment I have done two POV. As long as they are separate there is no problem but if they are in the same scene it gets tricky. Those scenes got very flat as I felt I had to do third very distant. The only way I could actually get the different POV' s was with flashbacks.

If two POV's are going to tell the same scene I think you have to be very clever how you do it so that the reader does not see it at a repetition. The reader will feel: been there, done that. Get on with the story!


Of course if your world is big and covers developments at many places simultaneous you can have many POV's

 

Not to me. To me it's a more natural, organic, cleaner way to pass the narrative baton to a character that would naturally, organically be in the place and situation I want to describe. I feel like there's a whooooole lot more manipulation and artificial machination when you stick with one character (be it 1st or 3rd) and are forced to find ways that grow more and more improbable to inform said character of actions/people/happenstance.

Everything has a Didn't Work™ version. Everything. Revolving 3rd close doesn't have this concept any more or any less than any other mode of narrative structure.

This is a really strong assumption to jump to. I agree that maybe for you this may be the case. I can say the same about me and 1st person present tense. I won't read it, so I certainly don't have the experience with the structure one would need to do it any justice as a writer, to execute the Did Work™ version of it. But my personal engagement is, by definition, subjective, not objective.

 

I had to do that with my first novel. My editor didn't feel that the dual POV was even enough (it was probably 75% one MC and 25% the other), so I decided I'd rather gut the lesser POV than put the energy into building it to be more equitable. I only had 30 days to do it, too - it was kind of a nightmare at the time, but I think the book is much better for it.

Nora Roberts head hops like a boss. I never noticed it until I was advised against doing it myself, but it makes me a little nuts when I read her books. I'm sure she's crying into her piles of money about it.

 

I specifically wrote Gravity to be more even in the POV, to the point where I don't know how I'd cut it down to a single POV without re-writing half of the book. Connor and Jaeden's relationship starts out so contentious that I felt I really needed to show both sides, or the readers were going to wind up hating the non-POV main character.

 

I try to keep it to the MC, but there are at least two scenes where I do change perspective only so the scene goes better, but the MC is still in the scene.

 

I'm currently playing with how to do the POV in my WIP but I am sure that I want at least three POVs and there could be as many as six. This is because I want give multiple of my characters some real personal insight and time to explore their own issues. If I had only one POV that would severely handicap my ability to have all of my characters undergo their own independent character arcs. I have multiple POVs because my story is about multiple characters.
I have a principal main character (Sarah) who will provide the answer as to what to do with multiple main character scenes by using her perspective except when there is something in particular I really want to show with another character or she's only there briefly.

 

I don't think there can be hard-and-fast rules about this. It all depends on the author, the type of story and the size of the story's universe. A large universe sci-fi with multiple locations on a massive canvass cannot easily be traversed by a single POV. A small universe love story can get clunky with multiple POVs, especially if you're trying to get the reader to relate to your protagonist. It comes down to your preferred style and what it is you're trying to achieve with your story.

 

You need as many as are needed to tell the story you want to tell.

 

Well, I mean, yeah.

 

I think you only ever need one POV. I actually prefer it. Part of the problem with multiple points of view is that the transitions can get confusing. I like how George Martin took care of it in Game of Thrones; he began each chapter with the name of the POV character at the top. Simple and effective. No head-hopping in mid-scene.

 

I do it the way GRRM did it for this exact same reason. Each chapter we're inside a person's head, and the chapter heading tells us whom. So, once the risk of confusion is nullified, you're free to enjoy the benefits of multiple POV if you feel your story benefits from it.