On Transitions Within Novels with Multiple Viewpoints
Between Hijack and Cake
Breaking News: I finished — really finished, after taking on Leigh’s notes — novel-Q.
My next book.
(My fiction usually arrives in alphabetical order, Adventures in Capitalism to Patience, with blips and gaps.)
I am excited about novel-Q, think it’s among the best things I’ve done, and am going to start sending it to important people soon.
Thought I’d let you know.
Fingers crossed.
Does novel-Q have multiple viewpoints?
Yes. Oh yes.
Which brings me back to —
That’s what I wrote a couple of days ago.
And it’s clear that the more abrupt the transition, the more likely it is that the reader gets confused or dismayed or loses patience.
If they have grown comfortable with the voice speaking to them, they may be reluctant to leave it behind. There’s a chance they’ll skim ahead, to see whether that speaker recurs, and if it doesn’t they may decide not to keep going.
But they were my favourite character…
There’s a phenomenon that occurs within some novels, and I think it’s one of the reasons some readers prefer them to short stories. That is, nostalgia in the later pages for the world or voice of the novel’s beginning.
If things are going badly for the main character, or if they are just getting older, there’s a likelihood that the earlier part of their life will start to look ideal.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh is one of the novels that makes me feel this most powerfully.
However, I don’t think that nostalgia for an earlier narrator or plotline-not-followed up works in a novel’s favour.
One of the hardest things to do in any narrative is go from one time or place to another that is radically different, and have the reader absolutely welcome that shift.
This is where I need to be.
And so every transition needs to be carefully managed. Beginning writers can fall into thinking this is easy, because good writers — with the help of good first readers and good editors — do it well.
Just like real people, fictional people (especially narrators) have different amounts of charisma.
If you begin a novel and find that one of your characters is very charismatic, you should immediately give up on it being a multiple narrator novel.
One voice cannot be so attractive that readers skip ahead to get cosy again with that purr or growl, to rejoin the life of that charismatic person.
Similarly, if you have four narrators and — however much you try to enliven them — one of them remains a little bit boring, they shouldn’t be kept.
The bump of the transition back to a narrator who makes the reader feel less energized, less engaged — that may kill the book.
If your narrators are involved in very different types of action, very different story-times, they may be impossible to reconcile within a single novel.
Say for Narrator 2, they are in a hijack situation where terrorists have taken over the plane on which they are a passenger, but immediately we transition to Narrator 3, who is baking a cake for their evening’s date and it has failed to rise.
It’s not that the baking a cake section is in itself bad (the cake was being baked to impress a new girlfriend, and the failure might put her off) — in both cases something has gone wrong and more wrong.
No, it’s not bad, but if the baking scene immediately follows the hijack section it will appear low-stakes, trivial, comic or pointless.
The kinds of story-time involved in these narrative lines are not just different, they are contradictory. Every novel sets out a level at which it says: This kind of event is important.
Novels involving hijacks may include baking scenes, early on, but by the time they get to the intensity of life or death, then issues of rise perfectly or sink-a-bit-in-the-middle just don’t cut it any more.
In a third person or first person novel that progresses smoothly forwards through time, you never have to worry about managing these kinds of generic transition.
The first person narrator is where they are in their life (present or past), and may go from being on a hijacked plane to baking a cake for someone they really like, but there would be an essential difference — the cake would now be one baked by a person has survived a hijack. It has a different meaning. (I can see it being an emotional scene, when the cake fails.) The meaning of scene after scene here is cumulative and is created by them each being part of the narrator’s ongoing emotional existence.
You might think my examples of cakes and hijacks are silly.
But the point holds for managing the transition between scenes in which one character is at a high point of their life, and another is just rolling along.
The balancing of different plotlines is the kind of skill that writers learn over time.
If you haven’t already, you will have to put in that time, even if it’s during the writing and rewriting of a first novel. And then another first novel. And then another.
In one of the next entries, I’m going to tell you about some of my early mistakes and failures. Because this sequence on multiple viewpoints seems to have turned into a bit of a Festival of No.
Would really like to read your thoughts about multiple view points (say two or three), but they aren’t dispersed in equal amount of pages? Meaning, there is a main arc. And then another section is much smaller —do you think there needs to be equal amount of chapters?
Have you by any chance read 'Trust' by Hernan Diaz? Interesting in several respects, including the issue of POV as well as the author's ignoring the creative writing 'rule' that writers must show not tell.