On Writing a Novel with Multiple Viewpoints

Delights and Dangers

Many beginning writers, those who have never completed a 70,000 word draft, start by writing a multiple viewpoint novel.

This may, in the third person omniscient, jump from character to character, or it may, in the first person, jump from narrator to narrator.

It may also mix many different POVs — having a section that is a character’s thoughts in the present tense, then some third person summarizing narration in the past tense, then another character’s diary, then an action sequence again in the present tense.

Possibly, this approach will serve very well, because the writer has a strong sense of the shape and drive of the narrative.

Most likely, however, this will create a big mess that needs to be fixed later, or abandoned.

When I was writing comics, I realised that there were far fewer issues with POV than there are in novels. The overall narrator of a comic (I’m going to call them the invisible organizing narrator, and come back to that another time) — the invisible organizing narrator of the comic is the form itself; the comic is told by the comic.

The thought bubbles that tell us what a character is thinking — the reader doesn’t worry who is giving that to them. This is the case even if that specific character’s inner world hasn’t been visited before and will never be visited again.

This freedom and lack of narrative angst is more like the early days of the novel, before Flaubert and Henry James began to make an issue of POV. I don’t want to digress on this right now.

For today, before I go into a bit more detail, I’d like to say just one thing.

It might seem as if a multiple viewpoint novel is, in some ways, an easy option. It feels more responsive, during the first draft. When you’re writing multiple viewpoints, you are able to include different scraps of narration that you’ve done at different times. Perhaps years apart. You can pull a novel together, assemble it, rather than try to write it from first to final page. You can also be more local in your choices. For example, if most of the book is in third person, but one character arrives in a beautiful place, you can switch to describing it through their eyes and also in their words. Such writing may feel more alive.

Again, this is likely to result in a mess.

Most of what you’d be trying to do here can be accomplished easily enough by a third person past tense omniscient narrative. You would just need to find ways of shifting the first person narration thoughts of your character across into third person.

Third person narration is extremely capacious and forgiving.

As she entered the beautiful clearing in the wood, she said to herself —

You go straight into what you’ve written, then come out again at the end. Back to the cradling third person POV.

Having characters narrate their every thought to themselves (especially if they do so in a hyper-articulate way that reads as if it is well-wrought prose rather than haphazard inner voice) will come across as old-fashioned, but this may not matter at all if you’re writing in an appropriate genre — say, a steampunk novel, or a Victorian pastiche, or even a large, loose, baggy monster contemporary novel.

Readers swept along by the big melodies of a big story are unlikely to fuss about these kinds of detail.

But the deeper mess remains. And that mess is that the voices telling you’re story are coming from different places, different times, different moods, and that if you’re not ultimately in control of this the reader will soon become unnerved, mistrustful, distracted and — soon enough — absent.

In order to write a novel, you need to have a sense of certainty about who the invisible organizing narrator of the whole thing is.

There are, I’m afraid, no completely local decisions in a novel. Everything relates to and contributes to the whole.

And that beautiful live description in the wood is exactly what stern creative writing tutors are referring to when they say, ‘Kill your darlings.’