How to Balance Different Points of View in Your Novel
Why do some stories require a single point of view character and others two, or an entire cast?
(How Do I Develop a Character’s Voice?)
The host of POV characters in Akwaeke Emezi’s mold-breaking Freshwater represent different aspects of main character Ada’s psyche, cleverly illustrating her mental health challenges along with a non-Western cultural interpretation of them. The array of voices in Joanna Pearson’s literary crime thriller Bright and Tender Dark revisit a 20-year-old murder, with each character lending an answer, or a new question, to the mystery. Two characters tell the story in my novel, Without You Here, which centers on the close relationship between Nonie and her niece Noreen, before and after Nonie’s tragic loss to suicide. In all these cases, the added voices not only contribute their own insights but also expand the story beyond what a single character could reveal.
We want multiple POV characters to enchant our readers without confusing them. Here are some tips for balancing POVs while keeping the story coherent across voices and ensuring that each character has earned their storytelling stripes.
1. Grasp Point of View.
To construct a voice strong enough to earn storyteller status, we must be fluent in the power of point of view. The generative writing exercise I teach to drive home this power involves an age-old family story of my four-times-great-grandmother Isabel’s murder in rural Ireland in the 1850s.
To set up the prompt, I tell a bare bones (pardon the pun) version of the crime—Isabel holding down the farm during a potato famine while her husband and son mine in England to supplement their meager earnings; Isabel welcoming a homeless family with five children to share the farm with her; the parents conspiring to murder Isabel, wrapping her in a sheet, throwing her in a ditch at a nearby farm; someone discovering the body, identifying Isabel by the family name embroidered onto the sheet; one of the children ratting out their parents; their parents hanging for the crime, at a time when it was rare for women to suffer this particular punishment.
Next, we list all the story’s characters, then I ask people to choose one and retell the story in their words.
My family’s version of events paints Isabel as deeply kind and unsuspecting, but my students often suggest she was cunning, demanding hard work on the farm for little return. Or she was cruel, punitive with the children, mercurial with the others. We might also get a peek at the greed or desperation that drives the visiting parents to their crime, the guilt or confusion that riddles the child who turns them in, the grief and shock of the person who finds their dear neighbor’s body, the hangman’s anxiety over executing a woman and depriving her five children of a mother, or perhaps the blithe dismissal of the landlord, reading of the murder in the morning news over toast and marmalade.
In every instance, the resulting story belongs uniquely to the voice in charge of the narrative. Switching storytellers yields utterly different stories—complete with their own circumstances, stakes, emotional investment, hopes, limitations, and more.
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2. Wield POV.
Once we grasp POV’s power, we want to employ it to its fullest, reinventing every story element based on what each new character would see, feel, expect, imagine. To do this, I recommend what I call “looking through each character’s eyeholes.” (This concept appears in my essay, “If You Can Name It, You Can Fix It: A Craft Glossary,”in CRAFT as well.) This means fully immersing in each character’s experience.
Plop right down in their bodies and look out of their very physical, very specific eyeholes to see what they’re seeing, feel what they’re feeling, and think what they’re thinking, while holding tight to everything we’ve established about them—their complex histories, their loves and hates, their motivations and limitations. Embodying characters this way helps ensure that their behaviors will be as authentic and story-connected as possible.
Think of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which follows generations of the same family after the slave trade splintered it apart. The sweep and scope could have muddled the story, but Gyasi fully commits to every POV character, offering up each of their lives with visceral, deeply satisfying clarity.
3. Distinguish POV Characters From Each Other.
If we follow steps 1 and 2, then each character will appear on the page distinct from one another with their POV naturally reflecting their individual voice. Their age, interests, level of formality, and status in the story’s pecking order will imbue how they perceive events and will determine what language best illustrates their experience.
Clinching that voice should bond the reader to each different POV character. Beyond that, never underestimate the value of a simple heading. In Emezi’s Freshwater, headings name the POV character at every alternation. I used time stamps in Without You Here to orient the reader about the main players’ ages, which helps lock them quickly into whichever POV is in charge at that point in the narrative.
Check out Jody Hobbs Hesler’s Without You Here here:
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4. Justify the Existence of Each POV.
Make sure your characters prove their worth to the story. If Without You Here were limited to a single narrator, then either we’d only see Noreen through Nonie’s eyes, and a ghost would have to tell half the story, or we’d only see Nonie through Noreen’s eyes, and Noreen would have to guess about what she couldn’t otherwise know about her aunt. Together, the dual POVs complement each other, creating a fuller, more vivid sense of both characters.
In Pearson’s Bright and Tender Dark, each POV character lends a unique clue or question to the story as the mystery slowly unfurls. POV characters in Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake add nuance or depth to the family secrets that drive the plot.
In all these examples, each POV character is a stakeholder in the larger story whose lens reveals essential details that other characters don’t have access to, making them necessary, not just interesting.