Writing a Multi-POV Story That Keeps Your Readers Wanting More
I blame my Southern, gossip-filled upbringing for the fact that I experience stories from multiple perspectives. When you’re eight years old and listening to your granny, your aunt, and your momma debate about your cousin who joined the army and then went up north and married a Yankee bride, you’re going to get lots of perspectives about who should’ve done what, when, and how.
(Branching Out: The Art of Writing in Multiple Genres.)
Maybe that’s why in college I gravitated toward journalism, writing the kind of articles that required a minimum of three sources from balanced and varied perspectives for the student newspaper. Even after I graduated and wrote freelance features about hot air balloon festivals, motorcycle classes, and hair braiding while starting my teaching career, my editor would’ve never accepted a story that wasn’t told from several angles.
Now, years later as a fiction writer, I’ve found that storytelling from multiple perspectives feels natural. All three of my published novels are written from multiple points of view, the most recent Watch It Burn a combination of the voices of strong Texas women and mixed media, including newspaper articles, websites, and book excerpts. In this novel, three women set out to determine how the wife of a prominent leader in their tiny tourist town ended up face down in the Guadalupe River, drowned in only two inches of water. The detective rules it a slip-and-fall, but the women soon realize that a cultish organization is at work, contributing not only to the death of this woman but to the destruction of their beloved community.
As both an author and a writing coach, I think a lot about the purpose of writing multi-POV, and ultimately, my reason comes down to one thing: moving the story forward. As a “pantser,” writing from a variety of perspectives personally keeps me interested in my individual characters because I’m weaving together threads that will eventually form a complete tapestry. This in turn should (theoretically) keep my reader interested because I’m planting curiosity seeds. When my reader finally sees a reveal or understands a twist alluded to chapters earlier, they feel a sense of accomplishment and a desire to turn the next page, thus pushing that story ever onward.
In order to successfully accomplish such a feat, I must do two primary things. First, I must make the voices in the narrative distinct by using a variety of tools, including practical decisions like dialect and use of colloquialism as well as less tangible choices like tapping into the emotionality of characters by not only describing their surroundings and the dialogue but their internal reaction to these elements.
Second, I attempt to switch perspectives at just the right moment. For me, that often means leaving the reader at the end of a scene that will inevitably lead to another problematic situation or question. For example, in the opening chapter of Watch It Burn, the reader meets Nichole, a second-grade teacher waking up to a strange man in her bed after a drunken evening. When she leaves him sleeping and goes for her morning run along the Guadalupe, she sees something in the middle of the river, something in the shape of a woman’s body. And then…we switch perspectives. Now we’re with her long-time friend Jenny, a washed-up reporter whose marriage and career are on the brink. She’s just returned home to write for her tiny local paper, and she’s about to get the call of her lifetime: a woman of a prominent man in town found dead in the river.
Check out Kristen Bird’s Watch It Burn here:
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Each chapter ends in such a way as to leave the reader wanting more of one woman’s story and a promise that I’ll provide more as soon as they’ve caught up with the next woman, whose story they’ll want to know more about as well. If I do my job right, then the cycle continues, and readers are eager to turn pages late into the night.
I love creating a character arc that will eventually intersect with the other characters in the novel in unexpected ways to form an overarching plot, and since I’m a book coach and teacher in addition to being a writer, I can’t leave this article without giving you something practical to use in your own writing. When creating each of the characters whose heads I’ll be living in for the next year as I write and edit, I begin by asking myself a version of the “newspaper nut graf” 5Ws and an H for each character. It looks something like this:
Who are her enemies? Her allies?What does she want most from her family? her job? her romantic partner?Where did she come from? Where is she going? (literally and/or metaphorically)When will she feel at peace again?Why does this experience need to happen at this moment in her life?How will this moment affect her? How will she overcome and set her world to right again?
Feel free to swap out pronouns and versions of the above questions for your own story, but answering such basic but detailed queries will help prepare your story to be told from a variety of angles. And when all else fails and you inevitably feel like you’re stuck, try moving your character toward the unexpected. If your character is always nicey-nice, make them break down and be mean as hell for one scene. If they’ve always been a fabulous nurse—but they’ve also always wanted a baby—have them steal one (that was my second book ;)). Either way, you’ll keep your reader wanting more of your fabulous characters, which is always the point.