Writing from a single point of view is both the easiest and the hardest way of writing.
From a single point of view: The character knows their thoughts and feelings and doesn’t know any other character’s thoughts and feelings, unless they tell him, and then he has to believe them to be true. There’s not much to keep straight as to what the reader is allowed to know. They only know what the single point of view does. This can be VERY difficult when telling a story where the single character simply cannot know something you have to tell the reader. It can take a lot of work-around, and the emotional output of other character can only be shown by observation by the single point-of-view character. I have done this in a bunch of shorts, and… 1 novel – because it is hard and makes writing complex stories very difficult. I am not saying it’s wrong, just harder.
Multiple points of view allow the reader to know what a character cannot.
Single point of view: You’re writing tension. Joe approaches the door of the ruined mansion, it looks spooky and the wind is chattering the graveyard cypresses. His friend Cedric has told him the place haunted.
Multiple points of view: First Joe approaches the door of the ruined mansion, it looks spooky and the wind is chattering the graveyard cypresses. His friend Cedric has told him the place haunted. Second point of view. Cedric – you know he hates Joe, and he’s merely pretending to befriend him. He’s hiding in the mansion with a meat-cleaver. The reader knows what Joe cannot.
Where this becomes complicated is when the author doesn’t want the reader to know, or know too much. The story turns on Joe being an axe-murderer and having invited Fred to meet him in the ruined mansion, to kill him. It’s not that hard to work your way around this one. The reader doesn’t get ALL the POV character’s thoughts, just those about that subject.
It’s a powerful tool, but a lot harder to keep your story straight for each character, and to remember you can’t chop-and-change without a clear handover of points of view, because, really this all about not confusing your reader. You make someone read a paragraph 3 times to get it – you’ve probably lost them as a reader. Multiple POV requires some care, and some management of the reader’s expectations.
That means reliability: If Cedric, Joe and Fred have POV roles in the story, trust me, you simply can’t introduce the POV when it suits you. I have read a couple of books where second POV was only AFTER the finale, where the story depended on the main POV character not knowing – tricky but it can be made to work.
What doesn’t – to my mind, work is when the reader has got used to a single point of view, and the author – half-way through the book – realizes that not knowing the second POV means it doesn’t work. It’s… jarring, and feels as if you’re being cheated as a reader. POV ALSO requires foreshadowing and continuity.
The story has had Joe’s POV only until the midpoint. You haven’t had Cedric mentioned and let alone interactions with Joe. Suddenly you have Cedric’s POV. Cedric and Fred manage to flee Joe and his axe. The story goes back to Joe’s POV and the end you find out Cedric and Fred are revenants… you never return to Cedric’s POV. YMMV, but if you are going to have POV characters, they need foreshadowing and completion.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Ad infinitum, point of view.”
I am currently rereading the Parker series by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). Most of the books are written from the POV of Parker, but there are sections from another character’s perspective. He doesn’t do anything to foreshadow or set up these other sections, and they are frequently late in the books.
You get three quarters of the book of Parker setting up the job, then a short chapter from the POV of a character who is about to impacted by Parker’s plan–generally someone who is living their ordinary life with no clue that a bunch of armed robbers are about to burst through the door–and then back to Parker.
I like them. They are like little breaks in the tension, the calm before the storm. They serve as a reminder that Parker is an aberration, almost a natural disaster. You see the world through the eyes of professional thief with a very particular way of looking at the world and then, just before the heist gets started, this bit of ordinary life. It actually increases the tension because you know that the bottom is about to drop out of this character’s world, and you get to see what Parker and his crew look like from the outside.
I’ve seen it done with some success at the tail end, where it is used to tie of/explain
My handful of shorts (4k to 15k words) were all done as single-POV (and the 15k was certainly harder to keep straight what the protagonist knew when. I actually plotted out other characters’ actions in some detail but had to keep all that “offscreen”). Over the years I’ve tried to work on a novel, but it kept sputtering out after the first few chapters. I did eventually realize that at least a few chapters should be from the POV of the secondary character / love interest, especially as her culture is alien to the protagonist. That way each character’s plot thread can be developed and periodically intersect and diverge and interesect again. Someday I’ll get back to that and rework the plot points, someday…
My most common way of getting stuck is and then unstuck is realizing I need another POV character. Good luck!
Generally I have several POV characters because I like to see what everyone is doing. It’s a large cast, so keeping track of where everyone is at any given time can require a bit of thought.
This is more a self-indulgence than a writing strategy, in my case. While writing a scene, I wonder how one of the other characters will react, and if they might have something hilarious to say about it.
One of the boys will be drooling on some piece of technology or ordinance, so probably one of the girls will be rolling her eyes and calling him a dork. This can be quite fun. ~:D
Eh, the only viewpoint-characters-with-secrets that I have seen work are those where the character is clearly kinda nuts. Just not happening to think of something during his scene doesn’t cut it.