Matthew: “The thing is, how do I do it without putting people’s noses out of joint?”
Violet: “Oh, my dear. Oh, I don’t think there is a way to achieve that. I mean, you must do what needs to be done, of course, but… oh, I think I can safely say a great many noses will be out of joint.”

Downton Abbey, Season 3, Episode 4

Almost every book I’ve written since the age of about 15, with a few rare exceptions, has had multiple points of view. I love the flexibility that comes from being able to pick and choose who narrates a given scene. I love the new dimensions multiple POVs can add to the story. I enjoy reading books like this too. It had never occurred to me that this might rub anyone the wrong way until I mentioned to a friend who was about to beta read a manuscript for me that it had multiple POVs, and her reaction was – and I am paraphrasing, but this was the general sentiment – “Oh, gross.”

It turns out this is actually a pretty common attitude, and one with plenty of excellent reasoning behind it. For every good reason to include a multiple POVs, you’ll encounter at least five arguments against the practice as a rule. Readers sometimes complain of feeling disoriented or jerked around when the POV changes, or having a hard time keeping track of the story as a whole, or feeling overwhelmed by the reading experience for some other hard-to-pin-down reason. And these are all valid complaints! This turned out to be a big blind spot for me as a writer, because again, I like having more than one point of view, both as a reader and a writer.

So, did this epiphany change my perspective at all? Did I mend my ways, hasten to my next revision, and leave all my narrators but one on the cutting room floor?

…Nah.

So today, as a thoroughly unreformed writer of multiple POVs, I’m going to walk through some common mistakes and pro tips in this area and how to avoid them so that my friend will buy your book.

Head hopping

Head hopping is what happens when you switch perspectives – typically by mistake – in the middle of a scene. It’s a classic beginner mistake, and most of us have done it at some point. It usually happens when you’re writing in a third-person omniscient style, and it looks like this:

Jane cringed at Mark’s terrible writing, thinking that at least it couldn’t get any worse. Mark watched her, squirming with guilt. I can’t believe I was head hopping, he thought.

The first sentence was written from inside Jane’s head. But then, we abruptly switch to being inside Mark’s head. In the course of this one, unbroken scene, we witness two different characters’ internal monologues. See how weird it feels? That’s head hopping.

Head hopping can come from a couple of different places. Sometimes it’s an inconvenient side effect of being highly immersed in what you’re writing. You’re flying around the room in your mind’s eye, seeing this cool seen unfold before you, and you’re just writing whatever comes into your head. That’s fantastic, but you know what they say about having too much of a good thing. If you notice this happening a lot, you might want to try pausing before diving into a new scene and allowing it to play all the way through in your head before you start writing it down.

The other possible origin of head hopping is kind of the opposite problem: you’re having a hard time getting a handle on what’s going on, so you’re inadvertently jumping around to different characters in an attempt to figure it out. Or sometimes, you really do need to convey how a side character is feeling, but you may be struggling to get that across through the eyes of your main POV character. The magic antidote to this is people-watching. You’re looking for body language cues that convey what your side character is feeling that the main POV character could reasonably pick up on. Next time you’re stuck in a waiting room or standing in a checkout line, thinking about the ways you’d describe the body language you see all around you can go a long way towards developing in this area.

But wherever it comes from, the most important thing about head hopping is that it isn’t a legitimate POV switch. Actual POV switching involves having clearly delineated sections in your book that are narrated entirely from one perspective or another, rather than jumbled together in the same scene.

Is it useful or just shiny?

We all want things we don’t need, and speaking as someone who recently ate half of a fairly big pizza by myself, I don’t really have much ground to stand on to tell you not to indulge. Well, I’m sorry, fellow writer, but you can’t be doing that in your books. Before you settle on including multiple points of view, your additional narrators will all need to pass the same background check your first narrator did. That means considering specific scenes you’d like this alternate character to narrate, and asking yourself the following questions:

1. What would be lost by having the original POV character narrate this scene? If the answer is nothing, drop the additional POV and stick with your original narrator.
2. Can the thing(s) you’ll lose be conveyed or worked into the story in any other way? If the answer is yes, drop the additional POV and do that instead.

Everything needs a reason for being in your story, and additional POVs are no exception. If you can’t identify the reason, you may be on the wrong track.

Additionally, you should ask yourself why this specific additional POV is useful, rather than some other character. The answer to that may not be found in the first scene they appear in; sometimes we do a lot of work upfront to integrate an alternate POV in the story because we know it’ll be critical in a later scene. This can result in early scenes that don’t necessarily pass this check, but need to be told this way so that the scene where the alternate POV becomes critical will not feel jarring. Throwing your readers into a brand new POV near the end of your story violates the contract of what your readers have been lead to expect, which (in this specific arena) isn’t likely to go over well. But the point is, at least one scene in the book does need to pass this check to even start to think about including this POV. And if you can’t find one – if you’re starting to feel like any old character could narrate this – then don’t include it. Some things are worth writing just for the hell of it, but this is not one of them.

Establish a pattern

One of the most common complaints about multiple POVs is that readers find them jarring or destabilizing. You’re just starting to get invested in what’s happening, settling in, getting used to a character’s voice and situation, when bam! You get thrown into somebody else’s head in a completely different place.

The best way to mitigate this is to establish a predictable pattern with your POV switching, so that the sensation of chaos only lasts for the first little bit of your book, when you’re still setting things up and the reader expects to still be trying to figure out how your book works. You want to get them into the swing of things as quickly as you can, so that they unconsciously start priming themselves for the POV switch as they near the end of a chapter or section, and don’t feel jerked around every time the switch happens.

For an added sense of stability, you might consider making your POV sections longer, rather than alternating one chapter at a time. Let your readers stick with one narrator up through the next point of resolution or “natural stopping place” in your story, then switch. This becomes a more useful technique the more complicated your story is. For example, if you’ve got a big cast of characters spread out over a vast and complicated world, you may get better feedback from longer sections. Meanwhile, having your POV characters located closer together sometimes means you can get away with switching more often, since you’re not changing as much every time you switch. You’re going inside a new person’s head, sure, but you’re not also asking the reader to suddenly start visualizing a whole new part of the world. It’s about trying to minimize how much of your readers’ mental energy you’re going to expend by making a switch.

Whatever you do, just don’t throw your readers around to different characters willy-nilly. It’s a novel, not a game of hot potato.

Be strategic

One of the best reasons to use multiple POVs is that sometimes, a scene just works better when it’s written from a certain character’s point of view. Establishing more than one narrator early on gives you the freedom to pick and choose who you want telling the story, depending on what you want to convey. Scenes where a particular character is going through a serious trial – facing a fear, confronting an enemy, blah blah blah – tend to be more impactful in the eyes of that character or somebody emotionally close to them. You may also want to think about the thematic implications of the scene. There might be moments where a point you want to make or a feeling you want the story to have shines through more acutely when viewed through a certain character’s eyes.

This kind of connects to the point about establishing a reason for every POV character to be there, but in reverse. If you have a feeling multiple POVs might come in useful – or you’re like me, and you just like writing them – then look for scenes like this as part of your outlining process. Figure out who in your story is going to have one of these key highlighting moments, then spend some time thinking about whether their POV might enrich the story in other place as well. The cool thing is that if you can find one opportunity to use this POV for a worthy purpose, there are probably others lurking somewhere too.

In conclusion…

I warned you earlier not to throw your readers around like a game of hot potato. Unfortunately, that’s how readers like my friend sometimes see it. But POV is a complex and highly nuanced writing tool, not a blunt instrument to be smacked against your book until a nice, character-driven story falls out. Approach with caution, strategy, and careful forethought… but do approach. There’s more value there than you may realize.

Happy writing!