When I started Mythcreants, I had an axe to grind: for years the epic fantasy stories I loved had forced me to wade through belabored chapters that bored me to tears. I just wanted to see my precious farmboy be crowned king – why did I first have to hear about how some random elf plays elf chess?
I expressed my beef with multiple viewpoints in an article shortly after the site launched in 2013. But this criticism made me an outlier on the site and elsewhere; I even debated Oren about it on an early podcast episode. Then over the next five years, something strange happened. Oren decided I was right: multiple points of view are the bane of novels everywhere. After that, it became the official Mythcreants position.
While my original article (PDF) held up surprisingly well for newbie axe-grinding, our readers deserve an updated explanation for why we’re so cranky about a writing practice that’s considered normal. So, let’s go over the problems that multiple viewpoints cause and when they actually work.
How Multiple POVs Work in Theory
I’ve never insisted that multiple viewpoints have no use. Like other choices about narrative style and perspective, they are a valuable tool in the right situation.
In theory, using multiple viewpoints allows writers to benefit from the immersion of close limited narration without giving up the opportunity to narrate the thoughts of side characters. By including a character’s viewpoint, writers can help their audience get to know that character more intimately and understand where they’re coming from.
A great example of this in practice is Steven King’s The Shining. In it, a family of three – Wendy, Jack, and Danny – are isolated for the winter in a haunted hotel. Jack has a history of heavy drinking and violence, which almost caused Wendy to leave him previously. As the hotel works its evil magic, Jack’s troubling behaviors reemerge.
King could easily have told this story with one viewpoint. However, he clearly wanted his audience to root not only for Wendy and Danny’s survival, but for the whole family to stay intact. By switching between the viewpoints of all three central characters, King develops each person in detail, builds sympathy for the antagonistic Jack, and explains why Wendy doesn’t leave with Danny at the first sign of trouble. If King had used omniscient narration to do this, he would have sacrificed far too much tension for a horror story.
Many other novels feature a few central characters that deal with the story’s problems together, romances in particular. Using the viewpoints of both people in a relationship arc can allow readers to discover the full complexity of each character’s perspective. With a better understanding of the obstacles they face, relationship conflicts can become deeper and more interesting.
How Multiple POVs Work in Practice
Instead of being a technical tool for developing characters, multiple viewpoints have become synonymous with something else: multiple stories thrown into the same book for very little reason.
As long as a writer sticks to one viewpoint, the main character has to be included in every scene.* While writers chafe at this restriction, it’s really good for them. In a world where most writers don’t know what a throughline is and are always stuffing too many ideas into one book, a single viewpoint forces them to streamline and focus on what matters. It doesn’t guarantee a tightly plotted story, but it definitely helps.
When writers add a new viewpoint, they often do it for the explicit purpose of inserting content with little or no relevance to what they’ve already written. They might even jump to an entirely different continent to follow characters that have no practical means of interacting with the main character anytime soon, such as the Daenerys viewpoint in Game of Thrones.
Writers believe that if they bring these disparate arcs together at the end, this practice is fine. But that’s not true. As long as the novel is stretched between independent stories running in parallel, engagement will suffer. A great end doesn’t justify a terrible beginning and middle.
How This Makes Novels Boring
When people read for pleasure, they generally pick up a book and read it through. They don’t read a chapter of one book, put it down, read a chapter of another book, and then switch back to the first book again. The reason for this is pretty obvious. A story has specific mechanisms for hooking readers. When a reader is hooked on Lord of the Rings, they want to read more Lord of the Rings, not more Interview With the Vampire or more Dune.
The two primary mechanisms for hooking readers are:
- Emotional attachment to the main character
- Tension created by the problems the main character faces
New viewpoints often feature a different character facing different problems. That means even if the previous viewpoint had a great hook, the new viewpoint isn’t benefiting from it. For readers, it really is like starting another book.
Then, many writers make this problem worse. It’s incredibly common to only bother with a good hook for the first viewpoint of the story, which features either the main character or a throwaway character during a prologue. Once this is done, writers assume they can throw in another story without taking the same time and care to hook readers. After all, the writer can make readers wade through this second story by holding the first one hostage. They might even end the first viewpoint on a cliffhanger before jumping to the second.
Considering all of this, it’s no surprise that so many secondary viewpoints are not only boring but actively resented. They’re getting in the way of the content readers are interested in.
This doesn’t mean that every reader will get bored during extra viewpoints. Some readers may become really interested in the world. Others may decide they like the secondary viewpoint character as much as, or more than, the main character. But even in a best-case scenario, readers will be more interested in some viewpoints than others. If they love a secondary viewpoint character, they could start resenting the main character for taking up time.
This is why even when you put effort into making each viewpoint riveting, it still doesn’t justify stuffing multiple stories into one book. If those secondary viewpoints had their own books, the writer would pay more attention to making them engaging, and readers would have more control over what they read. No one would be forced to put down Lord of the Rings until they read an obligatory chapter of Dune.
Since many novel writers emulate filmed stories these days, it’s also worth explaining why our favorite TV shows get away with covering so many protagonists with their own arcs.* It comes down to two factors:
- Narrated works require their audience to focus on the narration in hopes that it will pay off in the form of an engaging story. Visual works grab the audience’s attention immediately and then just have to keep it. The engagement bar is simply higher for narrated works because they require more effort to consume.
- Hollywood writers collaborate, and when their bosses tell them to make edits, they have to do it. If the ratings go down, the show gets cancelled. Because of all this, visual stories are better plotted than the average novel, so they handle multiple protagonists with more skill.
Even so, the occasional TV show does get itself into trouble for doing what novelists using multiple viewpoints do. The second season of Stranger Things sent Eleven off on her own. Carnival Row had a cast of characters that barely interacted with one another. This lowered engagement just like it would in a novel.
When Multiple POVs Work
A novel should be one consolidated story, not multiple stories that beg for reader patience as they inch closer together. As long as you keep to one story, it can be told with multiple viewpoints. This doesn’t mean you should give all your minor characters a viewpoint. Using additional viewpoints still takes readers further from a beloved main character, so they need to offer a benefit to make up for that. However, as long as you’re telling one story, the tension of the primary viewpoint should be in effect. In other words, the hook you put in earlier will be doing its magic.
So how do you know the difference between one story and many? To start, if you don’t actually need multiple viewpoints to cover all of the events of your plot, that’s a good sign you’re telling one story, not several. A more accurate but technical explanation is that multiple viewpoints should keep the throughline moving. Let’s dig into what that means.
Your throughline is the basic arc that holds your entire novel together. It opens with a big problem that your main character must resolve at the climax. For instance, they might need to find a loved one who’s been missing or stop the library from being destroyed. Then, movement is the sense that the story is heading toward that climax. It could mean the main character is making progress on finding their loved one or that they are approaching an inevitable confrontation with the villain who wants to destroy the library. When a story has good movement, every event is essential. If you take one event out, later events don’t unfold the same way. They’re all linked together in a single chain of causality.
This shouldn’t change when you add more viewpoints. If you can remove a scene from one viewpoint without impacting the next few scenes in another viewpoint, you probably have multiple stories on your hands. On the other hand, if scenes in one viewpoint have important implications for scenes in the other viewpoint, that suggests they are one story.
Let’s go back to my example of a main character who has to find a lost loved one. You give that loved one a viewpoint, revealing that they’re being held prisoner by the villain. Then they develop a relationship with another captive. Since that relationship has no impact on the main character’s search, you have two stories on your hands. However, maybe the villain lets slip to the kidnapped character that someone is searching for them. Then, the kidnapped character finds a way to send out clues. The main character receives those clues and gets closer to finding the kidnapped character. Now you have one story.
Viewpoint characters can also act against each other. One viewpoint character might plant bombs beneath the library, and then the next viewpoint character could defuse the bombs. Generally, this would be a gray morality story where the protagonists are at odds but none of them are strictly villains, because villain viewpoints rarely work. On top of that, these types of political intrigue stories need to be tightly paced, with lots of interplay between viewpoint characters to stay entertaining. Most writers would struggle to keep this up.
If you’re on the fence about using multiple viewpoints in your story, you should stick to one. It’s essential to keep your story simple where you can, so when you inevitably want to add more characters, places, or magical curses, you’ll have a chance of fitting them in.
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I’ve actually plotted a few stories that will need different viewpoints and I’ve written one of them already.
In this one, I have one main character (Emilia) who tells most of the story from her point of view. In a couple of scenes, I shift to her best friend Florence who does the detective work to find out the ghost is not a ghost, since she’s the more analytical thinker. Towards the end, I have three or four scenes from the point of Emilia’s love interest Leonard, because in the regency period it would make more sense for a man to chat with another man in a pub and he’s luring the bad guy in for capture. Yet, the overwhelming majority of the story is told by Emilia, I just didn’t want to make her a Watsonian character for Florence (and Florence takes the point of view while Emilia is kidnapped, although I do tell about Emilia marking her ‘cell’ for others to find). Then I realized that, if I wanted to narrate the lure instead of just havign people talk aboout it, I needed some scenes from Leonard’s perspective.
I try to make it very clear who is narrating what, though, so there’s no confusion. All viewpoints also are part of the same plot: an intrigue to take a large country estate from Emilia’s aunt, who was so good as to take Emilia and Florence in when they had to leave town after a scandal based on lies.
Great article, Chris, as always! However, I’m still confused at the part where the lost loved one develops a relationship with another captive while the main character is trying to find them. I mean, the relationship can act like a subplot, right? Or maybe the loved one is trying to escape by finding clues gathered from getting along with other people?
They could be doing that, or else they could be ratcheting up the tension by giving the reader glimpses of what the main character is going to have to face.
The important thing is to not slow down movement on the throughline, particularly since the captured character is unlikely to be the main character (since their agency will be limited).
If the captured character can actually participate in the throughline by sending out clues, etc, and you manage to multitask that with their romance with another captive, then you could include that as a subplot without slowing the story down. But if you insert extra scenes for this romance, then movement will become an issue.
Escape attempts also don’t have movement by default, since the character goes back to square one. You want something that actually affects what the main character is doing sooner rather than later. So if the captive character tries to escape and in the attempt manages to leave some clue behind just outside the door, and the main character finds that clue the next chapter, then you should be okay.
Great article– extremely helpful!
Since Dune is mentioned, and throughlines, and I just watched Dune last night…what is Dune’s throughline? I’m struggling between the true identity and growth of Paul Atreides and the liberation and identity of Arrakis itself.
I’ve read all the articles and listened to all the podcasts on throughlines, but I’m still having trouble actually picking out the throughlines in literature and film. Or maybe just trouble articulating them, not sure.
The reason you’re having trouble is that throughlines are often weak or even missing in literature. Dune is particularly challenging since the new movie is about half of the first book. In the book itself, the throughline is the fight over Arrakis. That encompasses defeating the Harkonnens and also Paul’s character arc. It get’s confusing since at the end, Paul is suddenly emperor of the galaxy, when that never seemed to be on the table before.
Thanks! I read all the Dunes around 20 years ago and don’t really want to reread. I will say, the new movie sort of introduces that last point, although I’m not sure there was enough set-up to make it feel natural. It also seemed to handle the Bene Gesserit chosen one male-magic superiority issue better, but that could all blow up in our faces in part 2. Fingers crossed, though.
The fight over Arrakis is only tangential to what I consider the two main throughlines, one internal to the book and one related to the story arc of the first four books.
First, you have Paul seeking vengeance for what happened to his family. Being a feudal society, this means destroying the Harkonens and their allies. This included the Emperor, which presents Paul with only three options: abandon the quest, be destroyed, or take over the empire.
Second, you have what the author said is the point of the series: “Charismatic leaders should come with a warning label: May be hazardous to your health”. The whole point of Dune is to create a situation where the Chosen One trope can occur, so that it can be carried to its logical–and horrific–conclusion in later novels. It may be a spoiler, but: Paul is not, in any way, shape, or form, a hero. He compares himself unfavorably to Hitler in the second book, and ultimately abandons the only thing that could in any way justify what he’d done. Pretty much everything he does in his life is destructive, on a scale that makes the conflict of the first book seem petty. The problem is, Dune is not a stand-alone novel. It’s a prequal. Most people–quite understandably–don’t go beyond the first book, though, so they never see that the first book is just setting the stage for what comes next.
Your use of Dune and Lord of the Rings as storylines to be hooked on is an odd choice, as these both have multiple viewpoints, which distracts from your point. Daenerys on the other hand…
With Lord of the Rings, that book is actually told from an omniscient perspective, so there isn’t any one point of view character. (can’t remember if Dune is in omniscient or not)
At best, LotR had a sort of limited omniscience – there were distinct shifts between PoV’s, especially, as I recall, in Two Towers, which distinctly stuck with Aragorn and friends for a while, and stuck with Frodo and Sam for a while, a long while in each case. And at least at first, Aragorn’s story in Two Towers doesn’t really have anything to do with the throughline of destroying the ring. Eventually it turns out it does, but definitely suffers the exact problem this article has pointed out. Then again, Tolkein spent a lot of time on events and things that had absolutely nothing to do with the throughline. (I’m sure I’ll get flak for this, but Tom Bombadil is a prime example, and is precisely why he was cut from the movies.)
LotR does use an omniscient narration, but Kataar is right that it also follows distinct groups of characters for long stretches, in a manner similar to TV shows. In some cases, the story would definitely be better if those stories were more closely related.
One point in LotR’s favor though is that it starts the characters together and then splits them up, which is better than starting them separately and then splitting them up. Of course that method isn’t flawless either, as you can see with stories like Wheel of Time, where every side character the protagonists meet is gifted with their own POV.
I mean, it’s fine, even laudable, to like what you like. But this whole article seems very much like it could be boiled down to saying ‘I don’t like stories beyond a certain complexity’ which is fine, I guess, though it seems like a weird hill to die on.
Anyway, like with Oren’s intolerance for moral ambiguity, I think this marks a parting of ways. I’ve enjoyed reading Mythcreants quite a bit over the years, but I think it’s done me all the good it’s going to.
In parting, let me suggest you check out Chip Delany’s About Writing. You may find it offers a helpful and interesting perspective. Anyhow, best of luck in future endeavors, and thank you for the good work you’ve done.
https://www.amazon.com/About-Writing-Essays-Letters-Interviews/dp/0819567167
I feel like this interpretation misses the point of the article.
It’s not about liking “simple” stories – it’s that unless your separate viewpoint characters are “doing work” (being involved in / moving the primary storyline forward, or used for something like reinterpreting/reframing events), the downsides of using multiple viewpoints will outweigh the positives.
I’m wondering if a better way to handle multiple point of view characters is to tell companion stories from each of their perspectives in separate books? I believe many an epic fantasy series might be more engaging that way to more cohesively bring these threads into one big through line somehow.
Sweet Tooth has this issue. While most of the time tv shows can get away with this better than prose, Sweet tooth presents an issue of having a protagonist who is very optimistic in an a setting where everything is terrible. Anything outside of his perspective is just dark without levity. Then these side stories aren’t given enough time or anything else to make us care. And like how you were saying with the issue of multiple stories inching closer together, this is another issue with it. The narrator says in the first episode that the two main plots would interconnect eventually. I watched probably half the season and they still didn’t intersect.
Plus the pandemic portrayal was absolutely atrocious but that’s another topic.
Oh gosh yes; the doctor’s storyline in Sweet Tooth drove us up the wall.
Romance novels have a way of avoiding this problem. They introduce a group of friends and then in each novel of the series the viewpoint switches to a different friend to tell the story of that friend’s romance. All of the novels in the series may take place at the same time.
So the first book might have a scene where the male and female leads have a huge fight at a party. The female lead leaves early with her friends. One of her friends is reluctant to go because she just met a cute guy. This isn’t explored in the first book beyond how it impacts their friendship.
The second book opens with the friend meeting a cute guy and having to leave early because her friend just got into a fight. The fight isn’t depicted. But the conversation between the two friends is repeated in the second book. But now it is shown from the new narrator’s point of view.
This clearly takes a lot of advance planning of the series. But I wish other genres would use the technique. The multiple stories and viewpoints are depicted. But each is fully developed. And if a particular character annoys you, you can skip that novel.
Well, that is not a multiple viewpoint at all. If every book is dedicated to that character, it’s a single viewpoint.
I’ve read series like that myself and I agree that it’s great to have a new viewpoint character every time (because the story, romance or otherwise, can play out fully in one book and missing a book in the series isn’t as much of a problem), but they’re not multiple viewpoint books.
Exactly. The problems of multiple viewpoint books are avoided by making them single viewpoint books. But you still get to read/write all the stories.
From a reader’s perspective, I super hate multiple POVs because they slow absolutely everything down. It’s one of those things that makes me toss a book against a wall if the 3rd chapter is yet another new character instead of continuing on with the first two!
So basically, thank you for this article. :)
I’m assuming similar tricks work in separate companion series in the same universe? The way I understand it, we’d have one series from one point of view and then another series from a different point of view. I would imagine these sorts of tricks work better in books without your typical chosen one tropes.
A work that does multiple POVs really well is Heroes of Olympus.
By the third book there are 7 (sometimes more) different POV but it never slows down the pace because they are all on the same journey and every change in the POV brings a new fractal unit (in honour of the wordcrafter of Mythcreants) that moves the main throughline forward, in addition to furthering the character’s development.
Even after book 3 when they split the group each POV feels just as important for the plot as the others, and none feel superfluous.
Risky bet but Riordan delivered
If another point of view is necessary, I’m assuming it’s best to do it from the perspective of another sympathetic character. My own sense is that the perspective of an anti-hero may work better than even one of a sympathetic villain if that’s what the plot calls for.
Generally speaking, it is a good idea to use a sympathetic character if you need to change your viewpoint. When it comes to villains, I’d suggest not using the villain, but a hench or other ‘bystander’. The less your audience knows about the inside of the villain, the better usually.
Thanks, guys. I didn’t realize how visual media are able to get away with multiple point of view characters better at first myself. My own sense is that visual media don’t have the same benefits of narration that your typical novels do, so they have to switch POV characters from time to time.
I certainly understand where you’re coming from. However two of my favourite novels are Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained. They have many characters – there isn’t really a main character. I think it works because the story is complex and needs an overview of the whole situation.
It depends very much on the story itself, but also on the skill of the author. If the author is good with writing different characters or writing distant third perspective, so that it comes across as a ‘camera’ of sorts, multiple viewpoints can work out. In other cases, you need the focus on one or two characters to build attachement and make things interesting.
Very true. A more classic example is The Woman in White – a fantastic book all (to the best of my recollection) in first person but with lots of view points. As with everything else there are exceptions to every rule.
When people read for pleasure, they generally pick up a book and read it through. They don’t read a chapter of one book, put it down, read a chapter of another book, and then switch back to the first book again.
Maybe you don’t. Judging not just from my own behavior (this is pretty typical for me, even if we don’t count in the serialized stories that I read as they come out, bit by bit) but that of other people known to me, at the very least a significant minority of the population does just that.
Disclaimer: Virtually all of my friends are autistic or part of the broader autistic spectrum. I have absolutely no barometer for “normal”. I do have a keen appreciation of the fact that everybody in the world has at least one weird personal quirk that they think is “normal” or even “universal” on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and that really isn’t either of those things.
I’m no autistic (at least I was never diagnosed and I wouldn’t put myself on the spectrum from my general experiences, either, but I was born before such diagnoses became common; I’m 47) and I, too, usually read multiple books at the same time. It depends on whether a book completely catches my attention, but I rarely read one book from beginning to end without a detour to another.
Yet, I have to say that, as it is a conscious decision to switch from one book to the next, it is not the same as having multiple viewpoints in the same book.
That’s actually an intriguing thought. What if people’s tolerance with multiple POVs is linked to whether they’re used to following multiple stories at the same time? I think we are progressively becoming more used to switching between different stories. Serials are becoming more popular (TV series, podcasts, manga, webcomics…), and we consume a lot of them in parallel. Could that prime our brain to be less bothered by following multiple separate plotlines in the same book?
I have adhd, this becomes my main strategy for me to finish stories.
Editor’s note: I’ve removed a comment for breaking our rule about attacking the author. Thanks to the commenters who already replied.
I got the impression that this was what the article was saying, but I just want some confirmation: can multiple POVs be used to build attachment to multiple important characters in the story?
Yes. A POV can be very useful for building attachment.