Many books out there are written from a single perspective of a single character, however there are also many stories that explore several other perspectives. This can be done in first or third person POV, which I’ve talked about the difference before on my channel. Providing perspectives of different characters is something that can help enhance a story and show how different people react to a similar situation. So, for today’s post, I’ll be teaching you how to effectively write a story that has multiple character perspectives.
My series, The Fallen Age Saga, does some more experimental things with points of view and perspectives. The first book is narrated by one character, Blide Stevens, but as the series progresses, more perspectives are added and the books will sometimes include third-person point of view chapters to add onto the plot. I did these sorts of things after many years of writing though, so it can be a little hard to balance if you’re a newer writer.
Why Include Multiple Perspectives?
If you’re writing a story, you’re probably wondering why you should even include multiple perspectives. There’s a lot of reasons for going for one perspective, as that tends to resonate better with many readers since the story feels more personal. However, multiple perspectives can also be helpful for readers to see.
Firstly, including multiple perspectives can help add depth to individual characters. Showing how other characters perceive each other can help to show a different view on each character.
Additionally, multiple perspectives can enhance the complexity of your plot. You can reveal different events of the same plot from different perspectives, which can make your plot even more interesting. If you want to learn how to create an interesting plot, you should check out this post where I give tips on that.
Another thing that’s great with multiple perspectives is that you can show off all that awesome world building you’ve been doing the whole time. You can showcase different cultures, different religions, and more.
Which Characters Should be Your Multiple Perspectives?
When you go to decide which characters should fill in the multiple perspectives role, you should consider what your goals are with your story and what benefit it will do to have the particular characters you pick narrate the tale or at least be the front-facing view of the story.
Firstly, you can pick characters that are working together in the story. Maybe you have one or two really important main characters, but you can also provide input from other supporting characters to provide different takes on the same journey.
If you’re writing a romance story, you can pick to make the perspectives from the two love interests, which can give an interesting balance to see how each character actually perceives the other one throughout the course of your book.
You can also write from the perspectives of the protagonists and the antagonists or even the heroes and the villains. Balancing out the narrative with these contrasting perspectives could be a really interesting way to deliver the story to the readers.
At the end of the day, when you pick characters to provide your perspectives, you want to think about:
- The goal of your story
- The importance of these particular characters on the plot
- The role each character plays
- The necessity of the character’s perspective
How to Effectively Write From Multiple Character Perspectives
Create a Distinct Voice For Each Character
The first thing you want to do is to ensure that each character/perspective in your story is given their own distinct voice. You can do this in a number of ways, which I’ll get into now.
You want to ensure that each character is well-developed, and you can do this by creating a character profile for each one and determining what sort of personality that the character has. You can also read this post to learn how to create memorable characters.
You want to ensure that each character’s tone and personality remains consistent so that readers don’t mix up between the characters. This way you can maintain an interesting narrative that doesn’t confuse readers.
Balance the Perspectives
When you write a story where there are multiple perspectives involved, you need to learn how to balance out the perspectives so that you can ensure that each character is given the right amount of time and space needed to convey the narrative.
You don’t necessarily need to be exactly equal, but you should be equal enough. If you have four character perspectives you’re going off of, you need to ensure that those four characters are important so that you can give them proper amounts of time on the pages.
Balancing the perspectives also means that you allow for the perspectives to flow in a way that’s natural so that the readers don’t feel like they’re jumping between the characters erratically.
Build the Story Around the Perspectives
Structuring and building up your story should keep the perspectives in mind in a way that makes sense. One thing you can do is to include alternating chapters, which tends to be the most common way authors portray multiple perspectives. You can also create parts and each part can focus on some of the characters or even only one character. You can also try to weave multiple perspectives into the same chapter, using divisions of the chapter to portray the different perspectives.
You should also ensure that overall, your story is actually built around catering to different perspectives. Each character should have a role in the plot and each perspective should be written in an interesting way that actually enhances the reading experience rather than detracting from it.
Use Perspectives to Create Conflict and/or Tension
Using many perspectives in a story is a great way to try and sow conflict and even tension in the story. Characters who have different views can try to drag the plot in a different direction. If you have characters that are enemies and are the perspectives of your story, then you can show how the conflict advances between the two. You can also create an interesting enemies to lovers dynamic if you do that, but it’s not necessary of course.
You can show the reader information that the other characters may not know, which can create suspense as the other characters are unaware of something that you know about. This is also a great way of creating dramatic irony as well, since you are more aware of things than the characters in the story.
Portraying Themes
The different perspectives that are present in your story can be great methods of exploring the themes of your story through different eyes. If you want to learn how to develop a great theme for your story, then you can check this post out.
Taking a look at the theme of your story from different lenses can show what different people believe about similar concepts. You can explore things in a diverse way, which I think is really interesting.
Things to Watch Out For
When you’re writing from multiple perspectives, there will be some things that you need to keep in mind. Firstly, you’ll want to avoid writing the same event over and over again. Sometimes, repeating things across the perspectives can prove to be interesting, but that should only be done when it has a significance on the plot. You don’t want to keep writing and rewriting something because your reader has already seen this pan out many times before.
The next thing that you’ll want to avoid is overwhelming your reader with so many perspectives. Too many perspectives will start to annoy your reader because they’ll have to keep balancing between them and that can be a little difficult.
You also want to ensure that each perspective is actually interesting, because it happens sometimes that the perspectives are not as interesting as each other and then readers become annoyed when they get to a certain character.
For the most part though, writing from multiple perspectives is a great and interesting way to deliver the plot to the reader. You can also write from a first or third person point of view, but it will feel a little different. In third person, you are basically just focusing on certain characters over others, so you may not need to create whole chapter titles and divisions, you can just flow from one perspective to the next.
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to get updates on my latest posts, WIPs, and book releases.