Picture it: Holiday, year of choice. Fifteen people sit around a table, three of whom decide they will tell the story of an event they all recently attended. As they do, the other twelve sit and listen as the first storyteller starts, the second one interrupts to say the first one got it wrong, the third one makes side comments that have little to do with anything, only for the first one to say “if you’re so smart, you tell the story,” to which the commenter decides they’ll barge in and do just that so the second person…
Confused?
Yeah, me too.
And I’d be even more confused if this was how the story within a multiple point-of-view (POV) novel was told.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted part 1 of this two-part series, in which I discussed structuring individual POVs so they would stand out as different enough for readers to tell apart. Equally important, as seen by the above storytelling disaster, is organizing POVs so they create a cohesive story experience. This may sound like a simple matter of just choosing who tells the story when, but there’s actually quite a bit more to it. Organizing POVs around each other first requires making sure each can stand on its own, which is conveniently the focus of this blog post. (It’s almost like I planned this.)
Since this post is also a follow-up to my initial one about turning a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) into a novel, I’ll also discuss how this organization relates to adventuring parties, but fear not. No TTRPG experience required.
So without further preamble, onward to the creation of a story with multiple points-of-view, or for my TTRPG people, glory! ⚔ (Sigh, I think I made that a thing for these posts now.)
Make Them Make Sense
Q. What makes characters in a book different from people in real life?
A. They make sense.
This is partly a joke, but it’s also kind of not. In real life, people are often predictable, but each person is, as I’ve heard said, a collection of anomalies. You might have known someone for years but still be shocked at how they react to something. This creates quite the disconnect as you try to reconcile the person you know with this completely out-of-character action.
Player characters (PCs) in a TTRPG campaign are similar. You may know what to expect from a rogue or a wizard more broadly, but you may also be shocked when the person playing one of these characters does something extremely unexpected or even nonsensical, such as entering the wizard into melee combat instead of having him stand back to cast spells from a safe distance. Sometimes, there might be legitimate reasons for this, such as an anti-magic field. In that case, the action, however inadvisable, at least makes a level of strategic sense.
However, if the wizard’s player just decides they “feel like stabbing something” for no discernable reason, this decision suddenly becomes loose-cannon behavior. It’s jarring. It stops action as people question what the player is doing.
And it’s exactly the kind of “just because” characterization you want to avoid when constructing your different characters’ POV sections.
There is certainly nothing wrong with book characters making unusual decisions. After all, the goal is to make them feel like real people so readers will connect with them. However, for a cohesive narrative experience, the “because I felt like it” decisions should be the exception, not the rule.
Readers literally have access to your POV characters’ thoughts. Thus, readers expect those characters to think and act consistent with who you’ve set each character up to be. If a POV character gets squeamish anytime someone even mentions spiders and then later rushes headlong into a giant spider’s cave with no reason to do so, readers are going to feel like that character is lying to them unless you’ve intentionally set them up to be unreliable (yes, that’s a thing).
This doesn’t mean characters always need to make “good” decisions. Real people don’t always do what’s best in the moment, and your characters don’t have to either. That said, the decision should make sense to them so readers can at least understand why they made that decision. If you truly want to write a character who’s driving motivation is “meh, I felt like it,” you can, but structurally, that might be tough to pull off for any length of time, particularly if you’ve got three or four POV characters doing it. Talk about 🤪.
↪ Quick side note: I mentioned intentionally unreliable POV characters. These are often referred to as “unreliable narrators,” and if you want to dig deeper into writing them, check out this article from Writers Digest.
Give Me an Arc! (Arc!)
Up until now, we’ve talked about POV characters as if they all pull equal weight in a novel. While this may feel like the case, there will be one character who emerges as the primary POV—the beating heart of the story. This character will drive the plot, and everything that happens, including the actions of your other POV characters, will ripple back to this center point.
This can be likened to different types of TTRPG adventures. If our fictional party is exploring a dungeon with lots of traps, the rogue, Stabitha, will likely (but not necessarily, for the people yelling about using a ten-foot pole to trigger traps) take point as the primary character, since she is the one with the trap-disarming skills. As a result, the actions of the other party members will revolve around the rogue, whether that’s Verra, the fighter, waiting to jump in if the trap triggers an army of goblins or Merek, cleric, on standby to remove poison when Stabitha fails her fortitude save. In a TTRPG, this kind of centralized focus on the character with the skills for the job is common, and no one blinks twice when the other characters sort of go dormant until a challenge emerges for which their skillset is needed. In our trap-heavy adventure, Stabitha is driving the proverbial bus while everyone else hangs out in the back, staring out the window and waiting for their stop.
Which will not work in a novel.
Imagine Stabitha becomes the central POV of the story. Her chapters are full of tension, challenges, and growth as she maneuvers the story bus through obstacle courses, across ravines, and down slippery mountain slopes. Stabitha’s chapters put readers on the edge of their seats.
Then the POV switches to Castor, the wizard , and he just follows Stabitha around, describing everything she does and doing nothing of any importance for his own character.
😴
Reading about uninteresting characters is boring. And the most boring characters are the ones with no skin in the game. Castor’s POV needs to have its own challenges to overcome and arc to follow. He needs to feel like a fully fleshed out character with his own story, even if his arc ultimately ends up taking a back seat to Stabitha’s centralized POV. Otherwise, his headspace (and the headspaces of anyone other than Stabitha) are just going to feel like commentary on Stabitha, which she doesn’t need because her POV is already doing that.
Location, Location, Location
As I said above, you shouldn’t use your additional POV characters as a walking camera for your main protagonist. But depending on the proximity of your characters, this is easier said than done. There are actually three key location relationships to consider when figuring out how to structure your individual POV characters’ arcs, so let’s take a look at how each of those works.
Far Distant
In this location relationship, POV characters are nowhere near each other and, indeed, might not even be aware of one another’s existences. A good example of this is Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In book one, A Game of Thrones, Daenerys spends all her time traveling across the country of Essos while Tyrion never leaves Westeros, which is on the other side of the world. At first glance, it may seem like these characters have no impact on each other at all, and perhaps for most of book one, this is true. However, their separate actions trigger changes that go on to affect both Westeros and Essos, meaning Tyrion’s and Daenerys’s arcs influence each other’s, though they’re never in a scene together.
Far distance relationships are about showing the grand scale of a world through the daily lives and struggles of characters in different places. In this situation, it is easy to ensure POV characters have their own arcs because they don’t have other POV characters in their space to steal the focus. Thus, it is also most critical to have fully fleshed out arcs for these characters because they can’t borrow tension from other POV characters to fill in empty space.
Close Distant
As the name suggests, POV characters in this type of distance relationship are closer but still not on top of each other. They exist in one another’s orbit and likely know the other exists, but they aren’t necessarily in the same group on the same adventure. In her American Royals series, author Katharine McGee demonstrates this well, even though two of her POV characters are sisters. The four POV characters all live in Washington D.C. and exist within and around the royal structure, but except for a few key events, they aren’t really together. They are close physically but distant in terms of how they interact.
Close distant relationships focus on how the actions within a given community or area impact different people within that space. For example, Beatrice, the crown princess, has little to do with Nina, the commoner Beatrice’s brother likes, but Nina definitely feels the impact of Beatrice’s influence on her world and vice versa. Unlike with Tyrion and Daenerys, the POV characters of American Royals are more immediately affected by one another, though, depending on how actions are taken, there might still be a delay before consequences are felt. As a result, close distant characters can sometimes borrow the shared tension of the setting that they all influence, but they need to have their own arcs for moments when they are the ones driving that shared tension.
Intertwined
An excellent example of this is three of the POV characters in The 100 by Cass Morgan. Clarke, Wells, and Bellamy spend most of the book in the same hundred square feet or so (maybe a bit more, but you get the idea). One of their chapters often ends on some kind of cliffhanger, which allows the next chapter to begin with another character taking an action to resolve that cliffhanger moment. Similarly, since they are in such a limited space, one might observe the other(s) without their knowledge, which then has an impact on the observer that they carry forward into future actions/consequences that affect the whole group.
The purpose of intertwined POV characters is to show their immediate physical and emotional relationships to one another, as well as how their interactions affect the world around them. This setup can make for some excellent tension, but it also presents the greatest challenge in terms of creating fully independent character arcs because the proximity of the characters makes it easy to fall into having one just observe the others. Naturally, there will be some observation, just because people observe the other people around them, but these observations should offer new information or change something, thus making them part of the POV character’s arc.
↪ Pro Tip: A novel need not rely on only one of these POV relationship types. A Game of Thrones features the members of the Stark family in close distant relationships. Similarly, The 100’s fourth POV character, Glass, is on a space shuttle, far distant from the three on Earth.
Wrapping It Up
And there it is, the how-to of making all your POV characters pull their weight, no matter where they’re located or how involved they are in the story.
Even better, writing this last section triggered an idea and a bunch of cut content for a post about the relationship between POV and pacing. So to make sure you don’t miss that, subscribe below, and I’ll see you soon. 👀