Reasons To Use Multiple Perspectives In Your Story

We’ve discussed perspective quite thoroughly in previous posts—first-person, third-person limited, and third-person omniscient, as well as a host of perspective errors. But we haven’t much discussed stories with multiple perspective characters, where the narrative jumps from point person’s point-of-view to another’s and back again.

Multiple-perspective stories can be written with any type of perspective, but these days third-person limited is the most common for these types of stories. Third-person omniscient stories are uncommon these days in general because they are difficult to write and to read (though they are all, by definition, multiple-perspective stories). First-person stories, on the other hand, can often be confusing if there is more than one perspective because readers can easily lose track of which narrator is speaking, since all of the narrators simply refer to themselves as “I”.

The number of points-of-view in a multiple-perspective story can vary widely. On one extreme, you have the Harry Potter books, which feature only two or three chapters across seven books from perspectives other than Harry’s. On the other extreme, you have stories like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which follows dozens of different points-of-view and switches perspective with nearly every chapter.

There is nothing wrong with writing a story from multiple perspectives—if it’s good enough for Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, then it’s good enough for the rest of us. Keep in mind, however, that writing from multiple perspectives is much more difficult than writing from a single perspective. If you choose to undertake this sort of difficult task, make sure it’s a choice that serves your story. If your story needs multiple perspectives in order to cover all of the plot, then put in multiple perspectives. If you’re only doing it because George R. R. Martin did it, however, then that’s not a good reason.

Here are some reasons a story might need multiple perspectives:

One person can’t be there for the whole story

Take a story like The Empire Strikes Back. At the beginning, the rebels are driven and scattered from their hidden base on Hoth. Luke goes to Dagobah to train with Yoda; Han, Leia, and the others evade the Empire through a strangely-cluttered asteroid field and then flee to Cloud City. Plot happens, and they’re (mostly) reunited at the end.

If Luke were the only perspective character, the audience would miss Han and Leia falling in love, the dark intrigue of their arrival at Cloud City, their capture by Darth Vader, Han being frozen in carbonite, Lando’s change of heart, and Leia and the others’ escape from Cloud City. If Leia were the only perspective character, we would miss Luke’s plot-important training—from Yoda’s reluctance to train him, “Do or do not. There is no try,” Luke’s vision of Vader, lifting the X-wing from the swamp, Luke’s decision to disobey his trainer to go save his friends, all the way to the climactic duel between Luke and Vader and the famous reveal of Vader’s identity. If we were to follow only one perspective character, then we would miss half the plot—therefore, multiple perspectives are needed.

To avoid an overabundance of convenient coincidences (Chosen One Syndrome)

Almost every story from any place or time relies on a certain amount of coincidence. Characters just happen to be in the right place at the right time to overhear just the right conversation, or Luke just happens to crash on Dagobah within walking distance of Yoda’s house—those sorts of things. We all accept a certain amount of implausibility for the sake of story.

But single-perspective stories tend to necessitate more implausible coincidences than do multiple-perspective stories. Look at the Harry Potter novels—across seven books, how many times does Harry conveniently overhear an important conversation that he wasn’t supposed to? How many more do Ron and Hermione happen to hear and relate to him? The sheer amount of coincidence can get to be a little staggering. In a multiple-perspective novel, you can give the audience all of the important plot information that they need without having to get all of that information to a single person.

To avoid boredom (More Chosen One Syndrome)

When plotting a story, it is a good idea to follow the action—show whatever part of the story is most interesting and engaging, and skip over parts that are dull or repetitive. The problem that arises in a single-perspective character is that this means that your single protagonist has to be there for almost every plot-important event or conversation that ever happens. Everything! J.K. Rowling even had to invent the pensieve so that she could have Harry be present for plot-important events that happened before he was even born! (And it was an excellent way to handle this problem, in my opinion.) But not every story can whip out a pensieve when the main character needs to be present for something plot important. More often, they have to rely on yet more convenient coincidences and implausible situations.

When single-perspective stories try to handle this more realistically, the story tends to become less engaging. One of the most common complaints that I’ve heard about Mockingjay (book three of The Hunger Games) is that so much of the actual story happens “off-screen” while Katniss is doing little to nothing on-screen. It was realistic to have her suffering from a PTSD-esque problem; but planning a big, daring mission to finally go save Peeta and then not showing us when it happened? That was disappointing, to say the least.

Multiple-perspective stories can handily side-step this problem. If one character has to drive for three hours before they’ll get to where something interesting will happen, switch to a different character in a more interesting situation. More characters get to share more of the spotlight, and the story will usually be a bit more plausible for it.

To give greater understanding or increase tension

Have you ever read The Wheel of Time? There’s a character named Galad who is in and out of the story throughout the entire fourteen books, and almost everyone hated him. He was cold and strict, a man whose devotion to what he believed was right led him to throw in his lot with dangerous, unthinking zealots. Or at least, that’s what he was for ten books or so. Then, I think in the eleventh book, we were for the first time shown a scene from Galad’s point of view. For many people, it was a revelation. Once we could see things from his perspective, he became sympathetic and understandable. Once scene was enough to make him suddenly likeable for the rest of the series, even when we weren’t in his perspective.

Writing a scene from a character’s perspective is an excellent way to get the audience to understand and sympathize with the character, if that’s what you need. (Or, if they’re despicable enough, it’s a good way to get the audience to quickly dislike or fear the character.)

Multiple perspectives can also increase tension. Show us a scene from a side character’s point of view that reveals that they are a traitor with a plan to bring down the other characters. Bam. All of a sudden, the audience knows that something bad is coming that the main characters don’t. That’s dramatic irony, folks, and it’s a handy tool that is only available in multiple-perspective stories.

So there’s some handy reasons for using multiple points-of-view in a story. Next time, we’ll go over some of the difficulties and hazards to look out for when composing multiple-perspective narratives.

Perspective and Parents' Names, Part Two

Last time, we discussed the subtle perspective error that can arise from calling your perspective character’s parents by their names in the prose—it creates a subtle implication of distance to the relationship. It’s a small problem, but one that writers should be aware of.

If you’re looking for ways of dealing with this problem (beyond simply calling the character “his mother” throughout the entire story), here’s a few tips and ideas:

Call the parents what you want, and make the relationship fit. There are a lot of reasons why a character might call their parents by name. You can easily work one of those into the relationship between your protagonist and their parent.

I’ve read plenty of stories where one of the central conflicts was between the protagonist and their disapproving/distant parent. If you’re going to have a conflict between the two of them anyway, why not ramp it up slightly? Perhaps your protagonist calls his father by name in order to upset his father. Perhaps he’s been so long estranged from his father that it feels odd to call him “dad” now, so he thinks of his father by name.

Perhaps your protagonist works with her mother, and her mother is concerned about potential accusations of nepotism. She might have the protagonist call her by name to avoid any appearance of favoritism. Perhaps there are other social circumstances behind the decision.

Or, barring external motivators, perhaps they’re simply the type of parents who prefer that their children call them by name.

Killing off the parents is always an option, too, though it can be a bit overdone. 

Call the parents by a different title. It often works surprisingly well to simply call the parent characters “Mom” and “Dad” without bothering to distinguish “my mom” or “so-and-so’s dad.” This only works if we’re very deep inside the perspective of the protagonist—usually because they are narrating in first-person perspective:

     I was ready to go, but mom was still loitering at the cash register, flirting with the perfume salesman. “Mom, we’re going to be late,” I called. She ignored me. Mom always got like that around cute guys.

This is particularly effective when your perspective character is a child (or an adult narrating their childhood).

Change the perspective. This is both the simplest and most time-consuming fix for the problem. Time-consuming, because if you’ve already written a significant portion of the story, it will require a bit of work to switch it to a new perspective. Simplest, because it fixes the problem without gimmicks or major adjustments to character relationships or plot.

The “Parent Name Problem” is most prevalent in third-person limited perspective, when we’re inside the head of the protagonist. If you switch to first-person, you can easily use the “Mom and Dad” approach above. Or, you can switch to a third-person omniscient narrator, who can tell us what is going on in your protagonist’s head while still referring to them by name without it being a perspective error.

Perspective Errors: Parents' Names

 First-person perspective and third-person limited perspective are probably the two most commonly-used perspectives in fiction. First-person is narrated by a character in their own words, while third-person limited places the audience directly inside the mind of the perspective character. In both cases, the language of the prose and what the narrative focuses on should be filtered through that character, as we’ve discussed before. We’ve also discussed perspective in relation to the name placeholders that you use to refer to characters. Today, we’ll look at a specific name-related perspective problem that writers encounter again and again.

The problem is this: perspective characters often have parents. That’s a good thing—not every protagonist should be an orphan. 

"One would think that Fiction's entire collection of protagonists had been recruited solely from her orphan asylums. Which we know is not the case."

But parents create a rather unique problem when it comes to names and name placeholders. Take a look at this example:

     Teri crouched on the top of the tall brick wall, watching for danger. There was no movement on the grounds below or in the manor ahead, and the narrow street behind her was clear of people in her direction.

     From her left, she heard a soft whistle. “Johanna, Luis,” Alina called to Teri’s parents, “we’re all clear. Come on up.”

     Teri gave a thumbs-up to her parents, and they silently scuttled out of the shadows across the street and up the rough face of the wall. They crouched beside her; Johanna bore a long rope coiled over her shoulder, and Luis carried a bag of thieves’ tools on his back.

     “Good job, you two,” Johanna whispered. “If you see anyone headed our way, signal us in the usual way.”

     “If we’re not back in twenty minutes, head back to the hideout,” Luis added. “We’ll catch up to you there.”

     Teri nodded. “Be careful on the skylight, dad.”

     Luis ruffled her hair with a smile and climbed down into the manor gardens.

     “I love you, my little girl,” Johanna whispered, giving Teri a quick hug.

     “I love you too, mom,” Teri whispered back as Johanna followed after Luis.

Do you see the problem? This passage is written in third-person limited perspective, and we’re inside Teri’s head. Now, Teri calls her parents “mom” and “dad” when she speaks. It is therefore logical to assume that she thinks of them that way, too—most children do. Most people do, for that matter. No matter how old we get, most of us think of our parents as “mom” and “dad.”  But in the passage above, Teri’s parents are referred to by name in the prose, even though we’re in Teri’s head.

Now, this is a very common difficulty, especially if your protagonist’s parents are prominent characters in the story. It can be very awkward and clunky to refer to them as “so-and-so’s mother” over and over again in the prose. For example:

     Teri handed her mother the bag. Her mother began to dig through it, frowning. “I want the two of you to stay here until I get back,” she said.

     Teri and Alina glanced at one another. “But you’ll need spotters,” Alina said. “It’s too dangerous for you to go alone.”

     Teri’s mother shook her head. “No. The two of you aren’t ready for this kind of job. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

     Teri placed her hand over her mother’s where she was holding the bag open. “Mom, please. Let us help.”

     Her mother sighed and hung her head for a moment. “Not this time, little girl,” she said. When she looked up, Teri was shocked to see that there were tears in her eyes. She’d never seen her mother cry.

That gets a little awkward, doesn’t it? Besides “her mother” being a bit of a long name placeholder, we're forced to repeat it more than we would her name (to avoid confusion between all of the instances of she and her that get thrown around with three female characters in the scene). We’re also forced to repeat Teri’s name a little more than looks good (otherwise, we’d create situations where the her in her mother would seem to be referring to Alina and not Teri—hence we say “Teri’s mother” in the third paragraph instead of “her mother.).

This problem is kind of a Catch-22. There tend to be problems whichever way you go.

Referring to the parents as “her mother” and “her father” thoughout the prose will be more true to life. But the larger the parents’ parts are, the more difficult this will make the writing.

Choosing to refer to the perspective’s characters by their names in the prose is an acceptable option, even if it is technically a small perspective error. Plenty of authors have done this in the past—for instance, if you read the first chapter of The Eye of the World (the first book of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series), you will see that Robert Jordan chose this method of dealing with the problem. Even though the perspective is third-person limited from Rand’s viewpoint, Rand’s father is referred to by name (Tam) in the prose. Most people don’t even notice anything unusual about it—and those who do notice the perspective error will quickly get used to it.

The problem with this approach is that it can create a subtle, unconscious distance between the perspective character and their parent. In the case of Rand and Tam, for instance (minor spoilers ahead), I was completely unsurprised when it was revealed that Tam was not Rand’s biological father. Rand was completely shocked by the revelation, but for years I could not figure out why it didn’t surprise me. Eventually, I pinpointed this as the reason—it is not uncommon for children or grown adults to refer to their adopted parents or step-parents by name, for a variety of reasons. The fact that the prose referred to Rand’s father by his first name even though we were in Rand’s head caused me to unconsciously label their relationship as an adoptive one rather than a biological one.

(This is in no way meant to disparage the relationships between children and their adoptive parents, of course. It is simply an observation of common patterns of speech and the situations in which they tend to appear.)

Now, is that a minor problem? Yes, probably. However, it is a problem that you ought to consider when approaching the problem of how to refer to your perspective character’s parents in the prose. 

Next time, we’ll discuss a few tips and possible alternate solutions to this problem.

Perspective Errors: Too Much Information

Another very common perspective error occurs when the author gives the audience too much information—that is, more information than the perspective character should have. For example, let’s say you’re reading a book written in third-person limited perspective from the viewpoint of a man named Sam, and you come across this passage:

     Sam glanced at the notebook on the table and then shook his head. “I won’t need it today,” he said, turning and walking out the door. Little did he know that, by leaving his notebook behind, he had just ensured that this would be the single worst day of his life.

Do you see the problem? Since this story is written in third-person limited perspective, we should only receive information that the viewpoint character has access to. Sam doesn’t know that he’s just ruined his day . . . the passage explicitly states that he doesn’t! Therefore, in giving us this information, the author has just made a perspective error—they leaped briefly from third-person limited to third-person omniscient narrator.

Generally, when an author makes a TMI perspective error, it’s because they’ve described the emotions, thoughts, or motivations of a non-viewpoint character:

     “I’ll be fine,” I said, kissing Emily on the cheek. “Go have a good day.”

     “Wait a second James,” she said, worried that I was still upset. “You’ll still call me at lunch, right?”

or described action that the viewpoint character cannot see:

     “I don’t want to go,” Missy said, thinking of the long drive and the awkward silences that would surely fill their conversation on the way. She turned away from Frank to look out the window at the storm. “It’s just going to get cancelled because of the weather, anyway.”

     Frank sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Well then, what do you want to do?”

In the first example, we’re in James’s perspective—therefore, we shouldn’t know that Emily is feeling worried. James can speculate that perhaps she is worried, or note that she looks worried; he can even say that he knows she’s worried, just as long as the action remains in his head rather than jumping into hers.

In the second example, Missy is our viewpoint character. She has just turned away from Frank, and therefore she cannot see when he runs a hand through his hair—and if she can’t see it, we shouldn’t be able to, either. 

Here are some options for how the previous examples could be fixed (italics for emphasis):

     “Wait a second James,” she said, probably worried that I was still upset. “You’ll still call me at lunch, right?”

     “Wait a second James,” she said. Her face still looked worried. “You’ll still call me at lunch, right?”

     “Wait a second James,” she said. I could tell that she was worried I was still upset. “You’ll still call me at lunch, right?”

     “I don’t want to go,” Missy said, thinking of the long drive and the awkward silences that would surely fill their conversation on the way. She looked out the window at the storm and then turned back to Frank. “It’s just going to get cancelled because of the weather, anyway.”

     Frank sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Well then, what do you want to do?”

     Frank sighed and stepped up beside her, running a hand through his hair. “Well then, what do you want to do?”

     Frank sighed. “Well then, what do you want to do?”

Overview: Third-Person Limited Perspective

Today we'll continue our series of discussions on common perspectives. We've already discussed what perspective and tense are and first-person perspective; today we'll delve into third-person limited perspective.

Third-person stories are told from the perspective of someone who is not part of the story; hence, all of the characters are referred to as "he," "she," or "it," rather than "I" or "we." In third-person limited perspective, your goal should generally be to not draw attention to the narrator—in a way, you're pretending that there isn't a narrator, that the audience is simply riding in a character's head and seeing what the character sees and thinks. Take a look at these examples from the first and second chapters of Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin:

     It was not until they were mounted and on their way that Bran allowed himself to taste the sweet air of victory. By then, his pup was snuggled inside his leathers, warm against him, safe for the long ride home. Bran was wondering what to name him.
     Halfway across the bridge, Jon pulled up suddenly.
     "What is it, Jon?" their lord father asked.
     "Can't you hear it?"
     Bran could hear the wind in the trees, the clatter of their hooves on the ironwood planks, the whimpering of his hungry pup, but Jon was listening to something else.
     "There," Jon said. He swung his horse around and galloped back across the bridge. They watched him dismount where the direwolf lay dead in the snow, watched him kneel. A moment later he was riding back to them, smiling.
     "He must have crawled away from the others," Jon said.
     "Or been driven away," their father said, looking at the sixth pup. His fur was white, where the rest of the litter was grey. His eyes were as red as the blood of the ragged man who had died that morning. Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind.
     "An albino," Theon Greyjoy said with wry amusement. "This one will die even faster than the others."
     Jon Snow gave his father's ward a long, chilling look. "I think not, Greyjoy," he said. "This one belongs to me."

     [Chapter Two]
     Catelyn

     Catelyn had never liked this godswood.
     She had been born a Tully, at Riverrun far to the south, on the Red Fork of the Trident. The godswood there was a garden, bright and airy, where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows across tinkling streams, birds sang from hidden nests, and the air was spicy with the scent of flowers.

In this example, there is no narrator to speak of—we don't know who is telling the story, because the narrator isn't a character. Instead, the narrator follows the thoughts and experiences of some perspective characters: Bran Stark in the first chapter and Catelyn Stark in the second. Even though Bran and Catelyn aren't personally telling the story, as they would be in a first-person narrative, we still see the world through their eyes. This is what limited perspective means—our view as an audience is limited to that of one character at a time. When the author wants to switch perspective characters, he begins a new section or chapter.

Advantages of Third-Person Limited Perspective

Reliable narrator: Because the narrative is not relayed by one of the characters, third-person stories tend to seem more trustworthy and objective. The audience feels like they're inside a character's head without a narrator, so what they are shown is probably true.

Character sympathy: While not usually quite as intimate as a first-person narrative, third-person limited stories can still feel very close to the characters—the story takes place in their heads, after all.

Multiple perspectives: As demonstrated by the example passage, third-person limited narrative makes it very easy to switch from one perspective character to another. Some books have two or three perspective characters, while others—like Game of Thrones—have dozens and dozens.

Eloquence: Not all characters are as intelligent or well-spoken as others. If you wanted to write a first-person story from the perspective of a thick-headed thug, it would be difficult to describe the action as well as you would like with the thug's limited vocabulary. In third person, however, you can write a scene from the thug's perspective without sacrificing eloquence or creativity.

Disadvantages of Third-Person Limited

Easy to over-do: Just because you can write from multiple perspectives does not mean that you can do so well. Many new authors attempt to branch their story out among too many perspective characters, resulting in a slow and confusing story that loses track of its own plot. Yes, George R.R. Martin did it—but you're not George R.R. Martin. (Unless you are, of course. Hi George! Thanks for stopping by.) Try to keep your novel to two or three perspectives until you've really got the hang of juggling all those characters.

Difficult to withhold information from the reader: Since the narrator is so reliable in third-person limited, and since the audience is inside the heads of various characters, the audience will often feel cheated if you don't tell them information that the main character should have known.

Perspective errors: It is very easy to make perspective errors when writing a third-person limited story; in fact, this perspective probably sees more mistakes than any other perspective. We'll cover the many errors that writers make in third-person limited in future updates.

Perspective and Tense Overview

Ah, perspective and tense. These are a vast and thorny topic—too vast for me to cover in only one blog post. So, for today, we’re simply going to run through what perspective and tense are and which of them are best for writing. Once we've established a solid understanding of what perspective and tense are, we'll be able to discuss the ways in which writers can make mistakes with them.

Perspective

Put simply, perspective means “point of view”—who is telling the story and in what manner. There are only a few perspectives from which a story should be told:

First Person

This is when your story is being told from the point of view of one of the characters. It’s usually easy to pick out—if the word “I” crops up a lot in the prose, than it’s probably first person.

Third Person Omniscient

This is when your story jumps from character to character, showing many points of view over the course of any given scene at once. There may be an implied narrator or there may not.

Third Person Limited

This is when your story is limited to the point of view of a single character at a time, but that character isn’t personally telling the story, as they are in first person. It is marked by frequent use of the words "he" or "she."

While it is technically possible to write a story from a different perspective (many choose-your-own-adventure stories are told in second person, for instance), it’s not something that should be done with any sort of regularity or without a very, very good reason.            

Tense

Perspective’s pernicious twin sister is tense. Tense is the “when” of the action. Did it already happen, or is it happening right now? When we’re speaking to one another, it is very easy to keep our tenses straight; but when you’re trying to string together a coherent set of several thousand to several hundred thousand words, tense can be difficult to keep track of.

Past Tense

Past tense stories are told as though they have already happened, finished, and are now being related to the reader.

Present Tense

Present tense stories are told as though they are currently happening (“Jason runs to the car” instead of “Jason ran to the car”). This is increasingly common in first-person stories but is very unusual in third-person.

When we combine our common modes of perspective and tense, we end up with four results that encompass the majority of literature:

First person, past tense: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Animorphs series by Katherine Applegate, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan

First person, present tense: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth

Third person omniscient, past tense: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy, Dune by Frank Herbert

Third person limited, past tense: The Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

Over the next week or so, we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of these narrative modes, and then we'll be set to discuss some of the many, many ways in which new writers tend to break their perspectives and tenses.

P.S.

Before we finish, a word of warning: many novice writers are tempted to look at a list like this and think, “But I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. I want to be original! I’m going to write a novel in second-person perspective and future tense! That will get some attention.” To you, hypothetical reader who is even now nodding to yourself in confident satisfaction, I have one very important word: no.

Don’t do it. And because I’m afraid you won’t listen to me, I’m going to attempt to convey the gravity of that sentiment by isolating it as its own paragraph, capitalizing it, bolding it, and italicizing it.

NO.

I really can’t make it any clearer than that without opening up a live video chat with you and screaming it in your face. Do not attempt to write in a perspective/tense combination outside of the four that I’ve shown you here. You’re not the first person to think of that idea, not by a lo-o-o-o-ng shot. You won’t come across as clever and original, you’ll come across as amateur and inept. Editors won’t even read your story—they’ll take one look and go, “Second-person future? Why is this person wasting my time?” And then they’ll give your story to an intern and tell them to send you a rejection. I know they will, because I’ve seen editors do this, and I have done it myself.

Now, I know: There are some excellent and original books out there that are written in unusual narrative modes. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is in second-person perspective, while Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones are written in first-person omniscient. Maybe you’ve read something else that was written in an unusual narrative mode that just blew your socks off.  Great. Send it to me, I’d love to read it. 

But those stories are atypical. They probably got to print because the author was a well-known, respected professional with a history of turning out great work—the type of person that an editor can trust to not waste their valuable time. The type of writer who has learned the rules inside and out and now knows how to break them to spectacular effect. You’re not that person, not yet. For now, stick with the tried-and-true basics until you've mastered them inside and out.