A couple of folks had questions about the last post, most notably “How do you know your story is complex enough for multiple viewpoint?” and “Does it count as multiple viewpoint if it’s a camera-type that follows different characters?” So I thought I’d spend another post on this.
Multiple viewpoint is one of the most confusing terms in writing, because it isn’t really a viewpoint at all. Think about it for a minute: viewpoint type comes in first-person, second-person, and third person, just like verb forms; arguably, one can also do first-person-plural and third-person-plural. There is no verb form “multiple.”
What multiple viewpoint is, is a structure, like “linear” and “parallel scenes” and “circular.” It is a way of ordering the events and incidents in the story. Unlike most other structures, though, it isn’t playing with the when and where of events, or with the mental/emotional effects on the main character. Instead, it’s playing with who and why. Specifically, it’s playing with whose eyes the reader sees through, and what each character’s reasons for doing things are. And, sometimes, with letting the reader know more than any individual character does.
A multiple viewpoint structure can be used with any story that has more than one character. For example, take Cinderella. The fairy tale is straightforward, and most retellings are equally straightforward: the Cinderella character is put upon by the evil stepfamily, the godmother interferes and sends Cinderella to the ball anyway, the prince falls in love and seeks her out, and the evil stepfamily gets their comeuppance.
Retelling the story using a multiple viewpoint immediately raises the question which viewpoints to use? The answer depends on whether the author wants a complex retelling or a straightforward one. For the straightforward one, Cinderella, her godmother, and the prince are the obvious main choices; the evil stepsisters and stepmother could be viewpoints, but if they are, they’ll almost have to be one-note caricatures in order to keep the storyline the same. Most authors don’t try; if they want more viewpoints, they go for original characters whose presence is implied by the setting – palace footmen, the king and queen, servants, townsfolk.
A complex retelling, on the other hand, almost requires the stepsisters and the stepmother’s viewpoints as well as Cinderella’s, and not as caricatures, either – as individuals who have a different take on what is going on, and good reasons for what they do that the reader would never know about without those viewpoints. Perhaps the stepmother is being blackmailed and that’s why money is so tight, or perhaps she’s trying to fend off a skeevy old rich dude who wants to buy all three of the girls for his harem. Maybe the stepsisters are running a charity fundraising business that Cinderella made a nasty comment about once (not knowing they were involved). Maybe the stepmom has cancer, unknown to Cinderella, and is trying to get her family safely settled before she dies. Maybe the chores she sets Cinderella aren’t really so bad if one looks at them from a different viewpoint (I certainly thought that I was much-put-upon when I was sixteen and had to do dishes and fold laundry).
Whatever the reasons, the complex multiple-viewpoint story looks vastly different from the simple one. It may still be obvious who the good guys and bad guys are, but neither side looks quite as black-and-white as they do in a straightforward story, because the reader knows more about everybody.
Because multiple viewpoint is a structure, rather than a first-person, second-person type of viewpoint, it can be used to mix up types of viewpoint as well as viewpoint characters. That is, one viewpoint character’s scenes may be in first-person, another’s in tight-third, and another’s in camera-eye or omniscient. This lets the writer play with different levels of intimacy with different characters – that one-shot viewpoint where the warehouse guard gets killed is often (not always) in camera-eye because the point isn’t to get the reader identifying with and understanding the guard, it’s to move the plot along by showing the killing. Sometimes, this kind of one-scene viewpoint is a good way of ramping up tension or creating a mystery or just moving the plot along; other times, it’s a cheap way for the writer to get out of learning how to get a particular bit of information in when none of the current viewpoint characters are conveniently to hand.
The answer to “does moving the camera focus around count as multiple viewpoint?” is, therefore “No, because camera-eye and omniscient are third-person viewpoint types; multiple viewpoint is a structure.” The answer to “How do you know when your story is complex enough?” is “Actually, that’s irrelevant; the structure can be used with any kind of story. The question is, is it the most effective structure for the story you want to tell?” If you want to focus strictly on Cinderella’s story, you probably don’t need multiple viewpoint (and it may get in the way). If you want to show that the stepmother and sisters are perfectly justified, from their viewpoint, you may not need Cinderella’s viewpoint. If you want to examine the complexity of a blended family from inside and outside and across generations, you probably do need multiple viewpoint.
It depends on what story you want to tell, and how you want to tell it. The problem isn’t the complexity of the story, so much as it is mis-matching the kind of story you want to tell with a structure that works better with a different kind. If you desperately want to write a multiple-viewpoint story, but you also want to focus really tightly on Cinderella…maybe you should think about doing Cinderella as tight-third or first-person, and save the multiple-viewpoint for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
As you said, story determines how many people you need to tell it, and which pov they should each use.
I find the ones where there are three first person accounts irritating – because I like to focus on a character, even in a rotating pov story, who I can identify with, and I also identify with the person in first person, so it jerks my head around. Three third-person povs works for me – then I can identify with one of the characters.
It is typical that, even with several viewpoint characters, one is still the most important to the story – and gets more ‘page time.’ My third character is the antagonist, and the third person in an adult love triangle – she gets the fewest scenes, but there are things that add to the story that can only come from her.
Also, to add in more complexity, I learned from Orson Scott Card’s Characters & Viewpoint a technique that works for me: my third person pov is not fixed in ‘closeness’ – it varies in very close when I want to put in the exact though the character is having, hovers at a middle distance most of the time, and even gets out to a fairly distant third person for general observations (almost like omniscient). As long as you don’t go abruptly from close to distant in one sentence, it works well.
It would be too claustrophobic to remain in tight third person for every little thing, but works to get in close for the emotional or important parts in a scene, and I’ve learned to check my distance, and pace it, to tell the story.
As with every story – whatever works for the writer, and is not too confusing for the reader.
Whatever you do, it should be consistent throughout the book, or vary slowly to make a point, possibly going from a more distant pov to a closer one as you get to know the characters. It has to be transparent to the reader. The reader should ‘get it’ subconsciously after a few pages, and then not have the system changed underfoot, except for very good reasons.
All the possible motives you imputed to the stepmother are nice ones. It’s perfectly possible to make her more complex without making her nicer.
She and Cinderella’s father were an arranged match until he fell in love and married Cinderella’s mother, and she’s out for revenge — both in abusing Cinderella and in getting an even grander match for her daughters.
She’s after Cinderella’s inheritance; there’s only so much to go around, after all, and she doesn’t have much for her daughters’ dowries.
She suffered a painful decline in status in marrying a merchant, and is determined to crawl her way back up the social ladder. Perhaps she has relatives who took the money resulting from the union to get themselves far more respectable positions, and who do not treat her as an equal. (How much sympathy this will garner depends on how much honest poverty she was warding off. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to buckle down to a budget and careful management of the family estate — how many alternative she has also matters.)
For some reason this makes me want to try multiple viewpoints … Now see what you’ve done to me!!!
The muse likes to stretch.
Sometimes she likes to stretch past the writer’s abilities, which can be useful for practice even if the result deserves only a safe location in the trunk.
Alas, sometimes she likes to stretch even when you can’t manage the stuff that doesn’t entail her stretching, even.
Thinking of Cinderella’s stepmother …
C. S. Lewis’s _Till We Have Faces_ is _Cupid and Psyche_ told from the viewpoint of one of the sisters. Her motives are not what Apuleius thought they were.