Multiple viewpoint issues–WIP

In case anyone wondered, the interior pages got finished and turned in in good time. But today’s post is going to be more ranting about the WIP. Fair warning.

Multiple viewpoint stories are inherently complicated. As a reader, I often find myself interested mainly in one specific character, and wanting to skip or skim over the sections that focus on everyone else. Sometimes, there’s a character that I actively dislike, and I can have great difficulty forcing myself to read that character’s sections, even when they are obviously plot-relevant. (When that happens, I almost never re-read the entire novel—and I normally reread nearly everything, sooner or later. But once I’ve suffered through that character I dislike once, I don’t want to have to do it again, and since I already know what happens, I can get away with just reading “the good parts” on the second or third time through.)

As a writer, I’ve tried writing both single-viewpoint and multiple-viewpoint, and I generally prefer single-viewpoint. It means I don’t have to worry about readers skipping parts of the book that don’t appeal to them, and it means I don’t have a second character’s plot arc to worry about. Because if a character gets a viewpoint, the story is suddenly at least partly about them, unless they’re a one-scene-at-the-end-of-which-they-die viewpoint (which is a technique that I personally dislike, but like all techniques, sometimes nothing else will do the job).

Somewhat to my dismay, the current WIP (not the one I just finished interior pages for, the one that’s currently halfway through the first draft) developed a need for two viewpoint characters, which is giving me fits. First, because my secondary viewpoint—and he’s definitely a secondary viewpoint, not a co-protagonist—has not got much of a plot arc in this book. Yet. (He needs to have something…). Second, because using these two particular viewpoints is making me more aware of how the background narrative has to change when I switch from one to the other, and the way it has to work annoys me.

For example, the secondary viewpoint is from a non-Earth culture in which rules and status are vastly important. In his culture, everyone has a proper title (unless they have had it stripped from them for criminal behavior), and one is supposed to use that title at all times, even in one’s thoughts, unless one has been given explicit permission not to. This means that when he’s the viewpoint, all of the characters are referred to as lord/lady/mistress/master/madam/sir, even in the narrative portions. He also spends at least a paragraph on thinking about the proper title for any new people he meets, because it would be a horrible—and possibly dangerous—faux pas to get it wrong.

This means that the narrative in his sections sounds awkwardly formal to me, and I keep spending an inordinate amount of time trying to make it sound less formal while still following my rules, until I remember that this is how he is supposed to sound. I did this to myself on purpose. I wanted a character who would provide a contrast to my main POV, someone who’d show how weird her ideas seem to someone born and raised under their system, and I didn’t think he would have enough impact unless I gave his viewpoint from the inside.

So I need the guy as a POV for thematic and structural reasons, and the way he thinks is making me grumpy. (I also still need a secondary plot arc for him—a short one, because I would like to give at least a passing nod to the publisher’s preferred word-count—but that is a whole different matter.) Mind you, I like the guy; it’s just that there are times I want to shake him for being so stubborn. Which is pretty normal for most writers and many of their characters.

The point is, how he thinks, what his background is like, what he knows and doesn’t know, don’t just affect how I write his dialog and his interior monolog. They also affect the narrative that’s attached to him. He doesn’t see Maria talking to Jane; he sees Lady Maria talking to Customs-Mistress Jane. He doesn’t see a new approach to a problem as a chance for positive change; he sees new approaches and experiments as suspicious and probably wrong-headed. He assumes that the way he has been taught to see the world is not merely right and proper, but as inevitable as the law of gravity. (He is frequently, but not always, wrong about this.)

In order to write this viewpoint character, I have to get into his head. Even—or especially—the opinions he holds that I disagree with and hope to eventually change. If he’s going to be a convincing character, he can’t be wrong about everything, and when he is wrong, he has to have good reasons for thinking he’s right based on what he knows (insufficient or incorrect information is a good reason, but it can’t always be the reason).

It’s not easy to get into the head of someone you disagree with, even if you rather like them as a character. It impinges on Real Life. As an author, I want to make my characters believable and realistic, but as a person, I don’t like thinking that any reasonable person would disagree with certain things I believe (even if said reasonable person is a character I’m making up). My characters can’t all be exactly like me mentally, any more than they can be exactly like me physically.

But that means that sometimes I have to set aside what I think, and take a long, hard look at the whys and wherefores behind opinions my characters would hold, so that those characters don’t become cardboard arguments for “why everyone who disagrees with me is wrong and stupid.” This is not an easy thing for most people to do. It certainly isn’t easy for me, but when the character in question is a viewpoint character, it’s the only way I can keep them from becoming cardboard.