Let me start by defining “multiple viewpoint.” A multiple-viewpoint story is one in which the scenes, chapters, or sections are written either from the point of view of different characters, or using different types of viewpoint (e.g. first person for the first scene/section/chapter, tight-third for the second), or both.
Allow me to say that again: In a multiple-viewpoint story, the viewpoint character changes, or the type of viewpoint changes, or both things change, from one part of the story to another.
This means that “multiple viewpoint” is not a type of viewpoint like first-person, omniscient, etc. I’ve referred to it before as a structure, but really it’s more of an extremely flexible structural technique, one that can be used with any viewpoint type and with many, if not all, different story structures. It has become more and more popular as writers who’ve grown up with TV and movies tackle sprawling epics (like The Game of Thrones) with ensemble casts, but the form itself has been around for a long, long time.
Currently, the most common use of multiple viewpoint is to present the reader with an ensemble cast who have overlapping stories. Each major character has scenes or chapters for which they are the viewpoint; most of these are written in tight third-person (though if one or more of the characters is a bad guy, their scenes are often done in camera-eye to keep from giving away too much too soon). The central plot goal is something that is vitally important to all the characters, like “how are we going to survive this hurricane/earthquake/shipwreck/exploding volcano?”, but since each character has a different idea of what the best thing to do is, their stories are all different. As a result, they lead each character to a different ending. Since they’re all aiming for the same goal, each character’s efforts also tend to help or hinder the efforts of other characters (whether on purpose or accidentally), which tangles all the individual plotlines into one giant plot web.
This kind of story allows a writer to take a single event – the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, for instance – and examine the reasons why some of the citizens of Pompeii left early enough to escape, while others did not. Instead of following only one main character, who can perforce make only one set of decisions, the writer gets to show several possibilities: the character who hides inside a building in hopes of waiting out the eruption, the one who decides to take the chance of heading to the harbor or down the coastal road, the thief who returns in search of loot, the son who returns in search of his elderly mother. Viewpoint characters can die. They don’t all have to be sympathetic or admirable. In essence, the writer gets to pick several different branches of the decision tree, instead of having to stick to only one.
Juggling all these different, intertwined stories is seldom easy, and the more of them there are, the harder it gets. Unfortunately, quite a few writers don’t realize this in time. Multiple viewpoint is a bit like omniscient in that the writer has to decide where the limits are; one can use any character as a viewpoint, but one cannot use every character. The writers have to make decisions…and stick to them when they reach a point in the story where some crucial event is taking place and none of their current viewpoint characters happens to be there to see it. The temptation in this situation is to slip in a brand-new viewpoint who is present, but this frequently causes more problems than it solves.
First among those problems is that using Character G as the POV for one and only one scene frequently looks and feels a little … off. It’s too convenient; it makes the author look lazy and sloppy, and the author knows it. So the author goes back and plants a couple of earlier scenes to establish G as a POV, so that G isn’t popping up quite so obviously as a way of showing that one crucial event. And the minute the author does this, G starts to develop his/her own story. Characters do this all the time anyway, but giving a character the viewpoint increases the likelihood of it happening by about 1000%.
Second, having invented Character G in order to show one offstage crucial event makes it easier for the writer to invent Characters H, I, and J to use as viewpoints for much less crucial events, things that the writer wants to show because he/she has this super-cool mental image of the scene, but that don’t actually need to be shown. When viewpoint characters start multiplying like this, one of two things happens: either each viewpoint character develops a storyline and the word-count begins to bloat, or the writer cuts back on the development of most of the storylines and the reader has less and less of each POV character’s story to sympathize with.
It’s simple mathematics: with four POV characters and 100,000 words, each character can have roughly 25,000 words worth of their story and their viewpoint if the writer wants to keep the viewpoints balanced, which is already only a short novella per character. Add one more POV, and everybody is down to 20,000 words. At six POVs, you’re down to a novelette per character…or you can stick with 25,000 words per character and end up with 150,000 words in the manuscript. And frankly, very few novelists stick to 25,000 words for a major character, even in a multiple-viewpoint novel. It’s usually more like forty to sixty thousand or more words each, which means 160,000 words (for a minimum-word count four-viewpoint story) to 360,000 words (for maximum word counts at six viewpoint characters).
Of course, one doesn’t have to keep the viewpoints balanced. That, however, is a different way of using multiple viewpoint (remember, I said it was flexible?), and I’m going to talk more about it next week, because this is already getting long.
