Gillian Bronte Adams writes YA epic fantasy novels, including the award-winning Of Fire and Ash and The Songkeeper Chronicles. She loves strong coffee, desert hikes, and trying out new soup recipes on crisp fall nights. Her favorite books are the ones that make your heart ache and soar in turn. When she’s not creating vibrant new worlds or dreaming up stories that ring with the echoes of eternity, she can be found off chasing sunsets with her horse, or her dog, Took. Gillian loves to connect with readers online through her website and Instagram.

Have you ever found yourself skipping around while reading a multiple POV (point-of-view) novel because you’re wholly invested in one character’s storyline and just can’t wait to get back to them? (Particularly when they’re thrown into a life and death situation and then the author chooses to switch to another POV, which is either evil or genius or possibly both.)

Or, conversely, have you ever found yourself skipping over one specific POV because you can’t stand the character and you just don’t want to spend time with them?

I have. Guilty on both counts. (Also the evil/genius situation above, but let’s not talk about that.)

There’s a running joke in my upcoming YA epic fantasy sequel Of Sea and Smoke where one character explains away the wilder events of his life (like slaying a sea monster or joining the revolution) as happening “mostly by accident,” and that line always makes me grin, because his story came about “mostly by accident” too.

You see, I didn’t intentionally set out to write a multiple POV novel. But while it started “mostly by accident,” actually writing a multiple POV novel proved to be a balancing act that required a lot of intentionality, learning, and work. Each additional POV increases the complexity of your story. Seeing the story through multiple perspectives means more words, more emotional beats, and more threads to weave together in a satisfying way. It means providing your readers with more opportunities to connect with a character they love or with one more character they just don’t connect with.

So today, we’re going to look at some of the common pitfalls writers can stumble into when writing multiple POVs, as well as tips for how to avoid them.

First, a quick definition: what is a multiple POV novel?

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start by defining what we’re talking about! In a multiple POV novel, you get to experience the story from the perspective of more than one main character. We’re not talking about head hopping or writing from an omniscient POV where you’re looking down from outside the story, watching the events unfold, but writing from the first, second (less common), or third person perspectives of multiple characters in a single story.

Pitfall 1: Racking Up POV Characters for the Fun of It

Your main POV characters are the eyes through which readers encounter the events of your novel. Their personalities, backgrounds, hopes, fears, and dreams color your readers’ experience, so choosing who those POV characters should be is important. We won’t go into the process of building out characters here, but you can search the many wonderful articles here on Go Teen Writers for help.

Each POV character you add needs to bring something unique to the story. They should have goals, dreams, and personal stakes that connect with the overarching story. With multiple POV characters, those goals and personal stakes need to be equally compelling, otherwise you run the risks we talked about at the opening, where readers skip certain POV characters to get back to the ones they’re truly invested in.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Does each main POV character have a compelling story goal? If not, will adding a compelling story goal for a specific POV character enhance or just complicate my novel? (If the answer is the latter, maybe that character should just be a side character instead.)
  
• Does their voice or perspective fill a gap in my novel? Or do all of my main POV characters think, sound, and react alike? Is there a unique perspective this character could bring that would enhance the story?

• Is there information or a view point on the larger story that readers can best access through their eyes? One of the reasons you often see multi-POV in epic fantasy is because events are taking place on such a massive scale that the best way for readers to follow along is to zoom in to specific pieces through the eyes of multiple characters. So, in The Two Towers, we get to see the war unfolding on multiple fronts: through Frodo and Sam’s eyes when they run into Faramir just outside of Mordor and through the eyes of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli fighting the Uruk-Hai in Rohan. The story splits into other perspectives/side stories too, and each one helps us to see the vast scale of the battle for Middle Earth.

Pitfall 2: Rewinding to Retell

Chances are you chose your POV characters because you’re invested in them. You like seeing the story through their eyes. That’s a good thing. But it can also be tempting to want to show all of your POV characters’ reaction to a story event by rewinding to retell each of their perspectives. Not only can this slow down the story, it can also make it confusing for readers to follow the timeline.

Generally, readers are interested in what happens next. This does not always have to be what happens next chronologically; it could be the next question or the next thread of information. But the goal should always be to carry the story forward with new moments, new tidbits, new pieces of the puzzle.

Rewinding to replay the same moment from another perspective might feel interesting, but unless it offers a massive twist that completely reframes what happened, you’re taking the story backward instead of forward, which risks losing your readers’ interest.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Does switching to an alternate POV add anything new to this scene?
• How does this scene move the overarching story forward?

An example of reframing what happened is the film Vantage Point, which is built around replaying one specific event (a presidential assassination attempt) from the “vantage points” of multiple characters. Each character offers a unique perspective that allows the audience to eventually piece together the whole picture. So each perspective provides new information that moves the story forward, even as the film jumps back in time to get it.

Pitfall 3: Revealing Info in One POV that Steals Tension from Another

One of the trickiest bits of novel writing is choosing when to reveal information. Questions, curiosity, a sense of anticipation (or even dread) all create tension that keeps readers reading. Readers want to find out what happens next. They want to understand why and how and what is going on. So when you have multiple POVs with different vantage points on the story, choosing when to reveal those vantage points has the potential to raise or lower the tension for your readers.

You can add tension by giving each POV character access to a piece of information but not all of it. As the readers put together the pieces, they begin to see the whole picture and see the impending threat while the characters remain largely in the dark as disaster looms closer and closer, like in The Illuminae Files by Jay Kristoff and Amie Koffman. Until, finally, chaos breaks loose and both readers and characters are left wondering how anyone is going to survive!

But it’s also very easy to strip away tension by revealing information in one POV that actually undermines the emotional effect of what’s happening in other perspectives. Consider a scenario where one character is stuck in a disaster situation where they believe there’s no way out and no hope, but readers already know from the POV of another character that help is about to arrive. Suddenly, readers don’t feel the first character’s desperation quite so much.

Of course, there are a variety of ways you could set up that scenario to maintain tension, all of which underscore the point that choosing when and how you reveal information in multiple POVs is vital.

 Questions to ask yourself:

• Does revealing this information in one POV raise or lower the tension for the other characters or the readers?
• Does revealing it now change how readers view what’s going on in the other POVs?

Pitfall 4: The One Dragging POV Character:

It’s a truth that (should be) universally acknowledged that you’re rarely going to write a multi-POV book where each reader cares about each of the POV characters equally. Each reader is unique, and each POV character should be unique, and it’s inevitable that some readers will connect more with one POV character than with another.

However, you can take steps to avoid the “Aw, man, not Joey again!” reaction by working to make each character’s story equally compelling (see Pitfall 1), focusing on each character’s introduction, honing the opening hook of each chapter, and paying attention to the overall pacing of your story.

• Character Introductions: Ideally, the first glimpse we get of each of your POV characters should be unique to them, root us in their personality/perspective, and hook us into their story. Since it may be several chapters before we see them again, we need to become invested quickly. The earlier we become invested, the less likely we are to groan when we have to break switch from one to another.

• Opening hook of each chapter: As writers, we tend to spend a lot of time on the opening chapters of our novel, and often, particularly, on the first sentence of the first chapter. Why? Because once readers have picked up our book, we want to convince them not to put it down. Each chapter provides another opportunity to hook readers and make them keep reading, which is especially important when you’re switching POV characters, whether it’s for the first or tenth time. Essentially, when you focus on crafting that chapter opening to draw your readers in, you’re telling them you understand that they were invested in what was going on with the one character, but if they trust you and follow along, you have another equally interesting part of the story for them to explore.

• Overall pacing of your story: Make sure you do have another equally interesting part of the story for them to explore. In other words, avoid the battle of Helm’s Deep to Ent Moot scene change. If you’re familiar with The Two Towers film, you know that it cuts away during a high action, high intensity battle scene to a slow, drawn out conversation between Merry, Pippin, and the ents. Now in that instance, I think the filmmakers were actually trying to make the audience feel the same frustration and helplessness as Merry and Pippin—in which case, it was very effective. But generally speaking, cutting away during a high action scene with one POV character to a painfully slow scene with another is a sure way to frustrate your readers and prompt them skip back to the action.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How could my POV character introductions help readers invest in them?
• Do my chapter openings draw readers into this next segment of my story?
• Could the pacing/structure of my story be contributing to readers liking or disliking being in a specific character’s POV?

Pitfall 5: Filler Scenes to Check In with POV Characters

Sometimes, it’s tempting to switch back to a specific POV character because we’ve been away for a bit, and it feels like we need to check back into their head. Unfortunately, this can result in filler scenes where not much happens to advance the story. Or it can lead you to pick a POV character who wasn’t actually the one with the most emotional investment in the scene, but you switched to them anyway because it felt like it should be their turn.

There’s nothing wrong with creating a pattern for when you alternate between POVs. Some books skillfully alternate between POVs every chapter (Ember in the Ashes by Saaba Tahir, The Blood of Kings series by Jill Williamson). But if there’s not something interesting happening in a specific character’s storyline at the moment, don’t feel like you need to alternate POVs just to stick to a pattern. Patterns exist to serve the story. The story is always king.

Questions to ask yourself:

• When you have multiple POV characters together in the same scene, which one has the most emotional investment in what is happening? Which POV character has the most at stake?
• Which POV character can play the most active role or has the most interesting perspective on what is happening?

At the end of the day, the balancing act of writing a novel with multiple POVs is not about making sure that each POV character gets the same amount of page time, but about making sure that the story works as a cohesive whole, utilizing plot, structure, pacing, and emotional beats.

Have you ever tackled a multiple POV novel? What other common pitfalls and/or tips to avoid them would you add to this list?

Stephanie here! Gillian is generously giving away a paperback ARC of Of Sea and Smoke! (A book that I am SO EXCITED FOR since I’m currently enjoying Of Fire and Ash). This giveaway is only available for U.S. residents. Enter to win below!