POVs: All together or seperated?

[ThisAdamGuy]

I had a thought today while working on my WIP. Road to Olympus has nine main characters so far, and I'm probably going to add even more eventually. The way I've been writing it, the POV character changes between chapters, occasionally sticking with the same character through multiple chapters if something really important is happening to them. Obviously, that lets the plot play out in chronological order, with the reader knowing what each individual character is up to at each specific point in time.

But with so many main characters, it occurred to me that this might get messy, with the readers not being able to keep up with while jumping from one head to another every few pages. So here's what I was thinking: divide everything up. Their stories are almost completely separate from each other right now, anyway. They're going to come together eventually, but for right now they're all just random competitors doing their own thing in different parts of the same enormous tournament. So rather than head hop between nine characters in one book, I could focus on one character, write an entire book about them, and then write another book about another character, then another, etc. Not only would this help to declutter the narrative, but it'd make it easier for me to release on Amazon (which is something I do).

The downside is that this would force the reader to retread the same events sometimes. This might lead to readers going "Ugh, do we have to read about the week leading up to the tournament AGAIN?!" But I think I might have a way around that. Some of the characters do come into contact with each other early on, just not for very long, and rereading the same events from another character's POV could explain some things that aren't explained in the previous books. Such as, in book 1, Lanz would run into someone on his way to sign up for the tournament. A minute later, the guy he ran into gives Lanz a huge bear hug and declares that they're best friends before running off. Then in book 2, you find out that was actually Rignas, and by knocking him down at that exact moment, Lanz had actually saved him from an assassination attempt. In book 3, Jyll is attacked by a man in a trench coat. In book 4, you find out he was a monster hunter hired because Jyll is a monster disguised as a human, and he's entered the tournament so he can keep chasing her.

What do you guys think? Should I keep the stories all together, or separate them into individual books?

 

[miyoga]

I can't give you a definitive answer, and I wouldn't want to as it will be your story and you need to be true to your intentions. I can recommend 3 authors who've handled similar situations very well.

Teanam doesn't have the constant POV flips, but does dedicate entire chapters/mini-arcs to a character and their perspective. Do we re-read about some events? Sure. Does it make us go "omg, not this for the hundredth time"? Maybe slightly but with a diverse enough set of personalities between the main cast, it's not so bad.

Next up, if you're down to read more is Paytoechip. His POV will flip depending on what's going on and his main cast is about 5-6 characters (Teanam's has about 10 mains, but mostly focuses on 1 or 2). Both of these authors are going to be heavy reads as they're in the hundreds of chapters each on their current projects, but it could be worth it for the insight.

The final author is someone who has been known to flip between characters mid-chapter (Paytoechip does as well, but far less frequently). Not knowing the types of things you'd be interested in reading, I would purely recommend this author as an example of what could be done: Purplecatgirl. They have a cast that varies in size from one story to the next, but they will typically devote some amount of time to looking through the eyes of each character, including the antagonist(s). The major catch here is that they don't publish with Amazon.

As for my own ideas and suggestions, if an interaction is brief enough that it isn't worth mentioning who they are (or if they won't be relevant until much later), then you're better off just retelling an event from their perspective when you need to. If they are already significant characters, then a mid-page/chapter POV change might be the better option depending on your style. You could even flip into an omniscient perspective to cover all the necessary characters if you feel that it's needed. But basically, it just comes back to the concept "you do you".

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I've been trying to do this with one of mine. There is one main character (though he is slated to ... leave the story around chapter 100 or so), but every once in a while I "jump ship" to the supporting characters (even, for one scene, the cat of the initial MC's best friend's love interest).
I've had fun redoing some scenes from different character POVs - but the "backing up" could be a problem (especially the few times they cross). I just try to only repeat the shared scenes and make sure everything else is different until the moment when the stories come together.

 

[blackcrowcrowd]

you sure you have 9 actual main characters?

I had a thought today while working on my WIP. Road to Olympus has nine main characters so far, and I'm probably going to add even more eventually. The way I've been writing it, the POV character changes between chapters, occasionally sticking with the same character through multiple chapters if something really important is happening to them. Obviously, that lets the plot play out in chronological order, with the reader knowing what each individual character is up to at each specific point in time.

But with so many main characters, it occurred to me that this might get messy, with the readers not being able to keep up with while jumping from one head to another every few pages. So here's what I was thinking: divide everything up. Their stories are almost completely separate from each other right now, anyway. They're going to come together eventually, but for right now they're all just random competitors doing their own thing in different parts of the same enormous tournament. So rather than head hop between nine characters in one book, I could focus on one character, write an entire book about them, and then write another book about another character, then another, etc. Not only would this help to declutter the narrative, but it'd make it easier for me to release on Amazon (which is something I do).

The downside is that this would force the reader to retread the same events sometimes. This might lead to readers going "Ugh, do we have to read about the week leading up to the tournament AGAIN?!" But I think I might have a way around that. Some of the characters do come into contact with each other early on, just not for very long, and rereading the same events from another character's POV could explain some things that aren't explained in the previous books. Such as, in book 1, Lanz would run into someone on his way to sign up for the tournament. A minute later, the guy he ran into gives Lanz a huge bear hug and declares that they're best friends before running off. Then in book 2, you find out that was actually Rignas, and by knocking him down at that exact moment, Lanz had actually saved him from an assassination attempt. In book 3, Jyll is attacked by a man in a trench coat. In book 4, you find out he was a monster hunter hired because Jyll is a monster disguised as a human, and he's entered the tournament so he can keep chasing her.

What do you guys think? Should I keep the stories all together, or separate them into individual books?

 

[Nolff]

I had a thought today while working on my WIP. Road to Olympus has nine main characters so far, and I'm probably going to add even more eventually. The way I've been writing it, the POV character changes between chapters, occasionally sticking with the same character through multiple chapters if something really important is happening to them. Obviously, that lets the plot play out in chronological order, with the reader knowing what each individual character is up to at each specific point in time.

But with so many main characters, it occurred to me that this might get messy, with the readers not being able to keep up with while jumping from one head to another every few pages. So here's what I was thinking: divide everything up. Their stories are almost completely separate from each other right now, anyway. They're going to come together eventually, but for right now they're all just random competitors doing their own thing in different parts of the same enormous tournament. So rather than head hop between nine characters in one book, I could focus on one character, write an entire book about them, and then write another book about another character, then another, etc. Not only would this help to declutter the narrative, but it'd make it easier for me to release on Amazon (which is something I do).

The downside is that this would force the reader to retread the same events sometimes. This might lead to readers going "Ugh, do we have to read about the week leading up to the tournament AGAIN?!" But I think I might have a way around that. Some of the characters do come into contact with each other early on, just not for very long, and rereading the same events from another character's POV could explain some things that aren't explained in the previous books. Such as, in book 1, Lanz would run into someone on his way to sign up for the tournament. A minute later, the guy he ran into gives Lanz a huge bear hug and declares that they're best friends before running off. Then in book 2, you find out that was actually Rignas, and by knocking him down at that exact moment, Lanz had actually saved him from an assassination attempt. In book 3, Jyll is attacked by a man in a trench coat. In book 4, you find out he was a monster hunter hired because Jyll is a monster disguised as a human, and he's entered the tournament so he can keep chasing her.

What do you guys think? Should I keep the stories all together, or separate them into individual books?

Miyoga's answer is already a great one, follow his advice. I know for sure he's good because hoolyy, he joined SH forum in 2020? Damn. He must've read lots of books.

I can't give you an answer to this, because this requires lots of experience and I only have a tiny amount of it. But, if I were to meet this kind of situation, I'd rather have them in one book instead of dividing them.

For example:

-Hopper
-Nolff
-Jide
-Mio
-Person
-Alf

Those bunch of freaks are troublesome and needs to be supervised at all time. So, how do I do that?

...

F**k, I don't know. Mmm... I'll prolly just write them like how I usually did.

 

[miyoga]

I think that the biggest key to it all is that you're part of the story even if you're not. If Hopper's (thanks for the confidence booster by the way) lunatics need to be supervised, then he needs to jump in as "God" to supervise them when they get together.
A lot of authors will divide their POV to suit their needs to some level. The question really should be whether or not it suits your needs for story progression. If the answer is no, then don't worry about it. If the answer is yes, then change it when you need to. Heck, even if the answer is a solid "maybe", try it anyways and see how it feels. After doing that, open another document and rewrite it the other way. After about 200 novels (reading, finished and dropped lists combined) on SH alone, that's really all the more I can tell you.

So again, do you and just enjoy it. If you're the only one who enjoys it, then you can fix it for publishing or just leave it as a fun thing for others to find because it's yours no matter what the fans say.

 

[Saine]

It's hard to say. I think the most important question that should be asked is does each individual narrative stand on its own well enough? If half of the characters aren't as interesting as the other half, then all that might happen is you have five good books and four bad books. You could also opt to put together characters that have similar themes or similar paths, three books of three characters rather than one with nine. However, if the point of this book isn't the individual narratives and has more to do with the overarching plot, it might be better not to split it up at all. Nine characters is a lot to juggle though, you might want to only hop between them if what they're doing is truly important rather than trying to make what they're doing important when writing their section if you decide to keep it all together.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

A comment above reminded me of the classic example of POV switching - one I have seen copied in sit-coms, Star Trek: The Next Generation and a few other dramas and cop show: Kurosawa's "Rashomon". Several eye-witnesses to a murder tell very different views of what happened, and the person trying to solve the mystery realizes that, while only one of them is lying, none of them are telling the whole truth, just their personal views of what happened.

 

[Kalliel]

I like to do it this way—first PoV for the main character and third PoV for everyone else. This comes from my personal reading experience. A lot of the time, I find it jarring to suddenly read from a relatively unimportant character's perspective, and if that transitioning section doesn't have an indicator, it's going to get a bit confusing as well.

I'm looking at you, Seoul Object Story.

Anyway, you can do third PoV for everyone, too. That generally works very well.

 

[Zagaroth]

I have three primary PoVs with occasional dips into secondary PoVs.

I interleave them chronologically, in large part because it is one story and the characters are often together. I try not to retread time periods, or if I do so, do it in consecutive chapters to get it over with quickly.

 

[Samsonchui]

I was reading the demon spear series and the author act put out a separate book from the bad guys pov. That was neat.

But I definitely was annoyed at first thinking this would advance the story.

Personally I try to avoid writing time skips or multiple POVs that don’t affect narrative.

I use POV to flesh and and flavour and humor.

 

[QuercusMalus]

I have seen it done a couple ways:
1. Where the 1st half of a chapter was in the MC's point of view, and the second half was in another's view of the same incident. It was fun for some chapters where you saw the same events interpreted in wildly divergent ways, so you saw the misunderstandings coming. The problem with this was they kept it up every chapter and for large portions there was no real difference so it was mostly padding the word count.
2. Each character view is a different chapter, and the chapter title indicates who the pov character is.

 

[HungrySheep]

Divide everything up. For complicated stuff like this, I first look for published comparables which are popular and see what works. For your specific predicament, there are a couple of successful series which have worked with multiple main characters seamlessly. Off the top of my head, these are Lord Loss (briefly), and The Power of Five series. Both use multiple perspectives to tell the story until joining up and then return the focus back to the "main" protagonist.

 

[fayethemouse]

Year of the Flood by Atwood had 2 MCs and 2 POVs through about a decade of time.

One MC was in third-person, the other was in first-person.

YMMV - that part was VERY hard for me to remember who was saying what when -- especially when in the final act the two MCs are on the same quest.

I think rules apply differently for what you do, but idk.... POV shifts are always a dice throw to me.