476 – When Multiple Viewpoints Actually Work
The Mythcreant Podcast
Exploring Multiple Viewpoints in Narrative Structure
This chapter explores the art of using multiple viewpoints in storytelling, with a focus on Nalo Hopkinson's 'Brown Girl in the Ring.' It discusses the advantages of this technique in enhancing interconnected plots and revealing character motivations across generations.
It’s well known that Mythcreants hates it when novels employ multiple viewpoints, but what if we didn’t? In a handful of specific situations, that is. Don’t want to get too wild here. This week, we’re discussing when additional POVs are actually good for your story, and why that’s the case. We discuss political drama, fraught relationships, groundbreaking cinema, and also whether readers need to know which floor everyone is on.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: I have a very serious question: when do multiple points of view actually work? Trick question! The answer is never. Moving on. Podcast over.
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: Down with multiple POVs.
Bunny: Hey, in fairness, we are on a podcast sharing multiple POVs.
Oren: You could say we each have a unique and beautiful viewpoint we bring to the podcast.
Bunny: Contributing a personal flavor.
Chris: Yeah. The important thing is that when I talk, you know what it’s like to be where I am right now, which is in a completely different place across the country from where Bunny is. So, if you didn’t include me, how would you know what it’s like to be over on the West Coast? You just wouldn’t. You need to see the West Coast. Otherwise, you won’t know what’s happening there.
Bunny: Yeah, you could be keeping secrets.
Oren: I would argue that being on a different vertical plane in the same air column known as being upstairs is equally different and worthy of its own viewpoint.
Bunny: [Dramatic] If not for Oren, what would we do with those rooms? They might as well not even exist.
Oren: That’s the secret. It’s okay if they don’t.
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Oren: I do wanna talk a little bit about when multiple viewpoints are actually good for a story. Cause this is one of those things where we’re known for being very anti-multiple POV. Partly because we’re the only people who have that particular axe to grind and everyone thinks we’re weird.
It’s easy to stand out if your opinions are strange enough.
Bunny: To be fair, you have the article decrying multiple points of view, but you do also have several articles talking about how you can do them. And now a podcast.
Oren: Yeah. Now we can do it in audio form. Because that’s a thing. There’s a lot of people who listen to the podcast and don’t read our articles, so we have to have crossover selection.
Chris: Looking at when they don’t work is still helpful, in this case, to seeing when they do.
Oren: And if you know why they don’t work, you can be sure if you’re actually picking them correctly.
Bunny: We’ve gotta resist the temptation to just fall into complaining about them.
Oren & Christ: [laugh]
Oren: Okay, so the first one that comes to mind, I don’t know if it’s the most common, but it’s certainly the one that I use as my most common explanation, is a political drama.
And you can do political dramas with a single point of view. You don’t need multiple points of view, but they can provide some benefits and you can structure them so they don’t take things away from your story as well.
And these are usually conflicts that have, if not morally gray or equivalent, at least not completely black and white, good and evil. So not Lord of the Rings cause we don’t really need Sauron’s perspective. Or a perspective of whichever inherently evil orc we might follow around.
Chris: We might need to explain that because there are many people who do try to add the villain’s perspective. We have a whole article on why that’s usually a bad idea, not 100% of the time a bad idea.
Bunny: We also see glimpses of the villain’s points of view in Lord of the Rings.
Chris: Not in the book, just in the movie. They have Sauruman, they show scenes with him.
Bunny: Well, there’s him digging the Uruk-hai out of the gunk. I think we have a scene with that.
Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s actually in the books.
Oren: Yeah. The Lord of the Rings is not a book I would hold up as a beneficial example.
Chris: No, it’s not.
Oren: It is worth noting that movies often have to cut away to what the villain is doing because that is simply the most efficient way for you to know what the villain is doing. Movies are under much tighter constraints when it comes to information portrayal.
The reason why I say not Lord of the Rings when it comes to political drama is that Sauron’s perspective is not interesting. Sauron is a perfectly good villain. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with Dark Lord evil villains, but the thing that makes them good villains is not their nuanced take on the world.
Honestly, Sauruman is more interesting cause Sauruman was a good guy and switched sides cause he thought it was impossible for the good guys to triumph. I still don’t know if that justifies him having a POV. I would say no, but he is a little more interesting as a perspective than Sauron is.
Chris: You have to know what the effect is of giving a character a POV.
One thing is it sets expectations about how important that character is. If a character has a POV, they’re considered a significant character, but also it helps you understand them. And in doing that, it helps humanize them and helps you sympathize with them.
And these are not things that you want for a Sauron. They’re what you want for a more sympathetic character, which is why it works so well for gray conflicts. Because when you have multiple people fighting against each other and none of them is strictly the good guy or the bad guy. That’s a situation in which it makes sense to humanize both of them and make both of them sympathetic, and then really dig into what their perspective is and then help understand why they disagree with each other so much, even though they’re not terrible people.
Oren: And it’s often a question of who you want to pick as your POV character. There’s a reason why in Game of Thrones, we have Tyrion as our Lannister viewpoint character, and not Tywin. Tywin’s not Sauron, but his point of view isn’t that interesting. Tywin is basically, I want power and money, and I will kill anyone I have to kill to get it. Tywin is a fun, intimidating, big bad, but he’s not an interesting POV character, whereas Tyrion very much is.
Bunny: I think it’s worth noting though that viewpoint characters don’t necessarily have to be in conflict with each other. It’s just that in political dramas at least, they often are.
Oren: This is one place where it can really help to have POV characters on both sides of a complicated political conflict.
Bunny: Yeah, and I mentioned keeping secrets, and that’s also something that you can’t do in one point of view, right?
Chris: Yeah. If you have a character who has a secret and would not talk to anybody about it, adding their POV can be a way of delving into that. Especially if they’re doing things that the audience does not understand and doesn’t seem to make any sense, or you want people to sympathize with them more.
They are coming off like a jerk, but there is a important emotional reason they’re being a jerk and you want to make it so they are more likable despite being a jerk. A POV is also really good for that.
Not usually what you want for a big, bad life of Sauron, but some other villains sometimes that is what you want.
I think a good example is in The Shining where you have this family hanging out in this haunted hotel. Jack, the father basically becomes a murderer cause he’s seduced by this hotel.
It’s clear that Stephen King wants readers to root for this family to work things out and stay together. He doesn’t want the reader to just write jack off and be like, nevermind, that guy can just go die somewhere. He wants them to understand his mindset and see his decline because that’s interesting to see the way that he slowly moves towards being more and more enraptured by this hotel, falling to his worst habits and patterns.
The story is, because it has a haunted hotel, scary enough even if we sympathize with Jack. So that works really well to give him a POV.
Oren: It occurs to me we should probably cover maybe the fundamentals of what it is that helps multiple POVs work. I maybe jumped right into a specific example before I should have. That’s the wonder of podcasts, everybody.
The thing that’s most important, and we’ve talked about this a couple of times in our articles, is that these POVs have to be part of the same story. What happens in one POV has to be obviously relevant to what happens in the other points of view. If they’re off doing their own thing, even if it’s a political conflict, that doesn’t matter.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re gonna bring them together at the end, which is the thing I see a lot. We need to be able to tell from the beginning why these characters matter to each other, whether they are on the same side or on opposite sides.
Chris: And just to go into some of the reasons why that is: if the viewpoint characters are affecting each other. What one character does in their viewpoint has an impact on what happens in the other viewpoints.
It raises engagement when that happens because then if the reader cares about only one of those viewpoint characters, they still have a reason to be engaged when they leave and go to a different viewpoint character. Because what that viewpoint character does will actually affect the character that they like. So, it gives them more reasons to care what’s happening.
Oren: Yeah. You never end up with a situation where suddenly you get pulled away from this character you like, and now you have to spend a bunch of time with someone you don’t care about who’s doing nothing you care about. Cause they’re all connected, baby!
Chris: If they’re all silos, they’re all doing their own thing, the book’s time is divided between different independent stories. Each story gets much less time and each story only moves forward at a slow crawl. So, you get to see just a tiny bit of one story and then it cuts off and then you have to get through several other viewpoints before you go back to that story and see the plot move forward just a little bit again.
Whereas if they’re interconnected when you switch viewpoint, that story that you just experiencing before is still moving forward. The story actually comes to a conclusion, feels like it’s coming to a conclusion more, and that’s a lot more satisfying and rewarding.
Bunny: I think it’s worth noting that there can be degrees of separation from the main story, and if the degree gets greater, you have a greater risk of losing people.
Characters can be in the same scene and working on the same problem between their viewpoints, and that’s the close end of the spectrum. And then characters can be both working on the throughline, but in completely different ways. That’s the series’ throughline. And for me at least, those are the ones that start losing me because there will be two high tension situations, but they’re completely, or almost completely disconnected.
We know that the characters know each other and they’re working towards the same goal or whatever, but they’re far apart in space and facing down different antagonists or sub antagonists. And every time it cuts, I’m like, I just wish it were continuous.
Oren: They have to be obviously affecting each other, right?
It probably shouldn’t be We’re two characters fighting a war and we’re fighting the same guy, so we’re part of the same story, but we’re both on different planets fighting different battles, and it’s not really obvious how one of our battles affects the other one. That’s probably too distant.
Chris: Location is a fairly good way to start looking at how connected they are, but it’s also not the end word, right?
It is possible to have two characters who are on the other sides of the world who are directly interacting in some way, depending on what kind of elements you have in your story that allow for communication or other interaction. But that is definitely logistically much harder than two characters who are in the same room.
Oren: If you do want one of them to be on the bad guys’ team, even if it is a not a hundred percent black and white—if you have one team that is the clear bad guys—you have to think really carefully about whether or not you should actually give one of them a POV. And usually that’s gonna be someone you’re gonna want to be making more sympathetic.
Children of Blood and Bone has its Zuko-type character. He’s chasing the protagonists across the world, and that’s a reasonable place to give a villain a POV. Cause he’s a secondary villain and he’s meant to be sympathetic, unlike his more conventionally evil boss.
As opposed to something like in the later books of the Expanse. They introduce another brand of new evil bad guys, and they’re very bad and we get a perspective from one of them, and he starts off the story bad and arguably gets worse as it goes along. But he was already evil, so who cares?
The best I can say about that.
Chris: A lot of writers are tempted to add viewpoints for logistical reasons. How will a character know what’s happening somewhere else if I don’t give a POV to that other person?
But that’s also a warning sign. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t work out. But usually, if you have to add a viewpoint, there’s a good chance that’s a bad choice that will lower engagement. Whereas if you don’t need it for logistical reasons, then what you’re considering is not that you have to, but will this actually improve the experience?
Bunny: Especially if you have this one piece of information that you need the audience to know. That’s happening elsewhere that the main character wouldn’t know about. Don’t throw in an extra viewpoint just to narrate one event.
Oren: Yeah, those are called interludes and nothing good ever happens in an interlude.
Bunny & Oren: [laugh]
Chris: So if you have a story that’s really tightly plotted and you have several essential characters that are hanging out together, and you could tell the whole thing from one person’s POV, but you’re like, maybe I should put some scenes from the point of view of this other central character. Maybe you wanna flesh out their internal struggles or what have you.
That’s a sign that it’s actually going to do less damage to switch POVs because they’re already covering the same events. So you’re not gonna cover a event that is completely disconnected from anything else.
Oren: This is a great place for conflicted relationships to shine using multiple points of view. Romance is the most common way that this happens. It doesn’t necessarily have to be romance.
The one that I always use as an example is Maplecroft, which has different perspectives of, I think, three characters who are, broadly speaking, the good guys and their very difficult relationships. It helps bring out the conflict between Lizzie and her sister Emma, and the way that they try to keep their doctor at arm’s length and all that sort of thing.
That kind of relationship is often a good indication of that. You might get some benefit from a second viewpoint.
Chris: And in romance, oftentimes if you do have a lot of internal obstacles to the characters hooking up, one person has to learn to stop distancing because they’re afraid. For instance, the other person sees their partner as the enemy or something, and they have to learn to trust them.
Whatever you have, those things are definitely easier to dive into in more depth if they each have a POV. It doesn’t mean that romances need POVs. I think it depends on what kind of romance you’re telling with what kind of obstacles and conflicts. So if you like a story where they’re just made for each other, but the world wants to keep them apart, if you like that kind of star crossed lovers type romance, that doesn’t so much need two POVs in most cases.
Again, any of those like really complex emotions that explain character behaviors that are otherwise difficult to explain, A POV really helps with that a lot.
Bunny: There’s a series, admittedly I haven’t read this in a while, so I hope I don’t get some of the details wrong. But it’s interesting in terms of talking about POV because it has in the first book a romance, and then it becomes like more of these action intrigue stories later, which is a zone problem because I came to the first book for like Hot Dragon Romance or whatever, and now it’s a spy thriller.
Oren: Why are there so many knife fights now? I wanted kissing.
Bunny: Come on. There’s more kissing and like surfboard dragon, but the first one is a romance between a dragon who’s shapeshift into a human and a dragon hunter. So we get their different POVs. We get to see the dragon hunter coming to realize that this is a dragon and like dragon trying to hide and stuff like that.
And I thought that was a good use of multiple POVs. And then in the later books, they get separated. I guess they’re both fighting their own evil organizations. The Evil Dragon Organization and the Evil Dragon Hunter organization.
Oren: There’s a little couple split, one for each of them. That’s nice.
Yeah. Everyone’s got their own special antagonistic organization to fight, but then that became the thing where it feels like broadly they’re fighting for the same cause. But both of the stories were so high stakes that I would end one chapter and be like, shoot, I really don’t wanna read about the other character right now. Like, I wanna get satisfaction for what just happened in this last scene. So I’d be skipping chapters, which is not what you want.
Chris: Especially if it ends on a cliffhanger.
Bunny: Every chapter was a cliffhanger. I was like, where did my California Dragon Romance go?
Chris: It’s like black hat storytelling.
Oren: Do not use additional viewpoints to drag out the time between when you put the character in a dangerous situation and when you resolve it. That’s not good.
Bunny: That’s exactly what it was doing.
Oren: It’s hostile architecture, but a book.
Chris: Similar to political conflicts, another type of story that can really benefit is Cat and Mouse. The one that always comes to mind, even though this was not actually in a narrated format as far as I know, is Death Note. Because Death Note has such equal weight in highlighting both the criminal and the police officer who’s chasing him.
Oren: I could see that working in a written narrative for sure.
Chris: So, if you were to put that in written narrative, you would definitely want both of those characters to have their own POV. And it has to do with the fact that they’re both equally important and giving them a POV is a way of saying who is important. Their relationship to each other is important, even though they’re enemies. That gets surprisingly close later.
Oren: [knowingly] Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.
Chris: Debating, how many in Death Note, the relationship to each other. I think that’s a good sign of when multiple POVs is helpful.
And even though they’re not in the same place many times, their antagonism means that they are interacting with each other. They spend their time figuring out how to outwit the other one, right? And so, anything that they do in their viewpoint affects the other person.
Oren: Another potentially useful, although very specific kind of story where multiple POVs can be helpful, is what I’ve been calling the vignette anthology. What is sometimes known as daisy chain plotting.
Instead of a single story, you are telling a bunch of small stories with a common theme, usually around a common event or sometimes a common item that links them together. But they’re still separate stories.
World War Z is probably the most famous book version. It’s a bunch of vignettes about the zombie apocalypse, and they all have the zombie apocalypse in common, but there’s not a single plot thread that runs through any of them other than the general rise and fall of civilization during the zombies.
Chris: I have seen some series that, again, feel more ensemble focused that make rotating POV work better. For most series, when you focus on a single main character and you move to the next book and you switch the main character, that feels icky. Because you got really invested in the main character of the first book.
But for some stories where they have an ensemble cast to start with, and then they devote one book to give each character a POV, it feels more like a TV show with an ensemble cast where some episodes focus on one person.
The series throughline is often less important than the actual plot of each book, and I think that’s one reason it tends to work better in those situations.
Oren: I am speculating a bit here because I’ve never actually seen this work with full novels. I’ve only ever seen it work with the Animorphs, which are very short.
Those are novella length books, and there’s a ton of them. But I think it could have worked fine in, for example, the Dragonet Prophecy, where each book gives one of the five dragons the center of POV. I think the problem there was honestly not even the POV change. It was that whoever wasn’t the POV character didn’t matter in the next book.
If each story had been about the team and we had seen the team from a different perspective each time, I think that would’ve been fine. But this one was more like, this is the story where the sand dragon matters, and this is a story where the shadow dragon matters, and the other ones mostly might as well not be here.
Chris: That is, I think, a big problem that can happen with those stories, and I’ve also seen them where the author really just wants to promote their next book. So, they include the characters from the next book, but a lot of times what you have is excess characters that just don’t matter to this story. They’re just there and I start to resent them.
I want to read the next book less. I learned to hate the characters early. But yeah, with the Dragonet Prophecy, I think the issue with handling an ensemble cast is how you get everybody involved so that they’re not superfluous. And I think that was the problem with that one. And if it had been a smaller number of dragons, then it would’ve been easier for the author to handle.
Bunny: Oh, I just wanted to talk about an interesting example. I just read from a Nalo Hopkinson’s book, the Brown Girl in the Ring, or just Brown Girl in the Ring, actually. It keeps the multiple viewpoints focused on the same actions and stuff taking place, but it hops a lot between their heads in the same scene. It’s all clearly delineated, every time it moves to a different perspective.
There’s three dots, so you know you’re moving to someone else’s head now. And I thought it worked surprisingly well, maybe because it was all in the same scene. So even though it wasn’t close limited, it felt omniscient because we were moving around so much.
Chris: Again, if everything is in the same scene and you could tell the whole story from one person’s perspective, then you know that all of the plots are better linked together.
Don’t get me wrong, a single POV story can still go on tangents and things instead of events that shouldn’t be included. Then you know that adding the viewpoint isn’t really like breaking the plot because you’re covering the same event.
Bunny: And there’s a lot of viewpoints in that, including the villain.
The villain starts off the story, but then the story follows a sort of intergenerational conflict against the villain. So, it makes sense that each of the three generations of women who fight this guy have a little bit of viewpoint. Ti-Jeanne is the main character, but then we have Mi-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne. They’re French-Canadian names, I’m sorry.
But then sometimes we’ll get a viewpoint that only shows up once and then we move away from it. And I didn’t find it drawing. I thought I might, but because it did it so much and there weren’t just like long sections.
Chris: Sounds like it was consistent and very clear about when it was moving.
Bunny: Yeah, it felt deliberate.
Chris: And that really makes a big difference about setting the right expectations for how this experience is gonna go.
Bunny: Yeah, it was. I know you two hate the term cinematic. It was cinematic in how it was able to move around between these scenes.
Oren: Yeah, as long as it’s clearly delineated. Otherwise, you’re gonna have the head hopping problem of being, I don’t know whose perspective we’re in right now, and that can be really confusing.
Chris: It is possible to hop heads in a scene and have it work. It’s just difficult. That’s not tried by most people.
Bunny: No, this definitely is the exception.
Oren: And there was of course, one other scenario that comes to my mind that I just wanted to mention, which is if you have a Rashman type plot, which is a movie, but has also become its own genre where there are multiple accounts of the same event, and part of the plot is trying to figure out who’s telling the truth or more likely how each version is wrong.
In that case, you’re gonna need multiple perspectives. And as long as you’re doing something interesting with them and actually showing differences, that could be very fun. Just replaying the same scene again but the cloak is a different color, that’s probably not enough.
Chris: If you’re doing that type of story, you do have to carefully fast forward through the parts people have already seen and always go the way you would expect, and then spend more time on the things as they deviate from the last person’s tale.
But yeah, that’s a premise that depends on multiple points of view to work.
Bunny: I feel like we should note that this is different than, say, retelling the same story over again from a different character’s perspective without changing anything like Midnight Sun.
Oren: Oh, right. Yeah. That was the one where Edward got a POV.
Yeah, the same thing happened with the Ender books, which kind of confused me. I haven’t read Ender Shadow in a long time, but I just remember feeling it. I wasn’t really sure what the purpose was.
Chris: If you wanna sell more stuff to your super fans.
Bunny: That’s the answer to probably Midnight Sun and that weird Christian Gray spinoff that I think came first. That’s the answer: Money.
Oren: All right, so we figured it out. The reason is if you want mooooney, that’s the right way to use multiple viewpoints. Alright, I think we will call this episode to a close on that note.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode and you have now unlocked the secret to using multiple POVs whenever you want, consider supporting us on Patreon.
Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Before we go, I want to thank some of our existing patrons, each of whom brings a unique and valuable point of view to our podcast story.
First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our premier expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.
We will see you all next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
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