Lately
I’ve been reading books written with multiple first-person viewpoints. During my Writing
a Novel course at the Faber Writing Academy, one of our guest tutors was an
editor who told us not to write from multiple points of view. Her reasons were 1) why make life more
complicated for yourself and the reader and 2) just when the reader starts to
feel empathy for a character the point of view changes and they have to get to
know someone new.
The first multiple POV book I read was Backlash by
Sarah Darer Littman. Backlash is a cautionary tale of what can happen when
people abuse the anonymity of the internet. The book begins with an attempted
suicide and Part One deals with the immediate fallout from that. Part Two details the events leading up to the
suicide attempt and in it we learn the true identity of the cyberbully. Part Three continues on from where Part One
ends and deals with the growth and change in each character as they move on
with their lives. Told from the
different perspectives of two sets of siblings, the multiple viewpoints work
really well in this book. Each part unfolds in a linear fashion with each
narrator telling the next stage of the story, each chapter is short so we don’t
become too attached to (or annoyed by) the characters before moving on, and
each voice is strong.
The
next book, The Truth About Alice by Jennifer Matthieu, has many similarities to
the first. It is also told from four
points of view (apart from the very last chapter where we hear from bullying
victim, Alice, herself). After the
linear structure of Backlash though, this book felt all over the place to me,
jumping back and forth from the present to the past and back again, rehashing
the same events from different angles. When
the story eventually becomes more grounded in the present, it feels more
satisfying. The characters start out somewhat
cliché but reveal enough emotional depth to make you care about them in the
end.
Wonder
by RJ Palacio is an uplifting and inspiring story and deals with the nature of
kindness. This book is told from a
staggering six different perspectives and I can’t help wondering if all of them
were really needed. August is such an
endearing character that the book would have been just as wonderful told solely
from his point of view. The characters
are all likeable though and it is a great story regardless. Like Backlash it is told in a mostly linear
fashion.
Voices
in the Park by Anthony Browne is a picture book about a walk in the park told
from the point of view of four different characters. The voices are distinctive and it’s a good study
of how different characters notice (or fail to notice) different details. I'm not too keen on the simian illustrations
though.
So
what have I learned about using multiple POV.
If you feel multiple voices are necessary to tell your story, limit it
to a maximum of four characters, keep the chapters or character segments short, have each character
tell a different part of the story rather than going over the same thing and
make sure each voice is distinctive.
