Swamp Survival Strategies 4: Multiple Viewpoints, Part a

Viewpoint in fiction is a vital component to a rich, entertaining immersion of the reader into your story world and the heart and soul of your protagonist. Viewpoint is what prose writers bring to the party that the razzle-dazzle color, moving images, and special effects of movies and television just can’t deliver. Movies can’t put audiences into the mind of a character. Therefore, watching movies–while helpful for plot, pacing, setting, and character design–won’t teach you how to handle viewpoint.

Movies show their audience what’s happening from the outside.

Novels let readers experience what’s happening from the inside out.

Viewpoint, remember, is about placing readers in the thoughts and emotions of a person at the center of the story’s action.

Simple plots fare better with a single viewpoint–that of the protagonist–from start to finish. However, some stories are long, complex, intricate, and need multiple character viewpoints to bring an author’s vision to the page. Novels with several subplots may require a viewpoint shift to follow the story action.

Very often, the middle of a novel brings a decided change of pace after a frenetic first act. The midsection is where writers seek to fill in background explanation that’s been deferred or they want to open up subplots or they want to twist the plot by revealing the villain’s identity. Therefore, it’s common to utilize a shift of viewpoint to the villain’s perspective. Other viewpoints may be utilized as well to follow the story, especially if the protagonist is going to be sidelined for a few pages.

Keep in mind that if you decide to shift to the villain’s perspective, you are in effect creating a subplot with the villain as its protagonist. The subplot will have its conflict progression and conclude with its own miniature climax. Each viewpoint you utilize in a novel manuscript should, in fact, launch and carry a subplot.

By approaching multiple viewpoint this way, you avoid the bad habit of jumping at random into the thoughts or emotions of various characters just for the sake of variety or just because you can’t think of what should happen next.

The very basics of viewpoint management are as follows:

In genre fiction, you choose whether you intend to write your story in first-person viewpoint (me, myself, and I) or third-person viewpoint (he, she, or it).

Single limited viewpoint means the story is restricted to the protagonist’s perspective only (either in first-person or in third-person) for the duration of the book.

Multiple limited viewpoint means that at any given point, the story is restricted to one viewpoint at a time. Most often, multiple-viewpoint plots are written in third-person. Occasionally they do appear in first-person, although you’re asking readers to make a larger mental leap from one character to the next.

To decide whether you want to focus your plot on a single viewpoint or expand to two or more, ask yourself the following questions:

Will changing viewpoint make my story better?Will changing viewpoint make my story more dramatic?Will changing viewpoint make my story less predictable, or will it rob my plot of twists?Do I need to change viewpoint to improve my story?Do I want to change viewpoint to share with readers what all my characters are thinking?

Forget what you want. Write what you need.

To be continued …