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Changing POV mid chapter
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Derek
(new)
Mar 08, 2016 10:40AM
I'm about 45k words in to my first novel. It's a thriller novel, or at least I hope there's some thrills in there. Anyway, I have read that changing POV mid chapter isn't necessarily wrong but it should be avoided if it can be. My POV is third person with two viewpoints and sometimes those views are in the same scenes. I don't really want to have a separate chapter for each as they will be about half the length of the chapters with only one POV. Any thoughts on this? I think it works alright, but being the writer I'm a little blind to it.
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I would agree with Claire. A sudden change to POV can be jarring to a reader, especially if they're caught unawares, say like halfway through a chapter. Brandon Sanderson does what I like to call a 'POV pivot' where he jumps from one character's head to another's within a split second. As much as I love his books, it's one of my least favourite of his writing techniques. Think about character mindsets as if you're stepping into a warm bath each and every time you take on their POV. If someone is constantly picking you up and flinging you into another 'bathtub' without warning, you're going to get pretty annoyed. At least if you divide POVs up by chapter, you're giving the reader chance to breathe.Good luck! :)
I see what you're saying and that pretty much echoes my thoughts as well. I only attempted it once where I absolutely couldn't start a new chapter (both POV characters in the same scene) without it coming out weird but I'll have to really think about the way to do it.
I know I'm a bit late on this, but I would recommend checking out Neal Shusterman's Unwind series. He uses third person POV, but the viewpoints are always switching. Sometimes those chapters are really short, and sometimes they are switched during a critical part of the story where a lot of action is happening, but it always worked. He just went back a bit and explained what the other character was doing while the first was doing something else. I never felt it was jarring or choppy. Plus, it's an amazing series! I don't know if any of this helps, but I wish you luck!
You might also want to check out Frank Herbert's Dune, he does a fair bit of hopping back and forth within scenes.That said, consistency is probably more important than execution here. In your case, switching mid-scene when you've never done it in any of the previous chapters will likely be jarring no matter how you do it.
Changing POVs is not a problem for most readers. It happens all the time. One of the best ways to show it is to have a blank line before the change.
