4 Ways to Organize Your Third-Person POVs
By Kathryn Craft | February 9, 2023 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
From the moment a reader opens the cover of your book, she is looking for a protagonist to latch onto, a setting to sink into, and some clues as to the nature of the journey ahead. And whether or not this reader realizes it, knowing whose perspective will deliver the story will boost her ability to grasp its significance.
For writers hoping to explore many facets of a complex story, employing multiple third-person perspectives is a popular choice. By allowing the reader direct access to the inner thoughts of multiple characters, the author can clue the reader in on the train wreck to come while characters keep secrets, broker deals, and shift alliances.
Yet those same writers don’t always spend enough time figuring out how they will organize those multiple points of view so the reader can track them. Doing so is important. Assuming that omniscience allows you to dip into anyone’s perspective whenever you feel like it can result in “head hopping,” which refers to a fluid manner of accessing the thoughts and sensations of two or more point-of-view characters in one scene, one paragraph—or sometimes, even within the same sentence. This can leave the reader wrestling with unclear pronoun references at a time they hope to be learning what each character will add to the story.
Rather than provide the deep dive you were looking for, such brief POV dalliances can skip across the surface of your story, leaving conflicts underdeveloped—especially in an opening, when readers are trying to get to know the characters. For your sake and your readers’, it’s worth giving further consideration to how you’ll organize the perspectives through which you’ll tell your story.
Here are a few ways to do that.
1. Assign chapters
The easiest way to do organize multiple perspectives is to assign each POV character their own chapter. Each chapter could deliver a different point of view from the beginning, or you could just drop in an additional POV chapter when needed (for more on this technique, see my 2019 post about how Bryn Greenwood brilliantly pushed perspective to the max with sixteen POVs in her New York Times bestselling novel, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things). This will organize your approach even if its effect on your readers is subliminal.
At a writing retreat I attended while making final pass edits to The Far End of Happy, a bestselling author told me that the negative reviews for one of her novels were all from readers who were unclear as to which POV each chapter was being told from—despite her leaving copious clues. Since I was writing from the third-person points of view of three different women, this author advised me to stave off potential confusion by titling each chapter with the POV character’s name. I was lucky to trip across this advice—no author wants the hunt for a POV identity to pop the reader from the tension she’s worked hard to build.
2. Give your reader a break
A line break is another commonly accepted and easily recognizable way to signal a POV switch.
Let’s take a look at an excerpt from the 1978 novel Ballerina, which has always stayed in mind for the clarity with which author Edward Stewart uses omniscient point of view to focus attention and create meaning. On the first page of his novel, paragraph by paragraph, he seamlessly tightens his lens from a wide establishing shot, to the character’s immediate actions, and all the way into his protagonist’s unspoken thoughts.
The last bell sounded. Stragglers came drifting back to their seats. At two hundred and fifty dollars a ticket, you didn’t hurry. The theater was packed with society, ballet potentates, celebrities. Conversation buzzed like a hive of excited hornets.
The house lights dimmed. Anna pulled in her knees to let people squeeze past. A jeweled dowager glanced at her curiously, probably wondering why she was alone, why she’d spent intermission in her seat.
I’ll tell you why, Mrs. Whoever-you-are: because it’s taken me a lifetime to get this far, and I’m not taking any chances on slippery stairs or falling chandeliers. This is the moment I’ve lived my life for, and I’m damned well going to stay alive for it.
This short first chapter, during which Anna is waiting for her daughter to make her debut in a leading ballet role, ends with the sense that something has gone horribly wrong.
Chapter two circles back five years to when Anns’s daughter Steph was auditioning for the company. We’re still in Anna’s POV as she is hovering and primping and coaching, right up until the point when her daughter enters the studio and its door closes to Anna. The line break Stewart inserts here both reinforces the meaning of this moment and cues the POV shift: only Steph can take it from here.
3. Use omniscience as a buffer
Continuing with the example from Stewart: after the mentioned line break, the author places the reader on the other side of the door, wisely employing third-person omniscience to pull back and allow a bit of overwhelm to develop within the reader as we feel the dancers jostling to be seen, hear the increasingly bad-tempered teacher bark commands, and sense the urgency with which the dancers comply—resulting in the omniscient conclusion, “Failures came more and more rapidly.” Only in the next paragraph, the thirteenth after the line break, do we enter Steph’s perspective as sweat runs into her eyes and her body starts to wobble.
By serving as a sort of buffer, such sections of omniscience can organize the perspectives you are juggling. Nora Roberts, often cited as a flagrant head-hopper, might skip the line break and just continue the scene, but she’ll often use this technique to pull back to “watch” character movement for a couple of paragraphs before easing into the perspective of a different character.
The line break is simply a stronger clue that the reader will now encounter a significant change, such as where the next bit of action will unfold in time or place. Or, that line break might only be signaling a shift in POV during an ongoing scene, as might happen, say, when two characters are guests at the same party but are having completely different experiences.
4. Establish a narrative voice
Introducing a distinct narrative voice can also serve to organize various perspectives. This is what Bonnie Garmus did in her runaway hit debut, Lessons in Chemistry, which begins:
Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbelt-less cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.
Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter’s lunch.
In the very next sentence, we enter protagonist Elizabeth Zott’s perspective as she writes notes to her daughter and tucks them into her lunchbox:
Fuel for learning, Elizabeth Zott wrote on a small slip of paper before tucking it into her daughter’s lunch box. Then she paused, her pencil in midair, as if reconsidering. Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win, she wrote on another slip. The she paused again, tapping her pencil against the table. It is not your imagination, she wrote on a third. Most people are awful. She placed the last two on top.
But this was just a tease. For the next three paragraphs in this first section, Garmus reverts to the omniscient yet personality-rich narrative voice.
This quick diversion into Elizabeth’s perspective demonstrates one of the “rules of the book” that the reader, if unwittingly, seeks from an opening. Garmus is reserving the right to dip into a variety of perspectives, including—quite convincingly, in my opinion—that of a dog.
An author who invites head-hopping can be like a teacher who allows everyone in class to talk at once. It’s dizzying and confusing; you don’t know who to listen to. Figure out how each POV character can signal that it’s their turn to speak so you’ll reap all the benefits that a series of well-organized third-person perspectives have to offer your story. Your reader will thank you for it.
If you’ve been called out by critique partners for head hopping, how did you solve it? If you’ve used multiple third-person perspectives, why did you choose to do so? What techniques have you used to organize them? All additional techniques are welcome!
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
Wow, Kathryn! Thanks for a thoughtful, elegant description of just how many options there are just for *breaking* the usual rules of POV, and a hint of what might make those worth trying.
There’s one rule I wish people wouldn’t ever break, though — about breaks. That is, I think using a line break that really is just a line break, without asterisks or other markers, is simply daring Murphy’s Law to end up pushing that break down to the top or bottom of a page where it’s invisible. And then that POV or the whole idea of a new scene becomes a mystery ready to “pop the reader from the tension” (well put).
Hi Ken, I hear you on the “empty” line break. Such a small thing, it might seem, but give me a wingding everyday! Due to MS Word’s orphan and widow settings, an abnormally large margin can easily occur at the bottom of a manuscript page—and should that space end up being a line break instead, it can be as confusing to a reader as head hopping. Even the author can easily miss the line break even when proofing their own pages pre-publication.
Same thing for me, Ken! The empty space often confuses me. It’s easy enough to pop a divider in, and it doesn’t have to be the prosaic #. If my self-publishing Vellum software allows it and provides some pretty options, then I know for certain that the high-end commercial press software has it as well.
Hello Kathryn. I’m happy to see that I’ve used what you suggest to clarify who’s on first base when the narrative POV changes in a story with multiple third-person points of view: naming characters up front at the beginning of chapters, or through use of visual signals–line separations–to signal a shift. I do both in my latest mystery, Colder, with Snow.
But your post is useful to me in terms of my current WIP, which is narrated in the third person, but through a single character. That perspective serves me well, except it makes for a certain claustrophobia for the reader. Your suggestion and illustration for how to use omniscient narration is what I mean. The single narrative POV can be broken up with omniscient setups for scenes, without abandoning my intention to make the story the study of a single character perceiving the world. Were the story being told in the first person, I couldn’t do this. Although “couldn’t” and “shouldn’t” seem to be passe these day. Thanks again for the help.
[See comment below, which didn’t register as a “reply.” Hopefully this time?]
Hi Barry, always great to hear from you! Glad I’ve suggested a telescoping POV technique that can be of use to you. But I’m about to blow your mind: you can absolutely do this in first person POV. As Chuck Palahniuk would say, you simply “bury the I.” If you read the excerpt from Ballerina above, again, sub in the word “I” for Anna and it will become clear how it’s done!
Kathryn, you’ve opened a huge topic. The telescoping POV pattern you’re talking about was heavily favored in the mid-Twentieth Century. Today immersive POV is ascendant, leaving objective POV on the sidelines. But is it time to rethink that? Has immersive POV (sometimes called “deep” POV) always better or can it become oppressive? Has voice-heavy first person POV become a tyranny, or maybe just a tiresome fashion as in Tik Tok fiction?
Are we ready to again mix objective and close POV, the “zoom in, zoom out” pattern of yore? I think readers are ready for any narration pattern so long as it’s strong, established immediately and builds the story in our imaginations.
Which in turn brings up another issue for us: Is “objective” writing truly objective? (Short take: So long as certain words are chosen over others, no, total objectivity is impossible.) Objective POV produces narrative distance, so why and when is that a good thing? I like your idea of “breathing room” for the reader. That speaks to how a story actually operates. We think that a story is what an author has written, but actually a story unfolds in the mind of the reader.
Okay, better stop here before this becomes a blog post–actually, a book–of its own–which it may. And if it does, my thanks to you! Talking craft with you and our craft guru buddies is what I live for.
Ha! Glad I stirred the bees in your bonnet, Don. Great questions! I love-love-love harnessing the power immersive POV, but I also believe that any technique that is used to good effect in our work—and for a good reason—is worth taking a look at. One person’s “outdated” can become another person’s “brilliant usage.” And nothing would make me happier than inspiring another book from you—a small way to pay you back for all you’ve taught me through the years. Have at it!
Don, I so hear you about first person POV. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t like to read it. But…caveat here…I am not a natural first person POV writer, and I’ve never been thrilled by it as a reader.
Wonderful post, Kathryn. Head-hopping can be an issue, but you’ve noted great suggestions every author can use to bring clarity to point-of-view changes within a manuscript.
While you’ve somewhat touched on this, I’d add name or character placement to the list. When a point-of-view change occurs, include the character’s name or a distinct clue within the first sentence. The idea is to make it clear–to the reader–whose head is center stage. If done well, a reader won’t even notice the name or clue, and the hint will be subliminal. This works whether a first sentence is dialogue, narrative, or description.
I usually suggest authors find creative ways to add the character’s name or distinct clue within the first sentence in addition to the wonderful suggestions you’ve provided. For example, if the reader missed the chapter title denoting the name change, the opening sentence or sentences would make the point-of-view clear. Same goes for a page/line break. One of your fab examples actually shows this trick:
“Fuel for learning, Elizabeth Zott wrote on a small slip of paper before tucking it into her daughter’s lunch box. Then she paused, her pencil in midair, as if reconsidering.”
This is also a great way for an author to pinpoint unnecessary point-of-view leaps. When editing, the author can use program tools to find a character name or distinct clue (a stutter, for example) and note if the point-of-view change is a must. If the scene is still strong without the change, perhaps head-hopping isn’t needed.
Great suggestions, Kathryn. I’ll share!
Hugs
Dee
Hi Dee, thanks so much for fleshing out the post with this technique, so easy to implement yet equally easy to overlook. Thanks for bringing it forward and explaining it so well! If anyone wants to read more about scene orientation, I did so in a previous post here: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2021/07/08/the-three-ws-of-scene-orientation/
One way that I deal with the multiple POV issues–of late, I’ve been titling their sections (usually chapters) with the character name.
However, when there are multiple POVs, one management technique I use in prewriting is to sit down and create a scene matrix. Take a tablet, turn it landscape. Down the short side, I write character names, from most to least significant. I star the ones that are POV characters. Then I break out my outline, scene by scene, identifying POV, location, and role of each character in that scene (if they’re in it). This also allows me to see at a glance whether I’ve been balancing my POVs or tipping too far toward certain ones.
I got into doing this when writing a couple of complex books where major characters were doing Big Stuff in widely separated locations, simultaneously. Plus, since it was a fantasy, I had to account for travel times in those locations so that when the Big Big One happened, everyone had a logical amount of time to reach where they were going.
(PS–I am not seeing the “see responses” checkbox anymore…is there a reason for that?)
Thanks for all your engagement with the post, Joyce. It sounds like you’ve hit on a great technique! I took a two-day workshop with writing guru James N. Frey years ago and he did something similar. He added an additional tip though, that you might be able to make use of. If the POV character WAS NOT present for a scene in another character’s POV, he’d put a flap over that square (like a piece of paper hinged by a piece of tape at the top that he could peek under). This helped him track “who knows what and when.”
As Don suggests, this is a potentially huge topic. In my own writing and in formatting the text in other writers’ novels when I design their books, I use a “clean” (empty) line break to signal a change in time or place but, when it’s a shift in POV, I put a symbol such as ~ or three asterisks or something visual. But the real key in shifting POV within a chapter is to make sure that the narrative voice changes to match the POV character. One beta reader of on of my novels told me that she knew whose POV the scene was in just by the voice. The first paragraph of a new POV narrative can easily give the reader the cues needed to signal and ease the shift. BTW, I once surveyed literary agents on head-hopping for my blog, and my sample universally panned the practice.
Hi Ray, great point to make concerning the differentiation of voice, a topic worthy of its own post. It’s absolutely true that no two people speak exactly the same. My two sons were raised in the same household on the same farm by the same parents and they not only express themselves differently, they have different accents! Differentiating character voice is particularly invaluable when using alternating first-person POV chapters, as André Dubus III used for the deposed Iranian colonel who purchased a home at a sheriff’s sale and the American woman the house should never have been seized from, in his novel THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG. It’s fun for the reader to immediately recognize the difference.
And readers, I hope no one thought I was teaching them how to head hop! But since Roberts does it in a way that readers can follow, it’s worth taking a look as to why that’s true. She’s earned the right to do whatever the heck she wants to do—not only because she’s Roberts, but also as J.D. Robb, Jim March and Sarah Hardesty, has 400 million books in print worldwide, and since 1999, every title by Roberts since has hit the NYT bestseller list. I love to study what we can learn from those who are widely successful!
Kathryn:
Your post is good advice for us short-fiction writers also. Especially in short stories, we need a quick way to shift from one character’s POV to another. Sticking with one POV character for “only” 5,000 words can feel claustrophobic (and boring!) for the reader, and problematic for the writer. Thanks.
Glad to hear it Christine. Thanks for reading!
Kathryn, thank you for this lesson on POV. I like reading and writing in first person. Close third too. I find the omniscient POV hardest to pull off–only managed it in a short story. A couple of my favorite novelists are C.S. Lewis and Rohinton Mistry who do this well. They head hop and I’m fine with it because it’s done so well and because their story people are so interesting, I’d follow them anywhere. I’m not in the least bit confused or lost.
Hi Kathryn, thank you for this. I have two povs and begin each chapter by using their name and a distinct action that is theirs and not the other person’s manner of being in the world as a way to ground a reader; easier with year and country differences such as hanging clothes on a rack-and-pulley system vs talking on a cell phone, and using their home-base locations as one is rural and the other is metro. And you gave me a new word and intentionality in its use–telescoping! Thank you.
Brilliant post, Kathryn! I love experimenting with the cinematic establishing shot and telescoping in and out. Your analysis and examples provide great food for thought–and more experimentation.