McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Is it possible to write a novel with three different points of view?
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Gruud on February 25, 2011, 06:09:35 PM ---If the action or plot dictates that I change POV in the middle of a chapter, somewhere I pcked up the idea/trick to do a double return, followed by a single "*" centered in the page, then another double return before starting the first paragraph of the new POV.
This gives the reader a nice visual cue that something is changing.
--- End quote ---
That's also very much the sort of thing where any given publisher will have preferences as to how to do it and it's not worth worrying too much about how you do it in manuscript; if nothing else, the visual cues for that will be different depending on whether the change comes out in the middle of a page or between pages in the final object, which I doubt is predictable in manuscript.
I don't think I have ever done anything that did POV shifts which weren't also chapter shifts except for a handful of climactic scenes where there was a very tight structure to how the POV moved (like someone getting shot five times and there being a couple of paras from different POVs flashing in between each shot) and I tend to do that with italicising the POVs other than the one whose chapter it is.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Starbeam on February 25, 2011, 06:36:24 PM ---It's possibly to do multiple POVs in 1st, but it can be more difficult. The biggest thing you need to do is differentiate the voices of each character so that they don't come across as the same and so that the reader is able to tell that the POV has switched. Another obvious way is to label chapter headings with the characters name.
--- End quote ---
It's worth noting that if you do that last, I will throw the book across the room, and I know I am not the only one; because if you need to do that, you are admitting you can't make the voices distinct enough.
Team8Mum:
I use different fonts for the different characters - which is kind of vital as in one case a character has multiple personality disorder, and it's the only way to tell which persona is 'upfront' and not all the other characters have worked out there is more than one of him.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Team8Mum on February 27, 2011, 05:01:19 PM ---I use different fonts for the different characters - which is kind of vital as in one case a character has multiple personality disorder, and it's the only way to tell which persona is 'upfront' and not all the other characters have worked out there is more than one of him.
--- End quote ---
Dorothy Heydt's excellent The Interior Life did something like this with different fonts, but unfortunately the fonts in the final published version are not distinct enough to make this really clear, so I would not rely on that being enough.
Team8Mum:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on February 27, 2011, 06:10:13 PM ---Dorothy Heydt's excellent The Interior Life did something like this with different fonts, but unfortunately the fonts in the final published version are not distinct enough to make this really clear, so I would not rely on that being enough.
--- End quote ---
My stuff is self published and on line, so I have a lot of control over the fonts, but I find using Arial for one and Times Roman for another does the trick. The different 'aspects' are achieved using the same font but in different colours (Black, dark blue, dark green, dark red)
Depends on what you intend to do with it in the long run.
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