My story is in 3rd person, and I've been switching characters POVs to try to get a full view of everything that's going on. So I've been jumping between characters a lot. A LOT. There's one scene, five pages long, with four characters in it and I think jump between them six or seven times, the shortest being two really short paragraphs and the longest about a page and a half. I've been double spacing between each POV switch, so the reader can follow it, but I was wondering if there was a hard and fast rule about this, what the normal length is, if it's frowned upon in professional writing or if it doesn't really matter.
Thanks in advance!
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2008 - The EPIC FAIL which shall remained unnamed (because I never got that far...) - 6/ 50K
2009 - The Travelers - YA with some sci-fi and adventure and history and...pretty much everything else thrown in for good measure...except vampires.
5,800 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 01 18
i'm not sure if there's a formal rules on switching PoV.
but, in my opinion, you should do more than put double space for each PoV switch.
the best practice (judge from reading) is have diiferent POVs separated by different chapters.
correct me if i'm wrong.
----------getting my head unstuck from the clouds by sticking it in a cloud
17,341 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 02 44
I think switching POV's is a tricky issue. Personally, as reader, after taking the time to get acquainted with a character I get a bit frustrated when the author ups and lands me in someone else's head. It can and is executed successfully though - see the very topical 'Time Traveller's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger for example, or Nick Hornby's 'A Long Way Down'. I'm sure other Nano's can name some others.
All I'd say is keep good clear demarcations when you do it, to signal your reader! The less confusion the better.
45,933 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 06 36
You don't need a new chapter, just a scene break suffices. Just be careful of having _too_ many POV characters. Robert Jordan did perfectly fine with sometimes multiple POV characters in one chapter... in very important, tense chapters it might flit from one to another and only give a few paragraphs of each. But always marking it with a scene break. His primarily problem was just having way too many characters. I liked how some of it was done... I just had difficulty caring about the 2000 or so named characters in the series. Heh.
50,048 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 06 43
The usual practice is to not switch within a scene. It's better if you can wait until a chapter break. But there are no hard-and-fast rules. I've read highly respected books that included an occasional slide into a different point of view within a scene.
That said, I think if you find yourself hopping around several times within a scene, it would be wise to give some serious thought to whether all the PoVs are needed. The raison d'etre of limited PoV is to build reader identification with one (or a small number) of central characters. Every time you switch viewpoint characters, you undermine that sense of identification.
----------Tom L Waters
Cuyamungue, New Mexico, USA
8,425 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 23 07
What do you think of changing the POVs and in one chapter one character desribes the event to them and in the next the other character describes this same time frame but obviously from their POV??
----------"Run, rabbit run. Dig that hole, forget the sun. And when at last the work is done. Don't sit down. It's time to dig another one..." - Pink Floyd
NaNoWriMo Inspiration 2009 [ my dark side of the moon ]
58,934 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 02 21
My current Nano has four p.o.v. characters. I'm not using chapters, I head each new scene with the name of the character. It might be quite short or it might be a couple of pages (or more). My only advice would be not to switch p.o.v. in mid-scene (sometimes you see more than one switch in two or three paragraphs) because that's called promiscuous p.o.v.
Good luck with the nano.
----------MJ
18,177 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 07 21
Don't have the characters describe the events in dialogue. This is boring for the reader and will be doubly so if you do it twice from different POVs. Show the events as they happen. If you want to show the same event from both POVs, you can do that. Think of the movie Vantage Point.
Before you go down that road though, be sure you have a legitimate reason for showing the same scene twice from different POVs.
43,113 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 13 11
My creative writing tutor calls it 'head hopping' and that too much of it makes the reader dizzy so it is generally a bad thing. That said, I'm doing it a bit in my nano because a] I can always edit later, b] I want to and it's my nano and c] I don't have a main character, unless you count a building as a character...
----------Yes the pic is a stavechurch, in case anyone wondered!