How many POVs are too much?

Last year, I switched POVs around three characters, each of them having their turn for a chapter. I think the transition goes smoother when you have a pattern for switching.

It does cause some confusion, I guess, bit it's all about your style and your writing talent. And it's often easier to write with multiple close perspective instead of from a distant, omniscient view. Really, they're two different POVs in my opinion.

Anyway, I think you should go for whatever fits your story.

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After three the PoVs start to become quite weighty, in my opinion. Dune is the only book I know that has lots of PoV characters, but even though it was very well written I found it difficult to keep up with everything.

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I could not give you an exact number on just how many is too many, but one thing I can tell you is that that's "less than the number of POV characters in the Wheel of Time series." When you start having "major" characters with all of two chapters to themselves in the entire novel, you know something is wrong here.

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A lot of characters can also be done quite well - George R.R. Martin is a oft-sited example of well done multiple MCs with rotating viewpoints (probably up to about 10 now with a few specific main ones? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a couple of months since the last one and I haven't caught up yet!)

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My first NaNo I had at least 8 POVs going on, and it was ridiculous. The most I've had since then was 4, and that worked well for that story. I used 3rd person limited in both cases. I think my problem with the first NaNo was that there wasn't really the need for so many POVs, not necessarily that I was trying to use that many. I had different groups of people who eventually came together, and I should have just stuck with one POV character for each group instead of giving everyone their own POV. It was just confusing, especially as the POV was, like, constantly changing. When I did the 4, the POV alternated each chapter. The characters all started out in different places, and by the time they finally came together, their voices were distinct enough that it was immediately clear whose POV we were on. I generally like 2 or 3 for a book, although I think I'm going to be stuck with just 1 for this year's novel.

I don't usually like reading a ton of different POVs in one book, but if each voice is distinctive enough, and if they don't switch around all the time, then it's fine to have a quite a few going on.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard. - Neil Gaiman

I think it can frustrate the reader, because they might feel they never get to know one person particularly well.

I had lots of characters in my NaNo last year, but I tried to keep the POV focused on a small number of them. It helped that some of them had good reasons for me not to go into their POV much. Like the hero's sidekick had a secret agenda that I didn't want the reader to get more than hints about, so even though she was a really important character she didn't get a lot of POV scenes until late in the book once the secret was out.

I often have a rule for certain characters, the main ones obviously. If this person is in a scene, they get the point of view unless theres a very good reason otherwise. Of course if I have several of those people in one scene, then I have to decide who gets precendence.

Also just how deep you get into someones thoughts while they have the Point of View can be important. If it's your main character, the reader wants to know loads about them. If it's a major but not main character they'll want enough to make that character come to life, so they can understand them, but don't spend too long on their inner life. ON the other hand a minor character who needs to carry the POV for a scene just because none of the main or major characters are there, only needs to have a shallow look into their inner life. We don't need their backstory in detail, we need just enough for the scene to make sense.

Last year, even though I had a lot of characters and several sub-plots and quite a few scenes that the main character wasn't in - I made sure I gave her the POV for almost every scene she was in. This made sure that her POV dominated and she deserved the label of 'main character'. :D I should go check how many scenes she's in and doesn't have the POV. I suspect I'll only need one hand to count 'em on.

Thanks for the input, everyone, it's been very interesting to read! :D

I have about five characters that the story revolves around, but one of them will only have her POV revealed through a journal that one of the other characters finds and reads. I'm also thinking about cutting out another of the characters, at least for the moment, as I'm having difficulties finding his particular voice, so to speak. Maybe I'll find some other way to convey him.

So, tenatively, there will be two POVs in the first time period and two in the second, with two (my gosh, the variations, they are boggling the mind!) wrapping up the story in the third period.

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I had two POV's for my novel last year, switching every chapter. It really helped because when I ran out of things to say for one character, I just switched to the other, and he could carry on the plot.

Personally I'd say one is best, but that doesn't necessarily mean any more is too many.

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down uses four, because it has very specific reasons for doing so. I think a lot of romance novels use two, but then some really good novels of that type use one so it can definitely be done.

I'm struggling right now because I think my story this year needs two POVs, but I'm not comfortable with the mechanic of how that works. I used a single POV in 2 or 3 of my 4 nanos and I find it works really well. The other year I experimented with writing my POV as if I were a camera - so no internal thoughts, and I could come into the room with one character but stay there with the other characters when he left. It was interesting (and good discipline making myself write without any internal character thoughts whatsoever) but I think people found it confusing because it's not what they're used to. I realized a while after I'd finished that really I'd written a screenplay in novel format ... My current thought is I'll just put a line break between paragraphs when the POV changes and make sure each section starts with something about the POV character for that section. But I'm still not sure if I'm just doing it wrong having two POVs. I can't think of any "literary" books I've read which have used more than one. Maybe I should try reading Dickens ...

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I have one main narrator, using first-person. But then now and then I pop in third-person narratives from someone else's POV. To me it seems to work fairly well, but I don't know if it would be confusing to someone else =)

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I have... wait, let me count... five main character POVs, one minor character POV and in one chapter I switch to ghostwriter (meaning no particular POV, more like someone in the room, watching what's going on and talking as they see it). I have my reasons though. Since the entire novel will be third person limited, and there are things happening all over the place, and much of the novel is introspective, I have to let each character tell their part of the story, especially since very few things are known by all.

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If you're in the double digets, you may be pushing too many. That doesn't mean you can't go into the double digets. It's just then we'd stop caring about all these people or not get to know them as well as we would if we were inside one person's head. But then, I've only read one author with too many viewpoint characters (where I actually had no idea who this person was when I read it and what it had to do with everything else), and he's already been mentioned.

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I think that if you go above four or five POVs, stick to the main characters and use the others as extra POVs, using them sparingly and only when you want to inject the plot with some intrigue and hook your reader in more.

I know the author Phillippa Gregory does they excellently in her novels. :)

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