How do you switch POV/Narrators?

[Rob_Royale]

When I have done split first person, I did it by chapter.
Chapter 1 -Bob
Chapter 2 -Connie
Chapter 3 -Bob

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

See, this is still in the works. Mom is telling the story. She is the prime narrator among dialog between all in her presence. But things need to happen between the triplets when she isn't in the room, or even the house. Plan as of now is that in a new chapter, one of the triplets takes over telling the story until Mom gets back. Then they carry on with the triplets hearing Mom's dialog.


Next scene/ chapter would go back to Mom being primary.


I don't really want to use an offstage narrator to fill in the gaps.

In my story Boat Talk ( two old friends catching up on the deck of a boat), I have a main 1P POV, but switch back and forth between the two primary characters, also 1P POV. I added the following caveat as an introductory note at the top of the story. As long as you make it clear what you are doing, it shouldn't bne a problem.

Be warned, the little three asterisk thing; ***, indicates a change in voice. Dave is our main storyteller, but Rick gets to tell his story, too, so just be aware.

 

[Britva415]

I've been telling it from one person, but I need to switch to a third party so I can add things happening another room where the one isn't present.

Can it be done in a chapter, or should it be a new chapter?

I've tried to read some where that is done by a line of dashes or stars, but I find them hard to follow.

As a separate matter from the nuts and bolts of just how do you format it, how will you word it, how will the storytelling proceed, in such a way which makes sense as a manuscript?

Like, 1p voice/POV already bugs me when the narrative doesn't account for why the person is telling the story at all, or to whom, or in what medium, or any of those kinds of things. Like, why am I hearing this story from this narrator? Who am I to them? If I'm not me, some reader who's outside of the fiction, but I'm someone else they're telling the story to within the fictional universe, well, who is that? How did this come to be recorded into a manuscript? When a 1p story doesn't make any effort whatsoever to even superficially or sugggestively fill in any of those blanks, I personally find it irritating.

So, there is even more of that kind of stuff happening in a manuscript with multiple points of view. How will your multiple narrators' words, your meta-narrative (the narrative which includes both narratives), make that make sense?

 

[TheLobster]

I've read a few stories where switched from 1P PoV of character A to 1P PoV of character B across a single dinkus. No explicit chapter headers, or names-as-titles; just a "seamless" switch.

The way they did it was always to have B talk about A within the first paragraph or even sentence. This made the change of perspective extremely obvious.

I haven't felt the need for it yet, for I rarely write in 1P, but if I ever need to incorporate a perspective switch I'm going to do it in exactly this way.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I've read a few stories where switched from 1P PoV of character A to 1P PoV of character B across a single dinkus. No explicit chapter headers, or names-as-titles; just a "seamless" switch.

The way they did it was always to have B talk about A within the first paragraph or even sentence. This made the change of perspective extremely obvious.

I haven't felt the need for it yet, for I rarely write in 1P, but if I ever need to incorporate a perspective switch I'm going to do it in exactly this way.

This!!!

 

[FrancesScott]

Can it be done in a chapter, or should it be a new chapter?

My story, Gravid Games, feverishly swaps FP narration between an MMC with a pregnancy / lactation fetish and a pregnant FMC. It’s only a short story (6,400 words).

I just use dividers like:

Still, the guy seemed to appreciate my efforts.

​

---

I couldn't take my eyes off of her.

But I make sure I use different nouns or pronouns for the other protagonist almost immediately (as in the excerpt above) in order to reduce confusion.

The subject of the story and its structure were both experimental, as is most of my work here.

—

UPDATE: My dividers are centered <hr>s of width 25%. This is supported in stories and in normal text here, but not when you make the text a quote it appears.

 

[VallesMarineris]

I've been telling it from one person, but I need to switch to a third party so I can add things happening another room where the one isn't present.

Can it be done in a chapter, or should it be a new chapter?

I’d like to point out an important distinction that can give an author another lever to pull: there’s a big difference between POV and narrator.

Whether 1P, 2P, or 3P, there’s a main character (MC) through whose words, thoughts, and actions we see the story unfold. But the MC doesn’t have to be the storyteller, the narrator.

The narrator is the person (or persona) telling the story. Yes, that often is one of the characters, usually the MC, but it doesn’t have to be. This is older than written literature. Homer was the storyteller of the Odyssey, although the story was mostly from Odysseus’s POV (and sometimes Penelope’s). When we encounter “the rosy-fingered dawn”, that’s Homer. This was all obvious to the audiences millennia ago because they could actually see and hear the storyteller right in front of them. For us it might get a bit obscured, but that structure of storytelling is still the foundation. And we can use it.

The narrator has an attitude, and a style, and sense of where the drama is heading, and in the end a message, that pull the story together and make it a whole. The POV characters don’t have to do that, and in fact are sometimes lost in their world.

So you can change POVs as long as you maintain the same narrator. This can work even for 1P, if the narrator is telling a story about himself, say, as a younger man, or relating an event in the past in which he didn’t know what was going on (this is done a lot in thrillers and mysteries, by the way).

So understand who your narrator is and how the narrator relates to the POV characters. If you understand how they’re different you’ll understand their relationship. Make sure your narrator keeps control of the story and you can have as many POVs as you want.

 

[THBGato]

Like, 1p voice/POV already bugs me when the narrative doesn't account for why the person is telling the story at all, or to whom, or in what medium, or any of those kinds of things. Like, why am I hearing this story from this narrator? Who am I to them? If I'm not me, some reader who's outside of the fiction, but I'm someone else they're telling the story to within the fictional universe, well, who is that? How did this come to be recorded into a manuscript? When a 1p story doesn't make any effort whatsoever to even superficially or sugggestively fill in any of those blanks, I personally find it irritating.

But... surely all of those objections could be applied to a third person narrator? (e.g. How does the narrator know this? How was this documented? What was their evidence? Did they interview the characters to find out what they were thinking and feeling? Why are they sharing their observations with me? etc etc)

Fiction demands we suspend our disbelief. Sure, a shoddy narrator - in first, second, or third person pov - makes that harder. I'm just thinking of all the great novels (Great Expectations, The Catcher in the Rye, The Big Sleep, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, The Hate U Give, etc) that you must have not enjoyed because of this!

Plus sometimes the lengths authors go to in order to explain HOW a first person narrative came to exist - think Frankenstein, with the dull sea Captain's narration, or Lockwood in Wuthering Heights - sometimes detract from the real story they are trying to tell. I can't tell you how many potential readers are put off by those framing devices.

 

[Britva415]

But... surely all of those objections could be applied to a third person narrator? (e.g. How does the narrator know this? How was this documented? What was their evidence? Did they interview the characters to find out what they were thinking and feeling? Why are they sharing their observations with me? etc etc)

To some extent, yes. But omniscience and unclear motivation are far easier to swallow when it's a third-person narrative voice.

A first-person narrative voice belongs to the primary character, and so cannot be regarded as anything other than a subject of the story, all of whose in-universe actions are eligible for questioning. I personally dislike the story and the storytelling being treated as "out of universe" when it's the main character delivering it - somehow.

There are ways of doing third person narration which are close enough to the story that it raises all these same questions, but there is something of a default, which we all learn from our earliest exposures to stories and storytelling, such that third person voices default to being out-of-universe and not up for question the same way the story's subjects and characters are. And because of that default, we tend to hang on to granting that liberty even to a 3p narrator which is much closer and less omniscient. It's even easy to fall back to that attitude, even when the 3p narrator is a literal in-universe character.

Fiction demands we suspend our disbelief.

Some fictions make greater demands than other fictions. I perceive the shortcoming I've been describing (with regard to the 1p voice) as excessively handwavey - only, without even hanging any speck of lampshade on it.

sometimes the lengths authors go to in order to explain HOW a first person narrative came to exist [...] sometimes detract from the real story they are trying to tell.

That's a great point, but to me personally, other authors' excesses and failures isn't a reason to not make any effort at all.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

How about an always on voice assistant, like Alexa or something? When Mom's away, she starts getting strange orders for things in her phone's notifications. She pieces together what the other characters are doing from that. It could also have the bonus side-effect of some comedy relief.

For example: https://xkcd.com/1807/