Need help with a POV story idea

[cuninglinguist61]

I'm working on a POV story idea, and don't know what route to follow.
The story involves four people, a mom (mid 50's), her daughter (mid 30's), and her grand-daughter (18), and their male neighbor (mid 40's). In a nut shell, the four women all are going to try to seduce the neighbor, without the other two knowing about it. I want to include HIS POV as well as the women's.
My quandry is, do I include his story in the same one as each woman's, interspersing POV's (mom/neighbor in one story, then daughter/neighbor in the next...), do I write hers, then his, (mom's story, then neighbor's, daughter's story, then neighbor's...), do I write each women's story, then his (mom, daughter, grand-daughter, his. I could do his as one story with all three women, or three seperate stories), or do I write them all into one long story, interspersing POVs (mom/neighbor/daughter/neighbor/grand-daughter/neighbor...)?

 

[sr71plt]

How many separate scenes/encounters will your story cover? The more there are, the more likely it's best that you do it in scene-by-scene or period-by-period sections with that same scene/period seen by separate characters. That way the reader won't have so much to remember of one perspective of the story when encountering another perspective. This is the typical pattern my coauthor and I use in our books, and they are reviewed favorably.

Carol Shields used the first-one-character and then the other approach with the short novel Happenstance, though. You could track that down and see how it works for you.

I think the separate stories for separate perspectives of the same events can be interesting, although it's hard to keep them linked here at Lit. A couple of Christmases ago I did that with a nonerotic story series here at Lit. (marked my my list with the title opening word "Second"). Lawrence Durrell did this famously with his Alexandria Quartet novel series.

So, there are several ways to approach it; none are wrong as long as keeping the threads in mind are made too difficult for ther reader.