This is another post in my series I’ve done about POVs. You can find out the first post here, where I talk about how I choose which POV is best for my story, and the second post where I talk about possible POVs and how they work in each story.
This week, I’m going to talk about how you can differentiate your POV when you’re writing multiple 1st Person POVs in a single book.
Multiple person POV is one of the hardest challenges a writer can face. That is because it’s not just about having a different narrator, but creating a whole new perspective of seeing the world. I talked about that in some of my previous posts about POV, how each character will see the world differently and how this will reflect into their narrative style and crafting your unique voice.
But when you have one more POV, things get even more complicated. It’s not just about crafting an unique perspective, but crafting it to make sure it stands out from the other ones inside the book. Your reader should always be able to tell who is narrating the story. If you get confused about who’s narrating each chapter, it means that the author has failed.
Which leads us to learning to craft these differences. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to narrate things in 3rd person instead of 1st. That way, even if you follow the narrative closely, you can still use small things to stand out. Each character will have different thoughts and expressions, but in the end, it doesn’t have to be completely distinguishable because you’ll still be using the POV character’s name in the paragraph.
You can see the difference in the following scenes, narrated by two different characters in line to get coffe, for example:
Alice was late. She looked at the watch, and then at the queue ahead of her. She was so late. Oh my god, she would never get to work on time. Her boss was going to kill her. It was the third time this week, and she couldn’t afford to be late again. And yet she stood in the queue, antsy, her fingers tapping her purse, and waited for her coffee. Hurry up, she thought to the barista, as if she could speed him up with only her mind.
Or narrated differently here by another character:
The café was packed in the morning, but Greg really didn’t mind it. There was an antsy woman in front of him, and the line moved slowly, but he liked the way people were always busy and in a hurry in the morning, as if the world was about to end if they didn’t get to places on time. There was a strange poetry in it, a type of magic that came from the busy life of the city.
Here it’s evident that these characters, narrating the same event, have different thoughts. Although ultimately you still use their names to narrate the events, you change the style to fit them better, but it doesn’t need to be extremely pronounced.
When narrating in 1st POV, this becomes a challenge, because you no longer have names available to make that easy distinction. The names become “I” only, and that can be very confusing to the reader.
So here are a few tips you can use to differentiate your POVs when narrating in first person.
- Vocabulary. Vocabulary is the first resource you must find. Above, you can see that Alice thought of ‘queue’, while Greg talked of a ‘line’. This can work on many levels, not just on word choice, but whether your character relies a lot on vernacular language, or if they like using fancy and longer words, or if they use a log of slang. There can be so many distinctions made here, and this is always where you should start.
- Descriptions. Make sure your characters describe different things. If one of them is a baker, they’ll describe food and scent more acurately than someone who has no interest in those things, for example. People will also notice different things in a room. Someone will notice the decoration, somebody else might notice whether the house is clean or not. Keep in mind that your characters work differently, and thus, they’ll notice different things.
- Personality. This is also important, because characters will react differently to dialogue. Someone who is always quiet and keeps their anger inside them will react differently to someone who’s usually brash. They’ll also have different emotions. Someone might pay attention to when people are angry, and others are attentive when people are sad.
- Metaphors. Metaphors can also really help! A character who’s an athlete might use a lot of metaphors that compare things to sports, while a character who enjoys theater might compare things to their favorite play.
- Elements that are visually different. This is the easiest way to distinguish things: some characters may use caps lock in their narrative randomly, or like the book “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”, one of them never capitalizes any words. These visually different elements can come in the form of lists, of footnotes, of highlights and italics, but they’ll make it easier for the person reading it to know it’s a different POV. And I’m not talking about fonts here, I’m talking about elements of their personality that can be represented visually into the narrative without warping your objective.
At last, keep a list! I always recommend keeping a list when using more than one POV, and that way, you can easily go back and distinguish which things you were using for who. It will work like a ‘cheat list’, but that also helps to keep track if you have been using things that are too similar to one another.
Happy writing!