Indie Authors Monthly Magazine For Authors and Readers discussion

I'm looking for examples of 1st person POV for multiple characters that is done well, preferably in an Urban Fantasy book. I'm familiar with the Song of Fire and Ice, but that is definitely high-fantasy and a bit more epic than I'm looking for.

As a reader, how many POVs are too many for you? What are the defining factors in your reasoning?

If you are someone who has used this technique, what were the pitfalls you encountered and what would you have done differently?

The Song of Fire and Ice series is probably the best extreme example of multiple first-person POV. I doubt if many authors could match George R.R. Marin's ability to keep track of so many charactes' personal observations through so many scenarios.

The only other good example of multiple first-person POV, that I recall reading, is Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.

As a reader, I prefer first-person POV. It is much easier for me to identify and empathize with the character. Third-person is preferred when the story itself is emphasized more than the participation or contribution of a specific character.

Of course, when written in the first-person, the reader sees, feels, and experiences the story through the eyes and perception of the narrating character. However, the reader's perception and opinion does not always have to agree with the character's.

Hi Nevada. I haven't used first person in any of my fantasy novels, but I did use 1st person in my psychological thriller. I chose to write 1st person as I wanted the POV of the two principle characters, and wanted to show a marked difference in the way they saw events unfolding. In doing so, I decided to stick to just one per chapter, rather than switch part way through. The biggest difficulty I encountered was making it clear from the beginning of the chapter whose headspace you were in. I wouldn't have done anything differently.

Nevada, my contemporary fantasy thriller series uses multiple first person. I only switch at chapter breaks.

It is written as if it were testimony in a documentary film. Each character is telling parts of the story that they experienced most directly.

I have 20 reviews on Amazon and none below 4 stars. Many of them comment on the choice of multiple fist-person POV and say they they like it because it adds depth to the characters. You get the intimate advantages of first person and the deepening of seeing how others view your character. No one has seemed confused by the switching. It is also a handy POV form because I needed to have some information known to some characters and not to others at a certain point.

I had one beta reader who said he wished the character voices could be more different from one another. But I've had several readers who say they could pick up the book and identify which character was narrating within a few sentences.

One Goodreads reviewer criticized the fact that I change chapters sometimes even when the POV doesn't change. She suggested that I should have just had really long or really short chapters at times and docked the book a star simply on that basis. In my view that's a matter of taste. I subscribe to the conservative school-of-thought in which chapters should be fairly similar in length.

So, my first book only uses 3 POVs, three different first-person narrators. The first one has the first four chapters and the reader is very comfortable with that but then that character ends up unconscious and the POV switches. I've never had anyone feel that was a strange switch. It might help that the narrator is unconscious and the reader can't see how else the story could continue. :) Later on another major character gets the POV for a few chapters because he goes off away from the other characters and otherwise we wouldn't know what was going on.

The next two books in the series add a few more POVs. They are mostly major characters that the reader knows well. I think Book Two has 6 narrators an Book Three has 6. I haven't run into a problem with it yet.

I don't know that it is easy to write this way for the average writer. I have worked as a journalist for many years and I specialized in empathetic features where I had to get into the head of a subject. The key to doing multiple first-person the way I did is getting into the emotions of each character. I wrote a couple of chapters from the first-person POV of someone who was very unsympathetic and hateful. That was very challenging. I worked harder on those chapters than on anything else in the series. But the results were successful and deepen the story. I think it might be easier to write the POV of a villain if you are writing in third-person. But the depth and intimacy of first person is still my preference, even if it is hard to pull off.

Oh, oops. The first book is The Soul and the Seed if you want to check it out.

For me, A Song of Ice and Fire just about has too many. There's twenty-five five of them. If you get that many, it is kind of difficult for me to keep the characters straight.
I only think of third person off the top of head that changes to different characters.