point of view question(s)

So, I've been working on my novel for awhile now, and it's 1st person point of view. Lately I have been realizing that there is so much more to the story besides what the main character sees. I was wondering if it would work (in your opinion) if I still narrated the main characters chapters with 1st person, while I narrated the minor character(s) with 3rd person.

-Tori

Just about anything goes in a story, so long as you set it up like a pattern. Which means setting up the PoV changes early on in the story, either by doing PoV switches from the very start, or switching for a handful of scenes/chapters early on and slowing increasing the number of scenes you switch around.

I haven't read the books so I'm not sure, but the Pendragon series apparently does this. The details as to how can be found here.

Hope this helps!

I personally love when books switch characters because I love seeing things from different perspectives. I tend to think it works better when you do all of them from the 1st person, or all from the 3rd person so that it doesn't get confusing who the narrator is. But it could work, as long as you make it clear who's speaking.

tori1234 wrote:So, I've been working on my novel for awhile now, and it's 1st person point of view. Lately I have been realizing that there is so much more to the story besides what the main character sees. I was wondering if it would work (in your opinion) if I still narrated the main characters chapters with 1st person, while I narrated the minor character(s) with 3rd person.

-Tori

I actually think that that would be a good idea, not only to pull in more information, but to have your work stand out a little more than ohers.

And yeah...Pendragon did do that and it was pretty entertaining!

I actually did the same thing with my own novel and it worked out great. The first-person POV really allows you to empathize and relate to the main character, usually at a deeper level than third person can allow. Their actions and motivations are generally easier to buy into, not to mention it tends to be easier for most people to write anyway.

But then of course, third-person has all the advantages of being able to go anywhere and do anything at any time, which is extremely useful for constructing a plot, especially if it happens to be large in scope or with lots of characters and sub-plots. Anything even remotely epic in nature is going to be very difficult to write entirely from first-person, unless you're jumping around to many different characters (which I personally don't like as much as just sticking to one character in first-person). Combining the two perspectives gives you the best of both worlds. Really though, it all depends on the story in question. Something things just lend themselves better to third-person, in my opinion (epic sci-fi and fantasy, for example).