: Re: Multiple POV's: Am I in over my head? Wondering if anyone with great wisdom can help me... I have 2 problems really that have pretty much stopped me writing anything decent for a few weeks.

@Gonzalez219

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You can use a sidekick as the POV for your genius villain. Think of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes; by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle's stories are ruined if told from the POV of Sherlock alone, but compelling if told from the POV of Watson, because Watson can't tell us what is going on inside of Sherlock's head.

Your villain has minions, taking orders. Promote one to the post of Minion In Charge Of Minions (MICOM); and from MICOM's POV you can relate what is happening; something about the plans and jeopardy being created. This can create concern for the heroes, or anticipation if it becomes clear the heroes have an edge the villain does not know about; etc. All without revealing the whole plan or mind of the villain. But of course the villain can drop clues to the MICOM and share details. Make that MICOM:Villain relationship as intimate or distant as your story needs it to be.

B) Multiple POV (MPOV) is fine, but you do have writing mechanics to consider when using it; in deciding when to switch POV. MPOV will seem to the reader to imply a timeline; either "Meanwhile," or subsequent.

You do not have to switch POV like clockwork; that wastes some of the utility. Characters in uneventful travel across the world do not need to be visited "in turn" every time. from your God's Eye View of the story as a whole, MPOV is useful because of all the story threads in your weave, you can pick the one most interesting, and talk about that POV next; while letting other threads progress without explicit description.

The primary difficulty with MPOV, in my view, is what to do when two POV collide: Alex and Beth, both POV characters, come face to face: Whose POV dominates the crucial exchanges? (Of bullets, information, bodily fluids, or whatever they meet to do.)

Or two POV remain separate but meet turning points in their threads at the same time? (You may be able to invent a problem to delay one by a chapter).

But MPOV does let you have one POV character make progress on some aspect of their goals while your focus is on others. You don't have to invent all kinds of minor problems and dialogue to hold the reader's interest while Cindy works at her office job, or lies in bed for a month recovering from her gunshot wounds. The reader (or viewer) presumes if the character is off screen they are continuing to do whatever they planned, without any plot-changing difficulties; or they are still doing what they were last seen doing, living their life without important incident.

So as an author, you can "skip ahead" to the turning point. I bring this up to address your problem about flatness: Anytime you switch to Character X POV, it should be a turning point in their story, something must change that puts them on a new course, or wakes them up, or has an emotional impact (positive or negative).

It is boring to read about John and Karen having a peaceful domestic life in Chapter 5, and then in Chapter 10 we come back to them --- having the same peaceful domestic life but this time John broke his favorite coffee cup.

Oh. The horror.

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