: How to execute a change of the POV in a first person novel POV? I am writing a novel and I am about 1/3 into it. It is in first person, past-tense. I am at a scene where the main character

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The moment you introduce more than one character narrating in the first person, they're no longer the narrator of the book. Instead you have a collection of accounts which is easier the more different accounts you have and which can be done well (I usually throw Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting as an example), but which raises the question in the reader's mind "who is telling me this story?" (In Welsh's case, it was Welsh - effectively an additional narrator for the collection of stories.)

Two people is tricky - particularly if one tells much more of the story than the other. The reader is likely to think "How does he know what she did?". This can be jarring when the second person's activities are written in third person, but when they're written in the first person this becomes "How is he seeing through her eyes?".

There might be a metaphysical or science fiction answer to this, but if so you'll have to include it and indicate the transition. Alternatively, you could start a new chapter with "This is what she told me happened", but this would probably work more smoothly if the second character was written in the third person.

[I'm using gendered pronouns as a convenient way to show two characters - I don't know whether your book works this way.]

Otherwise, it will be a case of working with the idea that the main character, while being the narrator of his part of the story, is no longer the narrator of the book.

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I have seen this done once before in a professional book. That book is by Seanan McGuire, though I can't recall the exact title. It's in her Incryptid series.

What she did was start an entirely new chapter, with a different chapter decoration, and opened the chapter up announcing that her cousin (technically her aunt) was narrating. These other chapters were also written in first person perspective, but it was made clear that the narrator was someone else.

An alternative might be to tell that bit as if this second character is explaining what happened to the first, though what you seem to want to do should be fine.

P.S. Another alternative is to rewrite the story in third person. The transition from one character's reference frame to another's isn't as troublesome if you aren't using first person, and close third person isn't that much different from first person in my opinion.

Rewriting might seem daunting, but I've done this myself. It isn't as bad as it sounds. It isn't fun, but its doable. In my case I was changing tenses which can't be done with simply changing the suffix on a verb. I had to rewrite it at the paragraph level, and in some parts rewrite entire scenes from scratch.

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