: Re: 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

@Karen856

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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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