: Re: Is it okay for a chapter's POV to shift as it progresses? I have this duo in my novel, they're always together in chapters. Usually the story alternates between them within their plot, though
There are no hard and fast rules about POV. There are different techniques that you can choose in order to produce the effect you want. Some of the techniques are harder to carry out than others.
What generally goes wrong with unskillful handling of POV shifts is that shift is either jarring or confusing to the reader, which breaks the "reader's trance" and pulls them out of the story. One way of dealing with this is to have scene breaks and clearly marked transitions in the text. Then although the POV shift is sudden, it doesn't feel wrong to the reader, because they know it's happening.
Another technique is to write in transitions that gently helicopter us out of one POV and into another:
That little brat Will was chewing gum. Sister Wendy locked her gaze on the boy, who continued his chewing while staring out the open window by his seat in the corner.
The children's heads turned, and there were a few smiles to be seen. A warm breeze blew in through the suddenly silent room, bringing the smell of the stables on the other side of Main Street. A little brown mare was hitched out front, where she'd been led, limping, on a halter. Something was wrong with her left front foot.
Will dug the tip of his fountain pen into the palm of his left hand and bit down on his lip. Was it a split hoof? That would hurt a lot for sure. Or maybe someone put a shoe on and did it wrong.
A nice example of a POV shifting back and forth between two main characters, with no clear demarcations, is the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels.
To me it generally feels a little awkward when you have a whole novel written predominantly in one POV, but then one part of one chapter shifts the POV. It feels asymmetrical and violates the expectations that have been set up in the reader. If it's really necessary to do this, I would try to avoid creating that expectation, by varying the POV in more subtle ways elsewhere in the book.
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