: Re: Can you switch point of view very often? I'm trying out a style where I switch POV very often. It's written in third person, but everything described is things that are visible to the POV

@Turnbaugh521

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You certainly can do this. A better question is whether or not you should. Does your story actually need multiple POVs? Especially if the characters are all together, I question whether it is worth the cost in decreasing your attachment to any one character.

There are cases like a romance or morally grey conflict in which the second perspectives add something, but so much of the time it makes the story harder to follow and draws you out of the action just when it is getting good. A notable example of I can think of this comes from Leviathan Wakes, in which we cut away from Holden's story in the middle of a space battle.

If the character's aren't all together, a worse problem is that you often wind up with characters who are solving different problems and thus aren't really part of the same story. There needs to be a reason for more than one perspective in a story. While I previously criticized Leviathan Wakes for the POV shift, it is an example where it is justified, as it is established from the beginning that Holden and Miller are following different parts of the same underlying investigation. The TV series even adds a third POV without it feeling redundant because it is a different bigger picture perspective on the same events(and because Avesarala is awesome). The Martian is another case in which it is justified by the nature of the story, because if we didn't know what NASA was doing it would make less sense.

Multiple POVs can be extremely effective, but they are also hard to get right. It is vastly easier to tell a good story with only a single POV than with multiple ones. It is far too easy for writers to add redundant and unnecessary characters, so if you do use this, be very careful with it.

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