When we talk about epic fantasy, it can pretty much be assumed that there are going to be multiple viewpoint characters in the story. After all, it’s hard to convey the grand scope of your world from just one character’s perspective. Usually there are multiple countries or races at play, and you typically want perspectives outside of your bog-standard human protagonist person. Of course, multiple viewpoints are not limited to epic fantasy, but it is the genre that I am writing in so that’s the lens through which I will write this post. (Credit is due to the Writing Excuses for their great information on viewpoints. Here’s one episode on this topic).

So, let’s talk about the different kinds of perspectives that we can offer. To me, this is defined by distance. You either have multiple viewpoints in close proximity to one another (think Six of Crows where our protagonists are on the same mission), or are too far away to interact or influence one another directly (like The Way of Kings where our various protagonists are spread throughout the world).

Each of these approaches offers different challenges and advantages, so let’s start with what it takes to do multiple viewpoints with characters who are in the same room, so to speak. I’ll leave the broader scope to a later post (link should be here when it’s done, feel free to bug me on twitter as long as you can read this!).

I’m pretty comfortable and familiar with multiple view points in close proximity. After all, this is a bit of what I juggle in Toric (though it’s a small degree compared to the aforementioned Six of Crows, with Skye only getting a few chapters, and a couple other characters just a section or two). I am sure later on in the series that the scope will grow, but for now we mostly have characters on the same mission together.

So, what are the challenges here? For one, distinctiveness is direly important. You can cheat on this a little bit when the characters are far apart and in very unique settings, but when you are switching between viewpoints in the same room, you have to worry about their voice a lot more. Whether you are doing first person or third person limited, you have to cloud each character’s observations in their background and personality.

My approach is to roleplay a bit. Given a situation, let’s say we’re in a bar and someone has just knocked over a table and drawn their weapon, I ask myself how would my viewpoint character react to this situation? Maybe I’m in my standard protagonist’s head, and I think, yeah, they’d probably spring up and be ready to intervene. Simple. So then, I think what would another character do in this situation. I’m not in their head for this scene, but if I can imagine how they would react in a different way, I can use this as a point of differentiation for my viewpoint character’s actions.

This admittedly works better if you have a character who is weaker or believes in themselves less, because if we are in their head then they can lament their lack of action or ability. It probably won’t sound quite right for a strong character to mentally congratulate themselves as they spring to defend a helpless bystander, so we need a different tack here.

That’s voice and personality. You have to let these things shine through. Again, we are in your viewpoint character’s head, they should be thinking about things through their unique lens. It may be that you haven’t yet identified exactly what sets this character apart from your others, so writing multiple viewpoints can be a good way to force yourself to work it out. I often actually write from viewpoints I don’t plan on including in my book just as a way to get inside of a particular character’s head, to write down their thoughts and let them come to life a bit more.

Well, given these challenges, why would you want to write a viewpoint character so close to another? What’s the benefit? Well, it can actually be very powerful to step outside of your main character to get an objective viewpoint of them. Maybe you’re working through some chapters that are dialogue heavy, and switching your perspective can help keep things fresh and maybe provide more insights to the reader about the current situation. I would hope that your different viewpoint characters would have different aspects of the current conflict or world that they would focus on, and if that isn’t the case, writing from their viewpoint is a fantastic way to force yourself to create that new perspective.

Another advantage of using multiple viewpoints like this is that it allows you to work around the limitations of your chosen perspective (first or third limited) in order to play around with information. When sticking to a single character, it’s almost impossible to present information in a way where your main character is unaware of it, after all we are seeing things mostly through that character’s eyes. But when you change perspective, you can make the reader aware of certain details and implications that the main character may not have realized yet.

The good folks over at the writing excuses podcast talk about this a number of times (one good episode is here). When both your main character and the reader don’t know what’s going on, then you have a mystery. When the reader knows what’s going on but the main character doesn’t then you have suspense. By providing an alternate viewpoint, then you can effectively hide information from your main protagonist and create suspense in ways that you never could with one perspective.

I can’t stress enough how careful you have to be when working through this though. I’m as guilty as anyone of writing an alternate perspective and just hearing the same narrator voice come through in the end. The viewpoint character needs to have a good thematic reason to take over and be that leading perspective, so I know that I have to constantly think about what such a character is bringing to the table that others are not.

As I said above, this is just the first of two planned entries on juggling multiple viewpoints, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this as I continue to write. For now, I hope you find some of this helpful or at least interesting. Please feel free to respond to my tweet below if you have some thoughts on challenges or benefits of this that I may not have covered! See ya!