We talked about the problem of Head Hopping a while back, but this time we’re going to discuss how to tell a story from multiple points of view…without hopping heads. Head Hopping is often an issue with romance stories because the relationship between the main characters is almost more important than the characters themselves—most readers want to know what’s going on in everyone’s head. The only way to do that, without Head Hopping, is to split the story up into sections…one for him, one for her.
Examples of Multi POV Stories
Although most romance stories are told with multiple POVs, they aren’t the only ones.
Some stories are best told from different viewpoints. For example in a memoir-like narrative about mother-child relationships, some chapters could be from the mother’s POV and others from the child’s. Readers could see the same scene from each POV and find out what each character is thinking…and therefore understand why they acted the way they did.
Another example could be a suspense story. You can tell some chapters from the Protagonist’s POV and others from the Antagonist’s. That way the readers would know what the Antagonist is planning and be worried about the Protagonist being able to work his way out of the situation…raising tension along the way.
There are some stories that start off with a new character in each chapter…and only bring all the characters together near the end. We saw one story that had a dozen chapters…one for each month of the year…and twelve unique stories. It wasn’t until the very last chapter that all the characters just happened to run into each other, and all the individual stories tied together rather well. It was an interesting way to keep the readers interested…wanting to see how these disparate stories were connected, and it worked rather well.
In any case, you need to remember to stick with only one POV in each chapter. The only catch is that some characters may not have much to do when it’s their turn in the spotlight…and you may not want a bunch of short chapters. That’s where scene breaks come in handy.
Scene Breaks
Instead of waiting for a chapter to end, you can switch to a new POV by signalling a scene change. That allows you to change time, location, or POV. (And that’s the only way to change any of those three mid-chapter!)
There are a variety of ways to show a scene break, the most common being just a double Enter. At the end of each pgph, you hit the <enter> key, so for a scene break, you just hit it twice. That’s fine for use as you are writing…but when you’re ready to publish, you need do something more. Consider what would happen if one of your double-enters falls at the end of a page…it becomes invisible! That can happen even in an ebook, so you need to do something about it.
The standard is to use a triple asterisk centered on a line by itself to show a scene break, but some authors don’t want to be so mundane as to use such a common character, so they opt for a dinkus! If you are also bored with the asterisk, here are some fancier characters you can use as scene breaks (usually used in groups of three):
- Asterisms: ⁂ ✽ ❄ ✱
- Fleurons: ❦ ❧ 🍁 🍃
- Crosses: ✠ ✤ ✥ ✜
- Stars: ✪ ✯ ✴ ✺
- Arrows: ➜ ➠ ➢ ➳
Or, depending on the topic, specific shapes may be used, such as chess pieces, card suits, astrological signs, numbers or letters in circles, musical notes, or math symbols. Scroll through the Wingdings fonts to get some ideas.
An alternative to individual characters is to use fancy lines that stretch across the page, such as in the picture to the right. Plenty of sites offer a diverse choice of options—one of which is Vector Stock.
By controlling the scenes, you keep the reader oriented, and we all know that a disoriented reader is a confused reader…one ready to set your book down, never to pick it up again.