Expanding Your Perspectives

As writers, we need to make sure the perspectives we communicate our stories through are as engaging as the stories themselves! Carefully choosing your point-of-view and developing a strong voice for your narrator are great ways to ensure that readers will love the way your story is communicated to them. Another tactic worth considering, especially when writing speculative fiction, is choosing to have multiple narrators or perspective characters.

The advantages of having multiple perspectives through which you tell your story can be split into two major areas:

More Quantity

The simplest way including multiple perspectives can help your story is by allowing you to explore more of what’s going on in your setting; while a single character can’t be in multiple places at one time, multiple characters can be! If your plot includes many moving pieces, or the world of your story is so vast that characters can’t easily travel from one place to another, then it can be difficult to communicate everything that’s going on through the eyes of a single perspective. Multiple narrators can give your audience access to many different places, groups, or even times within your story.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi writers will often choose to have multiple perspective characters because of how complex their settings are. Not only do they get to show off more of the world they’ve built through varied perspectives, but directly showing different parts and how they connect can make it easier for the audience to understand that world.

Varied Quality

When including multiple perspective characters, you do have to make some sacrifices, but you don’t have to trade the quality of your perspectives for the ability to show more of your plot or world. In many ways, the presence of another perspective can actually enhance the perspectives you already have. 

If the different perspective characters you include have different world views, come from different cultures, or are even on opposing sides of the conflict of your story, you can use them to reveal each other’s flaws or expose each other as unreliable narrators. You could also choose to do the opposite, using multiple perspectives to reveal the strengths of a character that they don’t realize themselves. Including dissonance or disagreement between your multiple perspectives can not only build up your characters, but it can help to make your world seem more nuanced, immersive, and realistic.

You could also choose to use this in building the message of your story, by using the perspectives to communicate different ideas, or comment on the same idea in different ways. In many stories with multiple perspectives, the conflict can only be solved when the different characters learn to understand and empathize with each other.

With multiple narrators, each pursuing their own subplot or describing the events of the part of the world they’re in, you’re also able to easily build dramatic irony in your story. While each character only knows a fraction of what’s going on, the audience knows what’s happening from every perspective at once, which is a great way to create tension. This tactic can be especially effective if your characters are on opposite sides of the conflict; while they scheme against each other without any idea of what the other side is up to, the audience gets to anxiously and excitedly watch all of it!

Any Downsides?

Including multiple perspective characters can do a lot to add to the world, characters, and conflict of your story, but it may not always be helpful. The major downside of splitting up your perspective is that you don’t have as much time with each character. If there’s one character whose perspective is more important or interesting than the rest, your story might be stronger if you choose to only focus on that character instead. 

It’s also worth considering how much information you want to give your audience. If you’re writing a mystery or other story where you don’t want your readers to know everything going on, it can be much easier to accomplish that if they can only see the word through a single character. The same goes with stories where the audience is unsure if the narrator is reliable, and part of the mystery is only seeing through one perspective.

Conclusion:

The methods we use to tell our stories are a vital part of our writing, so it's worth carefully considering every option we have. For some, using multiple narrators or perspective characters might just be the tactic that works best.

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About the author: An aspiring screenwriter, Allister McLeod is a First-year at Barrett, the Honors College, at Arizona State University. He is studying English Writing, Literacies, and Rhetoric and Film and Media Studies, with goals of pursuing further education in the future. Allister's writing interests focus on the recent intersections of genre and literary movements, and his personal projects focus on politized industrial fantasies.