Day 207: Thoughts on Multiple Perspectives

I haven't written anything with several perspectives until now. This new project has several. I know that ultimately I will have three main characters, with a few side characters that will also have a chapter here and there from their perspective. It's surprisingly much easier than working on a single perspective. The story progresses much more smoothly in my mind when I can jump from person to person between chapters for some reason. Maybe I've just seen and read so many stories with multiple perspectives that it feels more natural. When working on Oneiromancer, I had just one perspective to cover, and I often found myself running into walls. It felt strange jumping from one point in time to the next without intervening events happening. It felt equally strange covering every second of Clara's life though. I had to find a balance, to go from scene to scene without putting too many junk scenes in, but also without just skipping over the 'boring' establishing scenes. Of course they shouldn't be boring, but that's how they felt sometimes. It was a real challenge to mate everything together cohesively.

I thought that challenge would be doubly hard with multiple perspectives, but I'm finding that isn't the case so far. For example, I have one character who has to travel a long distance between scenes. There's a three day gap where nothing really goes on. It would feel unnatural to me to skip this without any mention of it if his was the only perspective. Going from the end of a chapter where the journey starts directly to the the beginning of the next chapter where the journey ends would just seem ... strange. I can't quite put my finger on why. The pacing feels off, but that's just it, it feels off. I can't tell if it feels off because my taste has been crafted by so many hundreds of stories where such time is filled in with other perspectives, or if it feels off for a more concrete reason. Regardless, during this pause in his story I can jump to another character, or maybe two even, then return to his story and it feels like time has really passed. Intervening events occurred that bridge the gap and all of them were interesting, crucial scenes for the overarching narrative. It's nice to have this option. Without it, I felt the need to fill in the travel time with paragraphs that skip over the time manually, letting the landscape fly by like those scenes in a movie where they zoom out to a map to show where the character is going. Those paragraphs are the toughest to exit and enter for me, and I'm kinda glad I have the option to do something else.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley