Introduction

Everyone has a multiple POV story or multi-storyline novel that comes to mind as if it were a chaos of spinning plates that fell off their sticks. The balancing of multiple views or storylines can be one of those balancing acts that gets away from the best of authors. Yet, when you get the balance correct, it can make the story more satisfying, more engaging to readers, and give depth that couldn’t be provided by a singular POV.

Writing in speculative fiction worlds leans more heavily on parallel plotlines than most other genres. This is because the world-building scope often demands seeing the world from multiple vantage points including: different factions, planets, timelines, magical and non-magical worlds. Yet the more threads you’re playing with, the more knotted up they can become.

So today we’ll be going over how to choose which threads deserve their own POV, how to weave them so each chapter does more at once, and how to braid them together so the end feels like a tight woven rope instead of a loose ball of yarn.

Choosing Your Threads: Not Every Story Needs Its Own Lane

While every story has at least two sides to it, that doesn’t mean every story needs to be told by two or more perspectives. This is especially true in speculative fiction. The worlds and scope are often massive, and it may seem critical that you have a character from each world telling their story. Yet how do you determine which characters, worlds, factions, or whatever segregation tool you use in your fiction, desrve their own POV or storyline? Begin with the following question.

Does this plotline need a separate POV, or is it information that the protagonist could encounter through the story itself?

To fully answer this question to ensure you’re covering all necessary POVs in the story we need to look at the functionality of the thread you’re considering following. A functional thread in a story is one that adds to the overall experience in a way that changes how the readers experience and interact with the story. A functional thread doesn’t just add world-building details, but also shows how those details impact the characters, the plot, and any other elements integral to your storyline. Consider the Miller versus James Holden plotlines in The Expanse. Each of these POVs focus on different elements of the overall story that impacts each characters goal and the overall message of Leviathan Wakes, our greatest enemy will always be ourselves and not external threats. At the same time these storylines are building the readers understanding of the cultures, factions, and governments of the book’s Universe in a way that is pertinent to the POV characters.

For each of your current or potential POV threads, ask the following:

• What is a “Job Description” for this POV Thread? Does it do more than just add world-building info dumps? If not, cut it, merge it, find ways to bring the information in through another POV.
• Are the POV threads dependent on the other or independent? If the latter, what’s the importance of keeping them separate? Will they ever be connected?
• How do the individual POV threads impact the reading experience? Who will most likely identify with each POV thread?

Asking your story these questions will help you trim unnecessary POV threads, and deepen the ones you keep. Multi-POV stories can be a lot of fun and memorable works of fiction when the time is taken to ensure every POV matters.

Weaving for Momentum: The Art of the Cliffhanger Handoff

Now, this next part can create frustration in some readers, but remember that you can’t satisfy every reader. Let’s call this idea chapter exit velocity, or the cliffhanger handoff.

The cliffhanger handoff is the idea that every scene should end with a question that makes the reader want to keep reading, not just to continue the story, but so they can find the answer to that question. You can see this in television shows, especially at the marks between commercials for those made prior to streaming services. They had to make sure that you would stay interested enough to come back after the mental interruption of the commercials. If you want to look at a more literary example though, go check out sites like Royal Road and Wattpad. Serial fiction is built around the same concept of the cliffhanger handoff to keep readers coming back each episode/chapter as the book is published one segment once or twice a week. The structure looks a little more like the following:

• Opening Hook (5–10% of episode)
• Rising Action (60–70% of episode)
• Climax (10–15% of episode)
• Resolution & Setup (10–15% of episode)

So then how do we apply this to the POV cliffhanger handoff?

Since the first part of the chapter will be a lot of the same, the change comes down to the resolution section. If you’re following a standard chapter/scene structure format (Exposition, Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Dilemma, Climax, Denouement) Then most of your endings land on that nice clean resolution of the chapter/scene problem. What you do is pull in the beginning end of the next plot thread just enough to make your readers realize they want to read the next chapter or section of the book so they can get back to that plot thread. This takes us into the next technique for weaving momentum into the story, a concept called braid, don’t alternate.

The classic dual POV narrative alternates between two perspectives that contribute a portion to the story. This can come across as events going on at the same time viewed by different people, in different areas, or in different worlds that are somehow connected. Or you can have one in the present moment and one in the past. The alternating structure works well for the dual POV because it creates a pattern and doesn’t set the cliffhanger to answer ratio too far apart. But sometimes this can create a metronome feeling that lowers the reading experience. If you follow a consistent A-B-A-B structure, then your readers will anticipate when you actually want to keep them offset. You can open with an A-A-B-A structure, or any other variation on that to prepare your reader for the fact that it won’t be a classic structure. This will keep your reader waiting to see who will be leading the next chapter and spaces out your cliffhanger momentum. It also helps your readers invest in a certain character from the get-go. It will also help maintain tension between the perspectives.

This becomes especially important when you’re using more than two perspectives. Think of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. If he’d patterned his perspectives it would force narrative arcs to drag and make readers uninterested. The rotational gambit of who’s perspective we’re going to read next keeps the readers eyes on the page.

Convergence: Landing Multiple Planes Without a Crash (2–4 paragraphs)

Dean Koontz’s The Darkest Evening of the Year is one of those parallel storylines that leaves the reader clueless as to how they’re connected until far later in the book. While it’s been a while since I’ve read it, and may not enjoy it as much now as I did then, the one thing that sticks in my mind is how the book brought two perspectives that didn’t seem like they could have possibly connected into a satisfying payoff of having read both perspectives without fully understanding why they both mattered. Dean Koontz landed the multiple planes well by making the revelation of connection satisfying and showing the reader that the effort of staying with the story was worth it. This is something that many authors of Multi-POV stories struggle with.

Readers are willing to forgive slow-building parallel threads if the convergence feels earned instead of being coincidental. A lot of this has to do with the thematic convergence vs. the plot convergence. Sometimes the POVs don’t need to physically collide, but need to resonate by answering each others questions. This is one reason The Game of Thrones series worked so well. While the threads didn’t always connect between characters, they gave answers to things that couldn’t have been seen otherwise. You can see this in the threads of the political wars versus the Others. While many POVs spend thousands of pages on the political wars, the true existential threat is shown through Jon and the Night’s Watch POVs. Even though the prologue introduces the threat, it really is almost forgotten about by readers until the Others start appearing in Jon’s perspective. As much as they’re a true threat to Westeros, they don’t physically connect fully until late in the TV series, and still haven’t in the book series. Instead they connect thematically through the god-eyes view of the reader understanding that while the political intrigue is important, at the same time it pales in comparison to the true threat waiting for them.

Conclusion

Running multiple POVs isn’t an impossible task, but something that takes time and focus. As you craft your stories and different perspectives remember that each one has a clear job. For Jon’s its to show the true threat and how being at the frontline can change ones priorities. While from the rest of the Westeros POVs, the world becomes a distraction from true threats as we squabble over what we think is important. Then as you remember the jobs, look at how they can interact with each other. Using tools like the perspective cliff-hanger and answering questions through other POVs keeps your readers engaged through seemingly small actions. Remember that the payoff can come through thematic resonance rather than physical collisions of perspective. The strong multi-POV story shows readers how two seemingly unrelated views can impact the overall story.

Comment below with your one-sentence job description from your WIP. Or you can share your multi-POV structure and how you handle the shifts between perspectives.

Multiple plotlines don’t just tell several stories in the same book, they show that the world’s larger than just one character’s POV to provide a more rewarding reading experience.

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