Hi all,
This week I'm going to talk about POV (point of view) in my books. Although most of my books are focused on one character with an occasional change of view, I have written a few books where there are multiple main characters who each have chapters dedicated to their point of view. These can be different scenes or areas that other main characters aren't involved in or different views of the same scene.
Celestial Plague.
In this series, there are four main characters. Shannon Pennylove, Jenna Carlton, Ashleigh Warren and Raya Oovo. Each of them have multiple chapters in every book. They are cycled through every so often so one character doesn't get two chapters in a row. They each have different personalities and opinions of the world they live in. For example; Jenna is more cynical and pessimistic while Ashleigh is a lot more meek and less likely to dive into conflict.
In the books, their chapters will be differentiated by a different chapter header for each character. A bird for Shannon, a fish for Jenna, a panther for Raya and a sun for Ashleigh. The chapter headers are supposed to represent their powers as well, which will make it easier for readers to identify. I did consider just having their names under each chapter but I wanted an illustration as well. My newsletter subscribers voted on this as well and decided that they also wanted illustrations.
Curse of Anubis.
There are two main characters in this series: Tahira Kahana and Bastet. As she is a goddess, Bastet is mostly in her cat form throughout the books and engages with the other gods in their animal forms as well. Although other gods appear throughout the books, Bastet is the only one who has chapters dedicated to her. I've written a lot of cat characters in the past so I wasn't too worried about writing a book with half of it in a feline POV!
Like Celestial Plague, this series will also have illustrated chapter headers. Bastet's, of course, will be a cat while Tahira will have a leopard. Again, I didn't just want the names under each chapter, I wanted something visual to distinguish a change of POV.
Why chapter headers?
There were a few things that I considered before choosing chapter headers as the way to distinguish POV. The others were:
Character name below each chapter - This was my first option but I decided I wanted something that looked better.
Different symbols in each chapter with a key explaining which character was which - I thought that this option might get confusing, especially in the ebook version. Most of the time Amazon will immediately jump to chapter one while skipping the contents. I didn't want people flicking back and forth and getting confused while reading.
Naming each chapter after the character - So, instead of chapters 1,2,3 it would go: Ashleigh 1, Shannon 1, Ashleigh 2 etc. I also thought that this would get confusing and would also be a pain to format.
In the end, I decided that illustrations would look best. I read a lot of Warriors books that have chapter illustrations and loved them. So, I thought they would be a good idea for my books.
Will I write more books with multiple POVs in the future? Possibly. I don't want to rule it out. For now the books that I'm planning on writing are all one POV, with the occasional chapter seen through the eyes of a different character. Because these books only have one POV I won't be doing illustrated chapter headers for them.
That's it for this week, I hope you enjoyed reading! See you next week!
