After reading the thread below, about POV change in the middle of a chapter, I decided to ask my own question: I have now written 8 full-length books, and am starting the 9th. Of the 8 books, 7 have just a single, third-person limited POV. For the last one I wrote, I had two third-person limited POVs. (Obviously, this made writing it harder). Whenever I changed POV, I always started a new chapter. (I also changed POV in the first book I wrote, but only for two or three chapters. In the 8th book, I changed POV every second chapter - i.e. chapter 1 for my first MC, chapter 2 for the second MC, and so on). My questions are these: 1. Am I limiting myself by sticking to just one POV per book? Personally, I find it easier to write. Would it also be easier for the reader? 2. Is it confusing to have one chapter per POV? Personally, I don't want to have more than one POV per chapter; it feels like "head-hopping". Thanks!
Depends on what you want to do. A single POV is obviously easier to manage and more narratively direct, but it limits you to one set of thoughts, feeling, and perspectives, though the narrative voice can riff off that a little bit. Multiple POVs obviously allow you to show more "stuff" with different perspectives and vibes, but it can get clunky and unnecessary if you add fluff to justify a secondary character's word count. Really depends on the story. War and Peace wouldn't have worked with a single POV, and Cuckoo's Nest would have lost all of its style with multiples. So, kind of depends on you.
Changing POVs needs a scene break at a minimum or it does become head hoping. You can do it within a chapter with scene breaks.
1. Just do whatever works best for the story. If you think it's better served by multiple POVs, use multiple POVs. Otherwise don't. I find tandem POVs much easier to write than singular, but I had to fight that inclination in my current WIP because the story is better told from mostly one perspective. 2. Yeah, scene breaks are fine instead of full chapter changes. That way a chapter can still represent a significant narrative threshold rather than just indicating a shift in perspective. When my two lead characters had their final confrontation in my last WIP, the scene length ratcheted down to just a few sentences for the pivotal moment—some so tightly connected that they completed one another's thought. It was fun. One challenge with multiple POVs, especially if it's a real balanced tit-tat scenario, is synchronising the narrative pacing. Breathing space is good, but completely stopping the show with misplaced stakes or tension is not. Don't worry about it if it's not quite right at first. I think it's something that can only be fully addressed in editing, at least in my opinion.
Yeah, as others have mentioned, it depends. In my last novel, I found it was best to have two POVs; one for the MC, and one for the "bad guy." But this is only because this particular antagonist is very nuanced, and it's valuable to the story and to the reader to understand what's going through their mind. Their perspective, and why their motivations are what they are. But in other stories, more often the bad guy is just so obviously bad and their motivations clear that we don't really need to hear from them outside of the viewpoint of the MC. As for when to change POVs, chapters are best, however sometimes there are sections where you might want to do this multiple times in a chapter, say for a chase scene. But generally I don't change the POV more than once in a chapter. One perspective is definitely easier to write, as you say. And to read, though two POVs isn't really a challenge to readers. The easiest thing I've written was in first person past tense. It was like a journal, a confessional, from the perspective of one character. It's also a nice format because if there are any inconsistencies in the narrative, hey, it's the character's fault, not the writer's !
