How do you balance multiple points of view?
One of the pleasures of rereading is holding your memories of a book up alongside the reality and seeing where the gaps are. Often the mismatch will lead to valuable insights about the writer’s craft. I picked N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became for this Novel Study series in part for the author’s deft use of multiple third-person narrators. In my memory of the book, there were five narrators (for the five boroughs of New York City) and they had roughly equal page time. Reader, I was wrong. And the book is better for it. Let’s see why.
When should you use multiple narrators?
Before we investigate how Jemisin uses multiple narrators, let’s spend some time talking about why she does so. I’m going to avoid major spoilers in this post, but let’s pinpoint the starting premise, which we learn in the prologue of the novel: New York City, as other great cities have done before it, is emerging—being birthed—as a live entity. But it is vulnerable in its newborn state, and it has an Enemy. It also has an avatar—in this case a young Black street kid—to both embody the city and fight for it. But the Enemy has developed new tactics and manages to damage the avatar. The newly awakened avatars of the five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) must come together to fight off the Enemy and heal the primary avatar if the city is to survive.
The prologue is written in first-person present from the point of view of the unnamed primary avatar, and shows him awakening to his power and fighting the first battle with the Enemy. First-person present is as close as authors can take readers to a character, which is why it’s often the choice for YA fiction, which prizes the reader–character connection. But Jemisin can’t stick with this narration choice because the plot of the book requires that this first narrator be forced off stage until the end of the novel.
After the prologue, we encounter a chapter that is titled “Interruption,” narrated in third-person past from the point of view of Paulo, the avatar of São Paulo, the most recently born city, whose job it is to help the avatar of New York City through its own birth. Paulo knows the rules of this fantasy world, and that’s what Jemisin needs readers to have access to. But she’s smart about what she delivers here. Paulo, through his own observations (the avatar disappears in front of him) and a terse phone conversation with an unnamed person, reveals the stakes (there have been “postpartum complications”) and the quest, but only obliquely:
“Like London, then,” says Paulo.
“Hard to be sure. But yes, so far, like London.”
“How many, do you think? The greater metropolitan area crosses three states—”
“Don’t make assumptions. Just ‘more,’ as far as you’re concerned. Find one. They’ll track down their own.” A pause. “The city is still vulnerable, you realize. That’s why it took him away, for safekeeping.”
The unnamed voice on the other end of the phone warns Paulo to watch his back and advises, “Make them work fast. Never good to have a city stuck halfway like this.” As readers, then, we have a broad sense of the quest and the stakes from this “Interruption.”
Now, why doesn’t Jemisin stick with Paulo as her narrator through the action that follows? I think there are two answers here. First, Jemisin knows that she is writing a high-stakes, high-suspense story here. The closer the readers are to the action, the more intensely they’ll feel the heat of that suspense. Paulo is invested in the outcome, but only at second hand: this is not his city, after all. The consequences are not life and death for him.
The second reason has to do with theme: one of the themes of the book is the power of discovering and fully owning your identity. For that theme to fully land, we need access to the inner lives of the avatar characters. Paulo, after all, has already passed through his moment of calling and acceptance. By deploying a classic assemble-the-team trope here, Jemisin is able to show us a group of characters—with different backgrounds, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses—confront the call to action and make their own decisions.
Before we move on, let’s examine another option open to Jemisin: omniscient narration. In omniscient narration, the (usually unnamed) narrator is like god, able to dip into the interior thoughts of any character at any time. This is the narration style of Lord of the Rings, for example. I’ve written elsewhere about the difference between omniscient and limited narration and why the former has fallen out of favor, but I think it’s enough to say here that Jemisin wants us to step into the lives and minds of her characters as fully as possible, and limited point of view allows her to achieve that goal better than omniscient narration.
How do you balance multiple narrators?
If you’ve read the novel, take a moment to guess how many scenes each character narrates before scrolling down to the graphic I created which lists them all. In my memory, each avatar had roughly equal ‘page time,’ though I remembered Manny, Brooklyn, and Bronca as carrying more weight in the novel than Padmini and Aislyn. (I had not remembered that the NYC avatar and Paulo were point-of-view characters at all.)
If you scroll down to the graphic now, you’ll see where I was wrong and right. I was right that Manny (in orange on the graphic) and Bronca (green) carry more weight in the narrative. But I was shocked to see that Brooklyn (red)—who feels like a guiding, grounded force throughout much of the book—has only one point-of-view chapter, though it is placed right at the heart of the novel. I was equally surprised to find that Padmini (puarple), the avatar for Queens, has only one POV scene, and that Aislyn (yellow), the Staten Island avatar, has so many.
Note too that Paulo’s “interruptions” (gray) stop appearing midway through the book. This is, in part, because his narrative role as knowledge-bearer is partly taken over by Bronca who—as the physically oldest character and also the one with the longest connection to the land, thanks to her Native American heritage—is given the knowledge of how this multiverse works when she steps into her role as avatar for the Bronx. Paulo also becomes more directly entwined in the action rather than following a step behind the avatars, so when we see him appear in the second half of the book, it’s through the point of view of another character.
How do you layer character arcs?
Now let’s analyze how Jemisin uses her multiple narrators. If you choose to use this narrative structure, how do you decide which parts of the plot each character will narrate? How do you manage to show a character arc for each one? The City We Became offers up clever solutions to both problems.
Generally, you do want each of your point-of-view characters to have a well-developed arc because otherwise what is the point of having access to their internal thoughts? That said, in a book like this one with multiple POV characters, some of those arcs can be truncated or flat. John Truby presents a useful formula for character arcs in The Anatomy of Story:
(W)eakness x (A)ction = (C)hange
In other words, over the course of the novel, you want to create an arc for your major characters which shows them moving from point A (weakness, lack, unrealized goals) to point B (strength, fulfillment, realized goals) by confronting and resolving their inner conflicts. Ideally that action the character must take is tied to the crucial external action of the book, so that it becomes the linchpin that ties the external and internal plots together.
Let’s look at how Jemisin varies the kinds of arcs she gives her characters and also how she layers them together to create an immersive, engaging story.
The first borough avatar we meet is Manny, which makes sense given the centrality of Manhattan, both geographically and in terms of power and prestige. Manny’s character arc also takes the longest to develop because he begins the novel with almost no identity at all: he has been struck with an odd form of amnesia as his train enters Penn Station, and has only external clues and vague internal echoes about his former persona. He accepts his new role as avatar for Manhattan without knowing exactly what he’s doing, and in part because he has been emptied of his former identity first.
We first meet Brooklyn in chapter two, while we’re still in Manny’s POV, and here’s where we see Jemisin being particularly smart and strategic about how she balances these multiple POVs and character arcs. Rather than keeping these character arcs separate, she layers them. And that’s why I remembered Brooklyn having such a major role in the book. She does, in fact, have a lot of page time, but much of it is not from her POV.
Why is that? Jemisin makes another smart choice here to vary the kinds of character arcs we see. She avoids any feeling of repetition that way but, more importantly, she gets to show us many different forms of what it looks like to accept a call to action and claim your identity. Like Manny, Brooklyn accepts her role as avatar right away (before we even meet her). Unlike Manny, Brooklyn is supremely confident in her identity—it’s no accident that she is the only character whose name is exactly the same as the borough she represents. And she literally represents her borough too, as an elected city council member.
When she steps onto the page in chapter two, Brooklyn first rescues Manny from the Enemy’s minions and then confidently guides them to the aid of Queens, educating Manny about New York City along the journey. But Brooklyn does have an alternate identity, a past life as MC Free, one of the most popular female rappers in the early days of the form. She doesn’t hide that identity, but she doesn’t embrace it either, and that is the focus of her single POV chapter in the middle of the book. The last element of her character arc—seeing the other boroughs as allies rather than competitors—is shown through oblique touches in chapters narrated by Bronca and Manny.
So, by the end of chapter two, we’ve met Manny and Brooklyn and left them on their way to find Queens. We then move to Staten Island, to meet its avatar, Aislyn. I’m not going to say much about her character arc to avoid spoilers, but as soon as I saw how much POV time she gets, I understood immediately why Jemisin needed to give her that much page time and also why I hadn’t quite remembered it accurately. I’ll just say that it’s easy to identify with Manny and Brooklyn and to understand their motivations and choices. It’s harder to understand Aislyn’s, and yet it’s crucial to the story Jemisin is telling that we do.
After Aislyn’s first chapter and another interruption from Paulo (in which he witnesses the aftermath of the attack on Manny in Inwood Park in chapter two and calls for help from the unknown entity he spoke to in the previous interruption), we meet Bronca.
She, too, after an initial confrontation with the Enemy, steps into her role as avatar for the Bronx without resistance. Where she resists, however, is in joining the fight to save the city as a whole, focusing first on her beloved Bronx, the art center she helped build, and her coworker Veneza, who is a daughter figure to her. Jemisin is also smart here in deploying a suspenseful medium-problem plot arc (involving a group of white supremacist artists, emissaries of the Enemy, whose work she is pressured to show at the gallery) that Bronca must solve before she can turn her attention to the overall quest she is being asked to join.
Finally, I want to note just how little backstory Jemisin uses to establish the inner motivations for her characters and how subtly she weaves that information into tiny quiet pockets in the narrative. Manny, for example, gets flashes of intuition about the person he used to be. After getting some access to his mind during a shared vision of the NYC avatar, Brooklyn probes for information. She’s still wary, after all, and uncertain how far to trust him:
“I used to hurt people,” he says, sitting back against the stairwell wall and gazing into the middle distance between them. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? I don’t remember everything. I don’t remember why, but I remember that much. Sometimes I did it physically. More often, I just scared them into doing what I needed them to do. But for a threat to have any teeth, sometimes… I followed through. I was good at it. Efficient.” Then he sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. “But I’d made the choice not to be that person anymore. I remember that, in particular. That’s why most people leave their old lives and come to the big city, right? New start. New self. It’s just turning out to be a little more literal for me than for most people.”
“Mmm,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Serial killer?”
“No.” He doesn’t remember feeling pleasure in the things he did. But he does remember that causing pain and fear was as easy for him as terrorizing Martha Blemins had been, in the park. Meaningless. He’s not sure that’s any better than being a serial killer. “It was… a job, I think. I did it for power, and maybe money.”
But somewhere along the way, he’d chosen to stop. He clings to this proof of his humanity as if it is the only thing that matters. Because it is.
“Well, that’s pretty damn fitting, for Manhattan.”
Notice just how much Jemisin is accomplishing in this short exchange. Manny is showing that he has made a decision to leave his past self behind; in other words, his character arc has advanced. And Brooklyn’s responses display her habit of confronting truths head on, her brutal honesty, and her belief that her values aren’t entirely aligned with Manhattan’s. After this snippet of conversation, Padmini rejoins them and they are on their way again on the next step of their quest. Jemisin never lets the forward action pause for long.
Aislyn’s backstory is given more extended page time than the others, especially in an important conversation with her mother in chapter ten, for the reasons already explored: Jemisin wants us to truly, deeply understand this complicated, and damaged, character.
How do you control multiple narrators?
Let’s dive down one more level and look at how Jemisin signals whose point of view we are in on the page. The first thing to note is that she never mixes two points of view within the same scene. In omniscient narration, this kind of slide can be fine, but it requires that we have a narrator whose voice and thoughts are guiding us. (Think, for example, about a movie voiceover, or the narrative voices we see in the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.) In third-person limited, where we dispense with that narrator figure and are brought right inside each character’s head, it can feel jarring to move from one character’s perspective to another—a problem many editors call “head-hopping.”
You can avoid this, as Jemisin does, by using a scene break or, more often, a chapter break as the switching point. If you look at the graphic above, you’ll see that Jemisin changes POVs at scene breaks only rarely, generally using chapter breaks instead. The one notable exception is in chapter fifteen when we toggle between Manny and Aislyn’s POVs as the battle with the Enemy proceeds on two different fronts. It is possible to do POV handoffs within a scene, but it has to be done quite carefully and sparingly. This isn’t a technique Jemisin uses, but I’ll be on the lookout for it in future Novel Study choices and will note it if I see it. (See this excellent in-depth post by writer Emma Darwin on how to use this technique successfully.)
The City We Became, as we’ve seen, houses an especially large number of POV characters, so how does Jemisin help readers stay oriented in whose POV we are in? First, she uses her clever chapter titles to provide clues. For example, “Our Lady of (Staten) Aislyn,” the title of chapter three, prepares us to step into the point of view of Aislyn, with the knowledge that she is likely the borough’s avatar.
Second, Jemisin is careful to orient us in the first lines of the chapter. Here’s the opening of chapter three:
It’s time.
Aislyn Houlihan is at the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, trembling. She’s been here for twenty minutes, trembling. There are open seats because it’s early enough in the day, just before the start of rush hour, that the ferry won’t be anywhere near full—but she’s opted to pace in front of the glass window-wall instead of sitting. The better to tremble while she paces.
Jemisin starts with a propulsive, italicized action beat, then immediately answers the questions it raises: time for who to do what? By the end of the paragraph we know the POV character’s name, we know where she is, what time of day it is, and we can intuit that, based on her location, that she’s going to take the ferry to Manhattan and, thanks to the pacing and the trembling, she is deeply anxious about doing so.
As so often with Jemisin’s writing, I also have to stop to admire what she achieves through repetition and variation. Let’s take a moment to analyze what she’s doing here:
Aislyn Houlihan is at the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, trembling.
She’s been here for twenty minutes, trembling.
There are open seats because it’s early enough in the day, just before the start of rush hour, that the ferry won’t be anywhere near full—but she’s opted to pace in front of the glass window-wall instead of sitting.
The better to tremble while she paces.
In sentences 1 and 2, Jemisin uses parallel structure, with the gerund “trembling” punctuating the end of both sentences. Sentence 3 is much longer, with a complex structure: two independent clauses, the first with an embedded dependent phrase (“just before the start of rush hour”), joined by an em dash and coordinating conjunction “but”. This sentence also introduces the verb “pace,” which then gets paired with “tremble” in the short sentence fragment that concludes the passage. Writing this dynamic and clever makes it impossible for the reader to be bored, even when we are being fed ordinary information: a woman is waiting for a ferry.
As the scene continues, every bit of the action is filtered through Aislyn’s point of view. We are not seeing it from a bird’s eye perspective, perched above the ramp to the ferry, but from within Aislyn’s mind:
Her thoughts ignite—GET AWAY GET OFF ME DON’T TOUCH ME GET ME OUT OF HERE—and her body contracts without any conscious input. Now she is moving against the flow (with the island’s wishes, though, at last), lurching from one stranger’s horrifying touch to another and wondering the whole time who’s screaming with such an ear-piercing pitch. Only belatedly does she recognize her own voice. People around her freeze or jerk away from the crazy lady, but they’re still too close. Crushing her.
In this passage, notice the vividness of Jemisin’s verbs: ignite, contract, lurch, scream, freeze, jerk, crush. These verbs communicate Aislyn’s abject panic in this passage, as does her moment of depersonalization when she doesn’t recognize her own voice screaming.
Point of view fireworks
Before summarizing what we’ve learned, I want to highlight the last two scenes of the novel because I think they are supremely successful pieces of writing.
As noted above, Jemisin toggles between the POVs of Manny and Aislyn in the climactic chapter fifteen. The battle with the Enemy continues in chapter sixteen, with Bronca taking up the narrator’s role, and then, with the battle over, the final scene of that chapter moves to a collective “they” narration that widens out even beyond the avatars: “They are New York. They are the single titanic concussion of sound from every subwoofer and every steel drum circle that has ever annoyed elderly neighbors and woken babies while secretly giving everyone else an excuse to smile and dance.”
The italicized they’s are in the original text; Jemisin wants us to take notice of this narrative shift, which modulates to “we” at the very end of the chapter.
At that point, we move to the Coda, where we meet again the first-person present narrator who opened the book—the primary avatar of New York City. I analyzed the way the prologue works thoroughly in a previous post, so the only thing I’ll add here is that this feels like the perfect choice at the end, allowing Jemisin to leave us with his lyrical, profane first-person voice—the voice of New York City.
Takeaways
What have we learned from this tour of The City We Became? Here are my takeaways from the novel about how to effectively use multiple point-of-view characters.
When making your decision about which point of view to use for your novel, think about what kind of story you are telling and how close you want your reader to be to your point-of-view character(s). If you want an intense engagement, consider which characters are closest to the drama and suspense of the plot at different moments in the story. Consider theme as well: How can your narration style enhance the message you are sending about what it means to be human?
You don’t need to give each point-of-view character equal page time: choose the balance based on the needs of your plot and theme.
Make sure you vary the kinds of character arcs you are showing, and layer them on top of one another so they continue to advance even when the character is not controlling the narration.
Provide only the amount of backstory you need in order to make each POV character’s motivations clear. A character with a flatter arc needs less backstory. A less sympathetic or more complex character may require more backstory. Weave backstory lightly into your scenes rather than making it the focus, except when absolutely necessary.
If you choose multiple narrators, make sure that you avoid head-hopping. Use scene or chapter breaks to move between narrators, or carefully (and rarely!) do a POV handoff within a scene.
