So, my current WIP is an urban fantasy with 3 POV narrators that rotate between chapters in a consistent, unchanging order. Each chapter continues the story directly from the last chapter, but the POV rotates each time. This idea works. I think it allows the reader to understand each of the main characters at a personal level while also allowing the reader to learn privileged information that the characters don't necessarily have without using an omniscient third person narrator.
The struggle that I've been having is balancing chapter length with story beats divided by narrator. What I mean is that I have an outline, which I'm following, and it's working out great as far as the general story beats. With all my novels, I have the general rule that no chapter can exceed 5,000 words. At that point, I break the chapter into 2 chapters, each at least 1,500 words in length at a minimum. This system worked well for the first 4 novels I've written. But those were all third person omniscient narrator in past tense. With this project, I'm sometimes having chapters go longer and need to split them, but there are story beats that I sometimes want a specific character to be the narrator for. But it has happened more than once so far where the chapter length caused the chapter to have to end, thus changing the narrator for the next chapter, which in turn means that the character I wanted to narrate for that part of the story has to change.
This has not broken the story in any way, but it has been a real challenge in the fact that I don't want to break the rotation order or my chapter length rules. But there are certain parts of the book that I know would be better to read when narrated by one character of another. This is the most difficult novel I've ever written.
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Terrence, just write it out, get it out of your head. Don't fret about any self imposed rules. You'll be doing rewrites for your trimming and adding details where needed. Keep going strong!
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This sounds like a great amount of fun, to be honest. I went along with my crazy idea and sort of made a book with multiple 1st person pov, from around 8 different characters. It's like madness embodied. But that's the fun of it. So, keep going. It's all fun and the editing is a blast))
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I agree with Lindbergh E Hollingsworth. I think it's great to attempt to keep the structure and boundaries that have worked well for you as a writer in the past. But when it comes to those specific chapters that you're having this problem with, try to keep going and get it all out on paper from that character's perspective. Then later you can go back and take a closer look at those chapters when you begin editing to see if you can trim or if you need to split the chapter up. I've read a lot of books in the last year that utilize multiple character POVs and use the chapter breaks to change the perspective. But occasionally, those books will have two or three chapters back to back that stay in the same POV because that's what was best to move the plot and story forward properly. As a reader, it never bothered me or took me out of it because I was so engrossed in the story that I didn't care. Then when it did change POVs, I was excited because I missed being in the head of the other character.
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If it were me, I'd focus on getting the story out first, then during revision, read aloud to see how the pacing feels. I did this with a current WIP and it showed me so many beats that could be improved and holes that needed to be filled I had missed during my initial revisioin.
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Brett Easton-Ellis wrote a story like this - which was made into a movie. It's called The Rules of Attraction.
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Lindbergh E Hollingsworth I agree with Lindbergh. Get it out of your head and on the page. Sending you positive writing vibes!
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Thanks for the advice and encouragement. I'm still going strong with this project. Just reached the halfway point of the first draft.