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Hi .. my background is feature writing ... 800 - 1500 words to a deadline and I think it shows in my main body of work.#
My early chapters are from the perspective of different members of a family - so each chapter is quite different in tone. However, my fear is that this could make for a disjointed novel, chapters being almost short stories.
Additionally, if there are five main characters - surely it will be cumbersome for each to have a chapter like this .... lordy, lordy, lordy!
comments hugely welcomed
Comments
As long as all five characters are clearly telling the same story, although from different viewpoints, I think it'd be OK. The Patchwork Marriage by Jane Green uses multiple viewpoint characters in this way (I think there were only 4 though)
You'd have to submerge the importance of two characters though.
It does work, but only by coming back to that whole group regularly, and the group having input into the individual lives too.
5 main characters seems a lot; could you write their stories as separate novellas, so telling the same story completely from 5 different viewpoints, and at the end bringing them together?
G R R Martin - millions (well not quite) of view points.
Robert Jordan - Ditto.
Melanie Rawn, Kate Elliott , R Feist.
Look for the overlying theme use that to bind the narative, the story to your characters.
A chap in the writing group I used to go to was working on a book with, I think, six different characters. He really struggled to make their voices sound different, with the result that it all got very monotonous and hard to follow because if your attention wandered it was easy to lose track of which character was the viewpoint one for the different chapters. You really need to pay attention to style, sentence length, word choice, sense of humour, and a whole heap of other aspects if you're going to pull off multiple first-person narrators. It's a lot of work.
If you're writing them from a third-person perspective, it's easier, as it doesn't matter if your novel has one consistent style throughout - as long as the individual characters are clearly defined in how they talk and behave.
Another concept I developed had two viewpoints, both in third person and they were much easier to control.
I don't think I would cope with five viewpoints.
I'm particularly pleased that other examples have been offered so off to the splendid Broadstairs library team to track down these books
My main two characters - mum, is in the first person in her chapters; but in the family chapters everyone is in the third person.
Mephistopheles echoes my writing mentor ...get it down ..write, write, write... then address issues in re-draft. Ive got to stop going back over previously written chapters or its a continual two chapter forward, one back.
In closing ... all comments greatly appreciated and lots to think about / research/ read.