In my first attempt at this book, I had the entire thing written from a single POV, because I thought that might make it an easier project to complete. But when I think about it, almost all of the books I enjoy all have multiple POVs, usually in different places doing different things.
I don’t have any of that planned for this book – no different locations or splits, but I want to try writing multiple perspectives, anyway, as way to practice different styles and find out what makes the most sense to me.
There will be scenes when I have all of my POV characters together in one place – in fact, much of the book calls for my two main POV characters to be traveling together, so that is going to be an issue to manage later. I know there’s the guidance that the scene should be told from the perspective of the person with the most at stake, but I don’t think that’s true in many of the books I read. Instead, it seems like the scene is often told from the perspective of the person with the most interesting view on the action. At least, that’s the way I see it and what I want to do with my story.
The other thing I did with this scene was to write it with almost no pre-planning. I had the concept and a little bit of a conflict set up, but from there, I just tried to let it unfold. Writing was slow, since I had to figure out what was happening as I went along, but honestly no slower than writing when I did have the scene pre-planned in detail. When I do that, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the characters to follow the steps I had planned, and I fear that results in something unnatural, anyway.
So, this is close to discovery writing, but I’m going to give it a shot to see if it is something that I can enjoy more and whether or not it results in a better story.