Thoughts on alternating narrators in a single story?

[GrushaVashnadze]

alternating point of view

I enjoyed doing this in the first two chapters of my Metamorphoses - two overlapping tales from the points of view of two lovers (both female, one futa), in a context where they each have very different outlooks on life (one an artist, one a scientist), and reality is a bit ambiguous anyway (alternate time lines, time travel etc.). The scenario seemed to demand it, and I had fun writing it.

Try it, and see if you like it.

 

[Britva415]

I've posted a couple Sammi Elf stories so far, both told pretty much just from Sammi Elf's point of view, except for the epilogue at the end. I'm working on a third (Tommy becomes a dommy Krampus and Sammi Elf learns she likes that), but I'm drawn to writing it alternating between Sammi's point of view and Tommy's.

How do most folks here feel about that? About yep narrators for a single story submission? Many of the stories I've read here stick to one narrator, and if that's the convention I don't want to stray from it (especially if straying means I'll get voted lower), but I don't want to handicap the story for it, and most romance books I've read alternate between the two main characters' pov.

I have posted a lot of comments and observations in this thread but it doesn't look like I've ever answered the question directly.

Some of my thoughts on alternating narrators in a single story are these:

By definition, these narrators have to be in-universe characters. It makes less than no sense to have multiple omniscient, third-person, out-of-universe narrators. Even if there are multiple authors! As soon as you get to where the composition has a conceit of multiple narrators, even if they aren't on-screen characters, I still don't see a way for them to not be taken as in-universe characters.

And so with that in mind:

For the story to be told by multiple in-universe narrators with different in-universe points of view, my feeling is that the story would have to make some semblance of effort to make that make sense as part of the story. Why are they telling the story at all? Who are they telling it to? How were their points of view captured and recorded/written?

Even when there aren't multiple POV narrators, I still perceive first-person narration to be an in-universe act of storytelling. It's usually easy to just ignore or overlook this when the author doesn't lift a finger to establish the in-universe circumstances of that act of storytelling, but when the story contains more than one in-universe acts of storytelling, it gets harder for me to forgive a total absence of including some kind of frame in the story to establish, or to at least vaguely suggest, the answers to those questions.

All I want is to see some effort on the author's part to acknowledge within the story that in-universe storytellers are not just the out-of-universe author cosplaying with different names and pronouns. That's all.

 

[RoyalAuthor]

I've written three stories that shift perspectives between two lead characters. I wouldn't do it from the first person, because I think multiple first-person narrators would be awkward to read, but that's just my opinion. All three of mine are third-person, such that all characters' actions are described, but depending on who the focus is, we only hear the thoughts and feelings of the current lead.

I enjoy doing it, I think it gives the author a way to increase understanding of motivations throughout a story, as well as allows for some ironic humor when we switch to the perspective of a character who doesn't know something that the other does. Before I start a story, I consider the perspective, and I've decided differently depending on the story I'm telling and which setup serves it best. For my last two standalone stories, I've used alternating perspectives to tell the story, but my ongoing serial is narrated by one half of the primary couple because it just made more sense to me when I started writing.

 

[BeechLeaf]

In a story to be published in a few hours from now, I flick between first and third person in the same paragraph. It's in Exhibitionist, and I chose that device to reflect the butterfly-in-stomach thoughts of the model and the perspective of her viewers. As it's near the end, all the 'dull elves' who would be confused by it and clasp their head in their hands, well they've given it up as boring in the first page, so they won't suffer. Use what works: use what feels right.