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How many viewpoint characters should you have in your novel? Is it okay to just have one? Is there such a thing as too many? How do you decide?

Moriah posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m writing a novel with 6 main characters. I’m having trouble with head hopping and what POV and how many POV’s I should use for the story to work and flow properly. It’s a fantasy book. 3 of the characters are friends in the beginning and are in most science together and it mainly follows them, but the other 3 characters don’t appear till later and aren’t there for every scene but they are still hugely important to the story. There’s one character I could write from first person and make the protagonist but the other characters input are to important. How do you think I should write this without messing it up.

Randy sez: It sounds like you have a choice of anywhere from 1 to 6 viewpoint characters in your novel. I don’t think 1 is too few. I don’t think 6 is too many. I typically have 3 or 4 viewpoint characters in my novels, but I’ve gone up to 5, and my current work in progress has more.

Review of Viewpoint Characters

It won’t hurt to do a little review here, to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Typically, a novel has one primary character (the protagonist) that the main story is about. (Yes, you can have more than one protagonist, but most novels don’t.)

But your novel is made up of many scenes, and each scene should work as a story in its own right. Therefore, each scene will typically have one main character that the scene is about. And that main character isn’t necessarily the protagonist of the novel. The main character for each scene is usually called the “viewpoint character” (or the “point-of-view character” or the “POV character”).

For more on viewpoint characters and why you need them, see chapter 4 of my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method.

Choosing the Viewpoint Character

So how do you choose the viewpoint character for each scene?

That depends. You may decide that your novel is only going to have one viewpoint character. In that case, there’s no decision to make for the scenes. You’ll use the same one every time. This has some advantages in giving your reader a consistent experience. But the disadvantage is that every scene has to have that viewpoint character, which means he or she really has to get around.

Most novels have multiple viewpoint characters. These will typically include the protagonist, friends of the protagonist, enemies of the protagonist, and possibly others.

A good rule of thumb for each scene is to choose the viewpoint character to be the person with the most to lose in the scene. This is a rule of thumb. It’s not always the best choice, but it’s often a very good choice. So consider that character first. Then ask if there’s a better choice.

My guiding principle is to try to give the reader a powerful emotional experience in every scene. So the critical issue is which viewpoint character will do that best.

But How Many Viewpoint Characters?

Now we can circle back to Moriah’s question. How many viewpoint characters should you have in your novel?

That’s really up to you. It’s almost inevitable that you’ll give one of your viewpoint characters more air-time than anyone else. (Usually, this is the protagonist, but sometimes the protagonist of a novel isn’t a viewpoint character. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the protagonist is Holmes and the viewpoint character is usually Watson.) Whoever you choose to get the most air-time, they need to have a strong voice.

Usually there will be a couple of other characters who also get a lot of air-time, but less than the leader. If you have three viewpoint characters, for example, you might give one 40% of the scenes and the other two 30%. That’s a nice, balanced split, but there’s nothing magical about it.

If you have a largish number of viewpoint characters (5 or more), then some of them are not going to get many scenes. At least one of them will get no more than 20% of the scenes.

And if you have a LOT of viewpoint characters (15 or more), then some of them might be walk-on characters who only star in one scene. That’s okay. That can work. If you need that many to make the novel work, then do it.

My opinion is that the number of viewpoint characters you choose is probably not going to mess up your novel. What makes or breaks your novel is the quality of the viewpoint characters—how well each scene works. If you make sure that every scene has a really solid viewpoint character, and if your main story has a solid protagonist, then the count of viewpoint characters is not a major issue.

Don’t get carried away, of course. If your novel has 100 scenes and 100 viewpoint characters, that’s going to take some extra skill to make sure that the main story hangs together as a story.

But for practical purposes, 1 viewpoint character is as good as 3, which is as good as 6.

It’s not something to sweat too much over.

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Think Scenes, Not Chapters

The scene is the fundamental unit of fiction. (For more info on writing scenes, see my article Writing the Perfect Scene.)

A chapter is just a bag of scenes. So your scenes control your chapters. If your chapters are variable in length, it’s because your scenes are variable in length.

And there’s nothing wrong with scenes varying in length. That’s just normal. You can write a scene in a hundred words, sometimes. Or you can write a scene that goes on for three or four thousand words, sometimes.

My personal average is about a thousand words per scene, but that’s just me. Other authors write shorter or longer, on average.

You get to decide the typical length of your scene. A lot depends on the pace of your story and on its complexity. So your story and your personal storytelling style will control the length of your scene.

Creating Chapters From Scenes

You also get to decide the typical length of a chapter, but that decision is much more arbitrary. Every chapter has to contain at least one scene, but aside from that, your chapters can be whatever length you feel like.

So how do you go about deciding what your chapter length should be? I do it by deciding how many chapters I want in my novel. Typically, I have four Parts in my novel, and I’m looking to write about ten chapters in each Part. That works out to about forty chapters for the entire novel, plus or minus.

Doing the math, that means that if I write a novel with 100,000 words, then each chapter will have about 2500 words, which works out to two and a half scenes.

Of course, you can’t have two and a half scenes in a chapter. A scene is fundamental. Scenes are the atoms of fiction.

So how do I assign scenes to chapters? I just glop together enough scenes to get a total close to 2500 words, and I call that a chapter. If I go under by 1000 words, that’s OK. Some chapters are short. If I go over by 500 words, that’s OK too.

I prefer to go under, rather than over, because the end of the chapter is a milestone for my reader, and I want my readers to feel like they’re burning through the chapters.

More Thoughts on Chapters

I prefer to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, which can be either a setback or a decision. Either way, it keeps the reader hungry, and a hungry reader is a reader who wants to read one more chapter, even if it’s 3 AM.

Maddie, you suggested that you can try to fill out a chapter by adding more description to your scenes. That will certainly make your chapters longer, but it doesn’t add more story, and readers are reading for story, not for description.

So if you’ve got a short chapter, either add in another scene, or just live with the short chapter. It’s not a crime to have a short chapter. James Patterson writes nothing but short chapters, and he seems to be selling okay.