Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28354
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Using a certain character's point of view to describe a particular event in your story is nothing more than a technique.

> Q: Is this okay?

Of course, it is. It had been done time and time again, and it will be done as many a time as there are stories to be told.

Selection of the point of view to me is akin to choosing a right file from my tool cabinet. Do I use a flat one, square one, round one, or triangular? That largely depends on the kind of a hole I am making so the peg I have will fit.

If you have a well-developed cast of characters (where every person is actually different from another), it would be a great time to employ multiple POV and choose, through whose eyes you allow the readers to see some events you are describing, because you can thus add a layer of subjectivity of each of your cast members to the perception of the said events.

If you are unveiling a complex who-done-it mystery, you might employ multiple POV technique, because it shows the limits of the single person's knowledge of the situation, thus keeping the tension going, etc.

The reasons for switching POVs are many.

> Q: Will this be jarring? Is it odd?

Only if you make it so, and here are no recipes, but try and see for yourself. Changing POVs is often tied to a chapter/scene breaks, to give the reader a chance to take a breath, but I have seen it done in one scene as well, and it was not always _head-hopping_ jarring; it all depends on how you _write_ it on a sentence level, and there are, again, no recipes, except for... ahm... _write well_.

If you tell your story for twenty chapters through the eyes of the pirate ship captain, and then, all of a sudden, switch the POV to the one of his only friend--his pet parrot--you better have a good reason to do it (like the captain gets whacked) and the way to set it up and prepare your reader for the abrupt switch, but, once again, it is only for you to decide, if you need it or not.

Best of luck.

Original score: 3