The effect of different "narrative voices" in the same novel
I am writing a fantasy novel with multiple points of view throughout. I plan to have the narrator sound differently for each character's perspective. For example, one character will focus more on descriptions, another dialogue, one more sentimental, etc.
The effect I am aiming for is to get the reader closer to each character. That they get a unique view of the world from each of them, possibly even reinterpreting the world, such as when one character may find something beautiful, another finds it boring.
I am concerned the conflicting narratives may cause confusion.
What are the pit falls and dangers with this kind of approach? What kind of effect would this writing style suggest to a reader?
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1 answer
The biggest risk is that you may lose the main characteristic of the narrator out of sight: to tell the reader what is important.
There is nothing wrong with changing the point of view and paying attention to different kinds of details is certainly a nice way to illustrate the change, but if you lose yourself in endless descriptions of the surroundings to illustrate that your character is not one who speaks much, but one who observes, you might forget to describe what is happening. Just like focusing too much on the dialogue may make you forget to describe the room your character is currently in.
The easiest of the things you listed is to have one character describe something as beautiful and another to describe it as boring, maybe because he has seen the thing so often that he doesn't care about it anymore. In this case you are describing the same thing from two very different points of view. That means you are doing the same thing in both perspectives, you just use different words and show different feelings. That way it won't happen that you forget to describe important stuff. In these cases you just have to remember that your reader will probably only want to read a description of the same beautiful/boring/normal/big/... thing so often. If you do this once or twice your reader will quickly understand the difference between your characters.
Your readers won't be confused by changing the narrative as long as you don't change it two or three times per page. For example changing the point of view every other chapter is normal in some books and your readers will have a mental break in that situation anyway. Quite the opposite: your readers will enjoy to have different points of view and to experience the story from different angles.
The biggest problem is to lose yourself in details just for the sake of showing a different point of view. After that comes the risk that some of your readers may prefer one point of view over the other - which is normal and shouldn't concern you too much as long as you don't explicitly try to make an obnoxious character. Changing the point of view suggests to a reader that there are different paths of a story that regularly converge and then split up again. They are part of something bigger, but leaving one out would leave the reader with only a part of the world explored and a part missing to fully understand what is going on. In mystery you might want that - in fantasy you often don't want that.
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