How do you balance multiple points of view?

One of the pleasures of rereading is holding your memories of a book up alongside the reality and seeing where the gaps are. Often the mismatch will lead to valuable insights about the writer’s craft. I picked N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became to include in this series in part for the author’s deft use of multiple third-person narrators. In my memory of the book, there were five narrators (for the five boroughs of New York City) and they had roughly equal page time. It turns out, my memory was wrong—though I could see why I’d remembered it incorrectly and I could also see why Jemisin made the choices she did.

Authors must make three key decisions when it comes to point of view (POV):

The City We Became is somewhat unusual in using multiple tenses and mixing first and third person narration, but all of these narrative flavors are limited rather than omniscient.

Before we dig into the details of how Jemisin uses multiple narrators, let’s spend some time talking about why she does so. I’m going to avoid major spoilers in this post, but let’s pinpoint the starting premise, which we learn in the prologue of the novel, discussed at length in my post on the prologue. New York City, as other great cities have done before it, is emerging—being birthed—as a live entity. But it is vulnerable in its newborn state, and it has an Enemy. It also has an avatar—in this case a young Black street kid—to both embody the city and fight for it. However, the Enemy has developed new tactics the avatar is unprepared for and manages to damage him. The newly awakened avatars of the five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) must come together to fight off the Enemy and heal the primary avatar if the city is to survive.

The prologue is written in first-person present from the point of view of the unnamed primary avatar, and shows him awakening to his power and fighting the first battle with the Enemy. First-person present is as close as authors can take readers to a character, which is why it’s often the choice for young adult (YA) fiction, which prizes the reader–character connection. But Jemisin can’t stick with this narration choice because the plot of the book requires that this first narrator be forced off stage until the end of the novel.

After the prologue, we encounter a chapter that is titled “Interruption,” narrated in third-person past from the point of view of Paulo, the avatar of São Paulo, the most recently born city, whose job it is to help the avatar of New York City through its own birth. Paulo knows the rules of this fantasy world, and that’s what Jemisin needs readers to have access to. But she’s smart about what she delivers here. Paulo, through his own observations (the avatar disappears in front of him) and a terse phone conversation with an unnamed person, reveals the stakes (there have been “postpartum complications”) and the quest, but only obliquely:

The person on the other end of the phone warns Paulo to watch his back and advises, “Make them work fast. Never good to have a city stuck halfway like this.” As readers, then, we have a broad sense of the quest and the stakes from this “Interruption.”

Now, why doesn’t Jemisin stick with Paulo as her narrator through the action that follows? I think there are two answers. First, Jemisin knows that she is writing a high-stakes, high-suspense story. The closer the readers are to the action, the more intensely they’ll feel the heat of that suspense. Paulo is invested in the outcome, but only at second hand. This is not his city, after all. The consequences are not life and death for him.

The second answer has to do with theme: One of the themes of the book is the power of discovering and owning your identity. For that theme to fully land, we need access to the inner lives of the avatar characters. Paulo has already passed through his dramatic moment of calling and acceptance. By deploying a classic assemble-the-team trope, Jemisin is able to show us a group of characters—with different backgrounds, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses—confront the call to action and make their own decisions.

Before we move on, let’s examine another option open to Jemisin: omniscient narration. In omniscient narration, the (usually unnamed) narrator is like a god, able to dip into the interior thoughts of any character at any time. This is the narration style of Lord of the Rings, for example. I’ll explore omniscient narration in depth in my posts on Matrix and The Marriage Portrait. For our purposes here, I think it’s enough to say that Jemisin wants us to step into the lives and minds of her characters as fully as possible, and limited point of view allows her to achieve that goal better than omniscient narration.

Now, how do you balance multiple narrators? If you’ve read the novel, take a moment to guess how many scenes each character narrates before you look at the figure below. As I noted earlier, in my memory, each avatar had roughly equal ‘page time,’ though I remembered Manny, Brooklyn, and Bronca as carrying more weight in the novel than Padmini and Aislyn. (I had not remembered that the NYC avatar and Paulo were point-of-view characters at all.)

As you can see from the figure, I was right that Manny and Bronca carry more weight in the narrative. But I was shocked to see that Brooklyn—who feels like a guiding, grounded force throughout much of the book—has only one POV chapter, though it is placed right at the heart of the novel. I was equally surprised to find that Padmini, the avatar for Queens, has only one POV scene, and that Aislyn, the Staten Island avatar, has so many.

Note too that Paulo’s “interruptions” stop appearing midway through the book. This is, in part, because his narrative role as knowledge-bearer is partly taken over by Bronca, who—as the oldest character and also the one with the longest connection to the land, thanks to her Native American heritage—is given the knowledge of how this multiverse works when she steps into her role as avatar for the Bronx. Paulo also becomes more directly entwined in the action rather than following a step behind the avatars, so when we see him appear in the second half of the book, it’s through the point of view of another character.

Now let’s analyze how Jemisin uses her multiple narrators. If you choose to use a multi-POV narrative structure, how do you decide which parts of the plot each character will narrate? How do you manage to show a character arc for each one? The City We Became offers up clever solutions to both problems.

Generally, you do want each of your point-of-view characters to have a well-developed arc because otherwise what is the point of having access to their internal thoughts? That said, in a book like this one with multiple POV characters, some of those arcs can be truncated or flat. John Truby presents a useful formula for character arcs in The Anatomy of Story:

(W)eakness x (A)ction = (C)hange

In other words, your character starts from a state of weakness, lack, and unrealized goals, then is forced to confront and resolve their inner conflicts in order to take an important action that will fundamentally change them, allowing them to end the novel in a state of strength, fulfillment, and realized goals. Ideally, the action the character must take has a big impact on the plot of the story, becoming the linchpin that connects the external plot (what happens in the novel) and the internal plot (character growth).

Let’s look at how Jemisin varies the kinds of arcs she gives her characters and also how she layers them together to create an immersive, engaging story. The first borough avatar we meet is Manny, which feel natural given the geographic centrality as well as the power and prestige of Manhattan amongst the boroughs. Manny’s character arc also takes the longest to develop because he begins the novel with almost no identity at all: He has been struck with an odd form of amnesia as his train enters Penn Station. He knows he is from somewhere else and is moving to Manhattan, but he has only a few external clues and vague internal instincts about his identity. He accepts his new role as avatar for Manhattan without knowing exactly what he’s doing, and in part because he has been emptied of his former identity first.

We first meet Brooklyn in chapter two, while we’re still in Manny’s POV, and this is where we see Jemisin being particularly smart and strategic about how she balances these multiple POVs and character arcs. Rather than keeping these character arcs separate, she layers them. And that’s why I remembered Brooklyn having such a major role in the book. She does, in fact, have a lot of page time, but much of it is not from her POV.

Why is that? Jemisin makes another smart choice here to vary the kinds of character arcs we see. She avoids any feeling of repetition that way but, more importantly, she gets to show us many different forms of what it looks like to accept a call to action and claim your identity. Like Manny, Brooklyn accepts her role as avatar right away (before we even meet her). Unlike Manny, Brooklyn is supremely confident in her identity—it’s no accident that she is the only character whose name is exactly the same as the borough she represents. And she literally represents her borough too, as an elected city council member.

When she steps onto the page in chapter two, Brooklyn first rescues Manny from the Enemy’s minions and then confidently guides them to the aid of Padmini, the avatar for Queens, educating Manny about New York City along the journey. But Brooklyn does have an alternate identity, a past life as MC Free, one of the most popular female rappers in the early days of the form. She doesn’t hide that identity, but she doesn’t embrace it either, and that is the focus of her single POV chapter in the middle of the book. The last element of her character arc—seeing the other boroughs as allies rather than competitors—is shown through oblique touches in chapters narrated by Bronca and Manny. Compared to Manny, who has to evolve quite a bit, Brooklyn’s character arc is flatter, less dramatic.

So, by the end of chapter two, we’ve met Manny and Brooklyn and left them on their way to find Queens. We then move to Staten Island, to meet its avatar, Aislyn. I’m not going to say much about her character arc to avoid spoilers, but as soon as I saw how much POV time she gets, I understood immediately why Jemisin needed to give her that much page time and also why I hadn’t quite remembered it accurately. I’ll just say that it’s easy to identify with Manny and Brooklyn and to understand their motivations and choices. It’s harder to understand Aislyn’s, and yet it’s crucial to the story Jemisin is telling that we do.

After Aislyn’s first chapter and another interruption from Paulo, we meet Bronca. She too, after an initial confrontation with the Enemy, steps into her role as avatar for the Bronx without resistance. Where she resists, however, is in joining the fight to save the city as a whole, focusing first on her beloved Bronx, the art center she helped build, and her coworker Veneza, who is a daughter figure to her. Jemisin cleverly deploys a suspenseful subplot involving a group of white supremacist artists, emissaries of the Enemy, that Bronca must solve before she can turn her attention to the overall quest she is being asked to join.

Because Jemisin has so many POV characters to introduce and because, unlike Patchett in The Dutch House, she is telling a fast-paced, suspenseful, future-oriented story, she has to be very efficient with backstory. She still needs it to establish the inner motivations for her characters, but she uses it sparingly and weaves it subtly into quiet pockets in the narrative. Manny, for example, gets flashes of intuition about the person he used to be. After getting some access to his mind during a shared vision of the NYC avatar, Brooklyn probes for information. She’s still wary, after all, and uncertain how far to trust him. Manny tells her he knows he “used to hurt people” but doesn’t remember why:

Notice just how much Jemisin accomplishes in this short exchange. Manny shows that he has made a decision to leave his past self behind; in other words, his character arc has advanced. And Brooklyn’s responses display her habit of confronting truths head on, her brutal honesty, and her belief that her values aren’t entirely aligned with Manhattan’s. After this snippet of conversation, Padmini rejoins them and they are on their way again on the next step of their quest. Jemisin never lets the forward action pause for long.

Aislyn’s backstory is given more extended page time than the others, especially in an important conversation with her mother in chapter ten, for the reasons already explored: Jemisin wants us to truly, deeply understand this complicated, and damaged, character.

Let’s dive down one more level now and look at how Jemisin signals to readers whose point of view we are in. First, note that she never mixes two points of view within the same scene. In omniscient narration, this kind of slide can be fine, but it requires that we have a narrator whose voice and thoughts are guiding us. (We’ll see an example of this in my post on Lauren Groff’s Matrix.) In third-person limited, where we dispense with that narrator figure and are brought right inside each character’s head, it can feel jarring to move from one character’s perspective to another—a problem many editors call “head-hopping.”

You can avoid this, as Jemisin does, by using a scene or chapter break as the switching point. Jemisin generally uses chapter breaks to change POVs. The one notable exception is in chapter fifteen when we toggle between the POVs of Manny and Aislyn as the battle with the Enemy proceeds on two different fronts. It is possible to do POV handoffs within a scene in third-person limited narration, but it has to be done quite carefully and sparingly.

Second, Jemisin uses her clever chapter titles to provide clues about whose POV we are in. For example, “Our Lady of (Staten) Aislyn,” the title of chapter three, prepares us to step into the point of view of Aislyn, with the knowledge that she is likely the borough’s avatar. Some authors of multi-POV novels use character names in place of chapter titles or as subtitles to guide readers.

Third, Jemisin is careful to orient us in the first lines of the chapter. Here’s the opening of chapter three:

Jemisin starts with a propulsive, italicized action beat, then immediately answers the questions it raises: Time for who to do what? By the end of the paragraph we know the POV character’s name, where she is, and what time of day it is. We can intuit, based on her location, that she’s going to take the ferry to Manhattan and, thanks to the pacing and the trembling, she is deeply anxious about doing so.

As so often with Jemisin’s writing, I also have to stop to admire what she achieves through repetition and variation. Let’s take a moment to analyze what she’s doing in this passage. Here are the sentences again, with key words bolded:

In sentences 1 and 2, Jemisin uses parallel structure, with the gerund “trembling” punctuating the end of both sentences. The parallelism and repetition create a pleasing rhythm and subtly emphasize Aislyn’s anxiety. Sentence 3 is much longer, with a complex structure: two independent clauses, the first with an embedded dependent phrase (“just before the start of rush hour”), joined by an em dash and coordinating conjunction “but.” This sentence also introduces the verb “pace,” which then gets paired with “tremble” in the short sentence fragment that concludes the passage. Sentence 4 feels extra snappy and punchy because it follows the very complex Sentence 3: This is what we mean when we talk about the effectiveness of sentence variety. If your sentences are this dynamic and clever, it’s almost impossible for readers to be bored, even when we are being fed ordinary information: An anxious woman is waiting for a ferry.

As the scene continues, every bit of the action is filtered through Aislyn’s point of view. We are not seeing it from a bird’s-eye perspective, perched above the ramp to the ferry, but from within Aislyn’s mind:

In this passage, notice the vividness of Jemisin’s verbs: ignite, contract, lurch, scream, freeze, jerk, crush. These verbs communicate Aislyn’s abject panic, as does her moment of depersonalization when she doesn’t recognize her own voice screaming.

Before getting to our takeaways, I want to briefly discuss the last two scenes of the novel because I think they are supremely successful pieces of writing. As noted above, Jemisin toggles between the POVs of Manny and Aislyn in the climactic chapter fifteen. The battle with the Enemy continues in chapter sixteen, with Bronca taking up the narrator’s role, and then, with the battle over, the final scene of that chapter moves to a collective “they” narration that widens out even beyond the avatars: “They are New York. They are the single titanic concussion of sound from every subwoofer and every steel drum circle that has ever annoyed elderly neighbors and woken babies while secretly giving everyone else an excuse to smile and dance.” The italicized they’s are in the original text; Jemisin wants us to take notice of this narrative shift, which modulates to “we” at the very end of the chapter.

At that point, we move to the Coda, where we meet again the first-person present-tense narrator who opened the book—the primary avatar of New York City. I analyzed the way the prologue works in my post on the prologue, so the only thing I’ll add here is that this feels like the perfect choice at the end, allowing Jemisin to leave us with his lyrical, profane first-person voice—the voice of New York City.

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