#and the Standard Writing Advice i've heard is 'don't alternate POV except by chapter' & that's what you'll see in most books

[silverwhittlingknife]

I do think it's potentially confusing, but "potentially confusing" isn't the worst thing in the world? It depends on your audience and the effect you're going for.

I had soooo many rambling thoughts about this sdfsfsdf so I put them below the cut.

Examples: some books I've read that switch between different POVs, and my takes on how confusing it is in each (Allegiant, Miracle Creek: A Novel, Ulysses)

My writing

Okay, so I have three examples I want to muse about in three different genres.

1] Allegiant: first-person, two POVs, alternating chapters. This is the third book of the Divergent series. It's an action-adventure trilogy intended for YA readers, and it switches between the POVs of two protagonists in alternating chapters and helpfully labels them at the start of each chapter. But I still found it super-confusing and wished it had only been one POV, because the stripped-down action-adventure writing style means that both the first-person narrators sounded alike to me and I kept forgetting who was doing what.

Here's one character's POV:

“My watch reads three o’clock. I’ve been here too long—long enough to make Evelyn suspicious."

Here's the other character's POV:

“Evelyn’s mocking smile twists like she has just tasted something unpleasant. She leans in close to my face, and I see for the first time how old she is."

See how they're basically ... the same?

I enjoyed the first Divergent book a lot, partly because I thought the author handled the stripped-down writing style really well. The heroine has enough personality to connect with the reader, but she's also bare-bones enough to make it easy to follow along with the action. But this writing style - which is great with one narrator! - is IMO a terrible match for two narrators.

2] Miracle Creek: A Novel: third-person limited, multiple POVs, alternating chapters. Miracle Creek is a murder mystery / courtroom drama that's probably targeting an adult literary-book-club audience. Like the Divergent book, it trades off between multiple narrators and introduces each new chapter with their names. Here, though, it works great. Every narrator has a very distinct voice; they all know different information and they're all concealing things.

Here's one character in the courtroom, aware that people are looking at her:

She'd expected anger, but they smiled as she walked by, and she had to remind herself that she was a victim here. She was not the defendant, not the one they blamed for the explosion that killed two patients. She told herself what Pak told her every day—their absence from the barn that night didn't cause the fire, and he couldn't have prevented the explosion even if he'd stayed with the patients—and tried to smile back. Their support was a good thing. She knew that. But it felt undeserved, wrong, like a prize won by cheating, and instead of buoying her, it weighed her down with worry that God would see and correct the injustice, make her pay for her lies some other way.

Here's another character in the courtroom, aware that people are looking at him:

He would've given anything not to be here today. Maybe not his entire right arm, but certainly one of its three remaining fingers. He was already a freak with missing fingers - what was one more? He did not want to see reporters, cameras flashing when he made the mistake of covering his face with his hands - he cringed, picturing how the flash would reflect off the glossy scar tissue covering the doughy clump that remained of his right hand.

I think this book is fantastically well-done. The switching POVs are never confusing - the characters sound too different - and the multiple POVs are also a deliberate part of the aesthetic effect. It's a murder mystery and you're trying to solve it; as we switch between POVs, we observe each character and their grudges and their insecurities, trying to guess from the clues what (if anything) they might be guilty of. It's not just about seeing what the characters do; it's about getting a sense of who they are and what they value.

Books often struggle with getting across images (like facial expressions) that comic books / TV / more visual media can convey effortlessly. But this kind of immersion in character POV is something that I think is really cool in novels and which is almost impossible to do in more visual media.

3] Ulysses: .... sometimes third-person limited, sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person omniscient, sometimes your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine. Ulysses switches between narrator POVs in different sections and does not label them; it's deliberately confusing. Forcing you to try to figure out what's going on in a new person's stream-of-consciousness thought is part of the aesthetic effect. IMO there's also some blurring of narrator voices sometimes. So for example here are two different parts of the same chapter of Ulysses, where the self-conscious intellectual Stephen Dedalus and the not-so-intellectual Leopold Bloom go to Bloom's house and drink some team.

Why was he doubly irritated? Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.

And:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units

These are theoretically both from the third-person omniscient narrator who voices this section - both Bloom and Dedalus get described as if we're looking at them - but also, those two voices sound pretty different, don't they? To me, at least, it sounds like maybe the first section is getting filtered through Bloom's frustration with himself, and the second section is getting filtered through Dedalus's mocking thoughts about Bloom's enthusiasm for water.

Or maybe not! Part of the fun of Ulysses is that it's kind of a puzzle-box.

4] Me!

I'm a writer and I do have a couple WIPs where I try to switch between different perspectives, but ... honestly it's something I struggle with? Aesthetic-wise, I have a real love for the Miracle Creek style so that's what I sometimes try to write, but the thing about switching perspective is that you're putting a spotlight on your character voices - you're saying, "Hey! Look at this!" And so at least for me, I feel like I want to be very sure that those character voices are distinct if I do that. If the voices are blurring together, it's going to get confusing.

Plus, at least in fanfic, I tend to write things that are pretty stripped-down / dialogue-heavy, which - like Divergent - is a style that gives you some scope for character interiority but not a whole lot. (Whereas something like Miracle Creek has a lot of long, musing passages entirely in the characters' heads.) I think it's extra-tricky to try to switch character voice when you're already working in a minimalistic style.

tl;dr it's a cool effect, but for me "easy mode" is almost always going to be "staying within a single perspective."

thing I keep (unconsciously) doing while writing is that I sometimes mix more than one character’s POV together, not in the same sentence (thankfully) but in some of my works the perspective of the characters keeps switching back and forth between this character and the other character, and I don’t know whether or not it’s confusing to the readers? like in this one paragraph it’s written in character A’s POV. then in this next paragraph it shifts to character B’s POV. and there isn’t a direct indication that directly says ‘okay this paragraph is in character A’s POV’ so…