Dealing with large casts

[graychalk]

Hiya everyone! I'm still fairly new to this community, but I've really been enjoying how helpful and encouraging everyone is here. I thought I should come out of lurkdom a bit and say hello. :)

I'd also like to bring up a topic that I hope could get some kind of discussion going, because I've been batting this stuff in my brain for months and I keep going back and forth on the best way to approach this. So... without further rambling, how do you guys deal with writing large casts - especially ones where there are quite a few key characters that would be important enough to warrant their point of views too?

Do you tend to prefer switching between POVs by a break of some sort, or do you brave the omniscient POV and hope it doesn't turn into a mess of head-hopping? And if you do dedicated switches between POVs, when do you make your switches? Within the same scene or do you make it a point to only do it when it's a new scene? Or something else entirely?

I would really love any input on this - it's driving me a bit nuts because I can't seem to find an approach that fits for my fic. :(

Thanks all!

Comments

[annotated_em]

I pretty much only ever write close third-person--that is, the only thing I let into the narration is what my pov character notices and knows (or is told). I generally don't switch pov inside a fic. I tend to be of the mind that if I need to do that to get something important across, then I'm not doing the thing properly. If having multiple povs becomes important, I usually go for multiple fics or at chapter breaks. And nothing makes me dive for the back button faster than a fic where the pov shifts around mid-scene. I was reading something just last night where the paragraphs altered from John to Sherlock for no good apparent reason.

Seems to me that keeping the pov closed on one character at a time is useful for building tension. What does the character know? What doesn't s/he know? What does s/he wonder about? When does knowledge/lack of knowledge cause problems or solve them? How can it drive your plot forward?