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

[rhi]

Omniscient seems to be currently out of style, but that's not the same thing as wrong, Lord knows! My only advice would be, if you're going to switch the POV in one scene, spend at least a few paragraphs in each POV and give the reader some way to follow who's thinking it. As long as you do do that, it's easily readible/comprehensible.

That said? What the heck, if you want to write it that way, write it that way. A beta will tell you if it's not working. (And hey, if it isn't, you only have to rewrite part of the scene!)