POV Part 1, Shifts Within Scenes

So, one of my students asked me about Point Of View (POV) shifts, multiple POVs, and multiple protagonists.

This is an interesting question for a number of reasons, not least because the way it is handled varies wildly from genre to genre and over time. For example, young adult is (or has been-these things shift with startling speed) mostly all right with mid-text snippets out of the POV of the scene's main character. Modern F&SF frowns on this, rather a lot, though, of course, there are exceptions. As with every rule of publishing, sufficiently outstanding writing trumps all.

I personally have trouble with in-scene POV shifts. In my experience, jumps outside of a scene's established POV tend to be weaker writing. This is for two reasons.

One, out of POV snippets are more likely than regular prose to tell instead of show, an inherently weaker form. Show, Don't Tell when applied as an iron clad rule is a bad idea, because there are simply times when the writer has to tell or has to do both (Eleanor has commented on that here), but as a guideline it's trying to get at an important point–actively engage the reader whenever possible.

Two, they usually signal that the writer has encountered some situation that he or she hasn't figured out how to approach from within the established format of the ongoing narrative, thus forcing the writer to cheat, again inherently a weaker solution than maintaining the form established for the narrative.

The corollary to all this is that staying in POV usually results in stronger writing. Not always, of course, but usually.

That said, good writing trumps all. If you're going to do in-scene POV shifting, make sure that you give your reader the tools to make sense of it. The few times I've seen it done well, the writer has always given the reader something to hold onto as they change POVs, a banister (term borrowed from Barth Anderson who got it from somewhere else). So, you might do something like this:

Main narrative voice.
Out of POV bits.
Main narrative voice.

Or this:

Main narrative voice.
***
Out of POV bits.
***
Main narrative voice.

The things is to give the reader that banister–some simple way of knowing that this bit is different from that bit over there.

In the next installment I'll talk about multiple POVs and multiple protagonists which are related but not identical phenomena.

Comments? Questions? Vigorous disagreement?