The eyes of the beholder - the case for multi-viewpoints

Two-thirds of the way through my re-write of Snowbird I realised that the story still wasn't working.  The   manuscript still wouldn't be fit to submit for publication once I'd finished.

As the story is over twenty years old you might be forgiven for thinking that I was just tinkering with the story, afraid to say that I'd finished with it.  But you'd be wrong.

The first major problem is that the whole novel is in the viewpoint of one person, Jian Kabana, my starship Coder.  Certainly she's the major character, and most of the events in the book revolve around her, but there are many problems with telling the story only through her eyes,

One is that it made it hard to describe Jian's appearance - at least, without resorting to the old routine  of the character seeing herself in the mirror.  And in the early drafts I'd done just that.  But I felt that it was important to say that she had dusky skin.  Her mother was white-skinned and her father dark-skinned, so naturally Jian's skin tone is somewhere between them.  But if I didn't mention this up front, most readers would make the assumption that she was white.

The second problem with one viewpoint was that I couldn't get into the head of her friend and Scwanberger security guy Brett Dorado.  I wanted him to confirm that, despite her wild looks, Jian is an ace Coder.  And I wanted him to reveal that he is a cyborg, as a result of being a victim of an illegal military programme.  Only he knew some of that information, so he had to reveal it.

And the third reason I need multi-viewpoints is that I'm planning on writing a series of books based around the Darius orbital shipyard location.  In fact, I already have a very rough first draft of the second book, Darius.  That is a multi-viewpoint book, and although it needs re-writing, it already has more pace than the first book.  So by re-writing Snowbird in multi-viewpoints, I'll be setting the pattern for what I hope will be a long series of books.

My last reason for re-vamping the book was pace.  With one character only, she has to do a lot of thinking about or straight telling of what's happening to other characters.  And that slows the pace down and makes the book plodding.

I've re-written five chapters so far, in three viewpoints, and the book works much better.