As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just finished my Auckland Allies urban fantasy series. One of the more unusual decisions I made with that series was to have an ensemble cast, but give them a rotating first-person point of view. I thought I’d take the opportunity of finishing the series to reflect on why I did that, how it worked, and what I learned.

Why?

First of all, why would I do such a nonstandard thing?

It was mainly a philosophical decision. Urban fantasy, at least the kind I write, has noir in its ancestry – very visibly in a series like the Dresden Files, where the main character starts out as a down-on-his-luck private investigator/wizard for hire. Part of the feel of noir is conveyed by the strong, often slangy or bantering, wry first-person voice of the protagonist, and that’s more or less the case in a lot of UF as well, not just Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, but Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville, and a number of others less well known.

I didn’t want to lose the immediacy, the voice, and the immersion in the situation that the first-person point of view provides. But I also wanted to have an ensemble cast.

All of the urban fantasies I’ve just referenced have a strong team backing the protagonist, but it’s always a case of a lead and a supporting cast. That’s in part, I think, an American thing. I wanted Auckland Allies to have a very New Zealand feel: a bit underpowered (in contrast to, say, the raw, unsubtle power of a Harry Dresden, always blowing things up and setting them on fire), a bit improvised, making up for lack of resources through ingenuity, and with a more egalitarian approach to teamwork.

I remember a manager I had a few years back whose approach to team meetings was to set up a roster for who would lead each meeting and rotate it around all of us equally (including himself). That always struck me as a particularly Kiwi way of approaching leadership, and I wanted to reflect it in the way the Auckland Allies worked. Their American member, Lynn, is occasionally sarcastic about how they have no clear leadership structure, but it works because each of them brings something to the team, knows what they bring and how to work with the others’ strengths, and defers to whoever has the best idea at the time.

Because that left me without a single protagonist, but with a cast of multiple protagonists (eventually five, though I started out with three), I chose to rotate through their first-person viewpoints, based on whoever had the highest stakes or was doing the most important stuff at the time.

How Did It Work?

Any nonstandard approach to point of view is not going to work for everyone, and a complaint I had from an early reader of the first book was that because I was rotating point-of-view characters pretty much every chapter, it didn’t give her time to immerse properly in one character before she was dropped into the next. I addressed that in later books by keeping the same POV for a while, unless there was a strong reason to switch quickly (such as when the climax was approaching and I wanted to build tension).

I did also have at least one complaint that the voices weren’t distinct enough, even though I took some pains to make them distinct. Perhaps I was too subtle, at least for that person. My approach was to give free rein (or, at least, freer than normal rein) to my natural tendency to write sentences that are too long using words that are too fancy when writing Sally, who the others think talks too much; to deliberately write shorter sentences for snarky, aggressive Tara; and to put in a lot more slang when writing Sparx. Later, when Dan and Lynn joined the cast, I gave Dan an unmarked, mostly factual tone matching his bland persona, and was careful to use American phrasing and spelling for the Boston-born Lynn.

I also, early on, decided that Tara’s characteristic emotion was anger, Sparx’s was fear, and Sally’s was sadness, though that third one didn’t end up coming through much. That also helped to distinguish them by their reactions to the same situation.

The real strength of the first-person ensemble, though, I discovered, was when the cast were thinking about each other.

When you have an ensemble cast, and you’re in their various viewpoints (whether first-person or close third), one of the obvious fun things you can do is look at the same events from different perspectives. I do that a couple of times, carefully phrasing the dialog slightly differently in each iteration to emphasize that no narrator is truly reliable. But another less obvious fun thing is to contrast how they see themselves with how others see them.

To the others, Tara is just rude. But when you see into her viewpoint, you see how angry she is, and why, and you also start to see her gain at-first-grudging respect for the other members of her team. The snark is still there, but it’s more often kept inside.

To Tara, Sparx is an annoying nerd. But in Sparx’s viewpoint, you see how anxious he is all the time, and how he tries to offset that by joking around and pretending not to take things seriously, and referencing his beloved pop culture touchstones.

To Tara, again, Sally initially seems like a “cupcake,” a bit of a princess, attention-seeking and shallow. To Dan, she seems flighty and unreliable. But from the inside, you see her struggles, and how seriously she takes them, and how genuinely she wants to help other people.

Dan – ah, Dan. Everyone else sees his white-knight persona, his bland accountant hairstyle and clothes, his insistence on following the rules, and thinks of him as a bit of a dry stick. But from the inside, you can see his bad choices, and how he regrets them, and how he keeps making some of them anyway.

To most of the team, Lynn is the smart one, with advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. But in her viewpoint, you see her, too, making choices she regrets because she didn’t think things through. And to Dan, her ex-boyfriend, she’s someone to be protected, a role she rejects thoroughly – sometimes too thoroughly for her own good.

Part of what a first-person (or very tight third-person) ensemble cast gives you is this ability to contrast the surface presentation of your characters with their deeper layers. And sometimes the other characters will notice when someone changes, or will come to see below the surface, and sometimes they won’t.

The other thing that an ensemble cast gives you is the opportunity for push and pull, for conflict and disagreement, for reciprocated and unreciprocated attraction, in multiple combinations. Each member of my five-member cast has a different relationship with each of the other four; that’s a total of ten relationships, each of which can have its own dynamic and its own arc and cycle, intersecting with the arcs of the individual characters. And it’s a total of 20 perceptions of other people, each of which can be more or less accurate. Because that wasn’t what my books were mainly about – they had powerful external threats to deal with, after all – I only scratched the surface of the possibilities, but it was enough to alert me to how rich a setup like this can potentially be. I do have a long-parked idea for another ill-assorted group, assigned to do important research in my Gryphon Clerks setting, and that would offer all kinds of opportunities to drive the story out of the dynamics of the group itself as well as the external pressures on them.

I enjoy ensemble casts. Auckland Allies isn’t my only use of them; Beastheads and Illustrated Gnome News, from the Gryphon Clerks series, both have multiple protagonists. They’re definitely more work to wrangle than a single protagonist and their supporting cast, but there’s a good reward in there for the author who’s prepared to take it on and make the most of the opportunities an ensemble cast affords.