Christian Speculative Fiction discussion

In the book that I am currently reading the author has jumped between first person and third person perspectives. I think that jumping perspective is jolting. What do you guys think?

I haven't read a book like that, but it sounds very jolting to me! Not to mention confusing.

Yeah. It is written as a first person narrative. Then jumps to the third for a chapter and then jumps back.

Is there a difference in time and/or location as well? E.g. that it jumps back into the past for the 3rd person sections? That would at least lessen the confusion a bit.

No difference in time. There is a location difference though.

And is that consistent for the person used? I.e., the mc is always "I" in one place and "he" in another?

I've read books that have done that. first-person for the protagonist and third for other characters. I'm having to do the same for my second book. I love FP perspective but I have to show events that the MC isn't at to witness.

Right. I can see the need for that. But then you'd have to make the switch in perspective very obvious, with changes in time, place and focus-character clearly marked.

Yeah, I go agree it needs to be clear as soon as it happens.

It goes from the main character narrating to third person and back.

It is definitely jolting! It's hard to keep track of who's point of view the story is from if it keeps jumpin' all over the place. Especially the first-person to third-person. They don't mix.
Rebel Seoul is the only book I've read with a FP-TP change, unfortunately, (or else I could complain more) and Axie (the author) did it at the epilogue, to show what was going on everywhere, so it was pretty fine.
I think that perspective changes are annoying if done wrong, but a few books do it well, like Artemis Fowl, and other Eoin Colfers.
On the flip side, the Green Ember was a little too zealous in making sure that you knew about the perspective change. The author inserted the "time passes" thing (you know: the * * * or --=-- or whatever little picture) whenever a perspective was changed, as well as when tie really passed, rather than switching it every chapter or putting an extra paragraph space (hit enter twice) between switches, so I never knew whether time passed or the POV changed. Very confusing.
Most books, thankfully, keep to only the MC in FP POVs, and are very clear when switching between TP and TP.
I guess the short answer is, yes, it's annoying. :/

While I like writing from multiple perspectives, I find it easier to do so in third person. I tend to avoid first person writing for this reason. I don't think there's anything wrong with first person, but one needs a certain skill set to pull it off successfully.

As a writer, early in my writing I didn't care all that much about having any rhyme or reason to my POVs, but I always stayed consistent as far as nth-person (so no switching between, say, first-person and third person in the same story).

That being said, I feel like the constant POV jumps do make my earlier work more difficult to read, and, well, jumpier. It feels like a smoother ride when you're in just one person's head the whole time. These days I only include multiple POVs if I feel it's absolutely necessary for plot reasons. I definitely don't toss them around until every chapter (or even sections within a chapter) is from a different POV. In fact, most of my work lately has only had a single POV, simply because I haven't felt the need for any POV switches in the course of the story.

Of course, there are others' stories that have lots of POV switches and it works. But I think it's because they were overall better thought-out than me just randomly deciding to switch POVs because I thought it was interesting.

As a great example of when this doesn't work, I wrote a story in junior high using creative writing prompts from my English class. I thought it would be fun to use a different character's POV for each day's entry. I also didn't bother to note whose POV I was using, making the reader figure it out from context clues Now when I go back and read it, it just looks like a hilariously bad mess.

I also feel like I didn't really think things through well when I decided to include so many different POVs for my first novel (I think there are at least four, maybe five). But I left in most of the POVs during subsequent revisions, because of the way that the plot is structured and how the characters move around and split up. I think that because I intended to use multiple POVs in the first place, I wrote something that would actually not work well with fewer POVs or a single POV.

For example, at one point in the plot, three of the main characters are separated from the other two MCs whose POV I had mostly been using up until that point. The things that happen to the three other MCs were very important to the plot and I didn't want the reader to miss out on them, so I had to tell that part of the story from one of their POVs. I still think the story overall is a little disjointed, but it's a reader favorite, so I don't think the POV issues are quite as severe as I'm playing them up in my head.

As an example of when I think I did multiple POVs well, I wrote a fanfic where two of the MCs were separated from two of the other MCs by the end of the first chapter, and the two groups spent most of their time apart from each other until the last third of the story. I limited myself to writing from the POV of one person from Group A and one person from Group B. However, when one of the Group B characters started going off and doing his own things - things which were necessary that I show first-hand because they were integral to the plot - I introduced a third POV for him, because important and interesting events were happening that only he was experiencing. So although the story involves three POVs, I think it reads very cohesively because I had an actual plan about whose POVs I would include, and when it would be necessary to switch.