POV Changes

He's awesome, that's how it works

Seven planes?? How does that work?

A brilliant series that does 3rd/1st is the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathon Stroud. I love those books. Plus the daemon, Bartimaeus, thinks in 7 planes, so you often get amusing footnotes as well.

I agree with gezza's idea that if you go from third to first, it should be at a chapter break. This will give you longer periods between shifts, and the reader can settle in and adjust. Me, I don't like books that use both as much as I like books that just pick one (preferably 3rd person). But I have read a couple of books that used it, and used it well. Read: they gave at least one chapter, if not four or five, in each POV before switching. Short hops between perspectives makes me dizzy, like having two people talk to me at the same time. And you know what they say about the cocktail party effect.

That is very good W/G we need to add that to the book!

I suppose the closest to what your'e thinking of as '4th person' would be '3rd person, omniscient'. This used to be very popular, and some good stories have been written this way, but it has fallen out of practice.

Dave walked up the street to the brick house and knocked on the door.
John watched Dave, hoping he would not dare to knock.
Lisa heard the knocking on her door, and wondered if it were John or Dave.

The author knows all (omniscient) and tells all from a distant POV. Your short story about the birth of a god is a good example. This sort of thing is most often used only in a beginning chapter or a prologue.
Most stories out there are 3rd person, limited. The story above, told exclusively from Lisa's POV would be an example. The reader is intro'd to Lisa, and only learns what Lisa herself witnesses or experiences.

3rd person, limited, with shifting POV's, would be telling part of the story from Dave's POV, some from Lisa's and the remainder from John's, including what each thinks and feels about the events. What may be a disaster for John might be the wonderful romance between the other two, and the reader is encouraged to empathize with each in turn. Or perhaps revolted by Dave's sick and twisted thoughts about the horrors he plans to commit against Lisa...
In any case, this is a great way to build suspense and has become very popular among spec fic writers.

I there such a thing a fourth person. You know a person watching the thrid person and commenting on it.... Or not!

I am the Mistress of POV.

Yes, 3rd person is relatively easy to get around, a few asterisks in a line can solve that. 3rd to 1st and back again CAN be a doddle, if you do it right.

The sequel to The Summoner is 3rd/1st person. Usually what I did was alternate chapters - so one chapter would be Scarlet's 3rd person and one Ryan's 1st. Sometimes I interweaved them with asterisks, sometimes I did 3 Scarlet chapters, and so on. What you have to be careful about is how strong the voices are. Try to keep both voices solid so one piece doesn't shine out more than the other. Two, don't repeat yourself for the sake of POV. Try not to tell the same part of plot twice from 2 different perspectives. Sure, mention it in passing, summarise, but don't go through it all again.

This is all from experience, but don't take it as gospel.

Plus, I use entire novels sometimes. My Space series is an experiment - how do 6 people see each other? Each of the 6 novels is from a different POV, and in each you learn things that the other characters might not. For a character like Onyx, who is secretive to the point of silent, it's an eye opener. For Arranthia, who is misunderstood, it helps you to empathise with her.

My first novel - The Sceptre and the Orb, was in some ways an experiment in the use of POV (third person only). It had three threads of stories, separated by many hundreds of years in one case, and generally about 30 years between the other two, and each was in the viewpoint of a lead character. The POV change occurred by way of chapter, and they were strictly taken in turn. What made this an experiment for me was that the timeline of the latter two threads joined about two-thirds into the novel (about chapter 40) and so I was able (much like WG stated with generals) to provide two viewpoints of the same events. I think it worked a charm.

In the second book of the series (Crystal Peak - nearly complete), I used a similar techique but with some distinct differences. Firstly, the POV of one thread was in the form of an astrologer/navigator's journal onboard an exploration vessel - and so it was in first person, while the majority of the novel is written in third. Another difference was that I chose not to make the threads evenly regulated - I chose a free-form of choice of when I turned to another thread - still chapter regulated but I might, for example, choose to run the same thread for 3 chapters, for instance. Having said this - in the the main thread there are several main characters, and I freely chose to use any one of them as the central character from a POV perspective.

I have used 1st person only for one short work, but my finished story and my horse nomad WIP have multiple POV changes. I've seen it in almost all of my favorite works and I've enjoyed it. My SF WIP will be entirely from the main character's POV however, because that seems (so far) the best way to tell it.
POV changes can be done chapter by chapter or with a break in text as in Knorrasky's example, and any reader should be able to follow you along.

There's a series out by a newer author named Stackpole, who used multiple POVs, and one of those POV's was indeed in first person. I found it a surprise when I encountered that POV, since all others had been 3rd person, limited. It was not jarring, as you wondered, but it was a surprise.

If I were to use multiple POVs and 1st person, I would consider multiple 1st persons, and no 3rd at all for that work. Maybe get inside the heads of the generals of opposing armies, for instance. Alternate chapter by chapter, and by the end the reader would have the story of the war...

Darn you to heck, OGO! Now you've given me another story idea, and I already have two WIPs going! Hmm...haven't started this month's challenge yet...

Changing POV can be quickly introduced by using

******

to seperate one PoV from another. If you write it well it will work fine.

As long as you introduce it quickly yes. If you take too long to bring in the pov it'll come across as if you just don't know how to do the particular bit in 3rd person. And you need to keep it consistent. Otherwise you come off as trying to be artsy fartsy, something that irritates me when it breaks up the flow of the story and adds nothing to it.

Hello friends.
I've been busy but now have the time to get on with other things, so I'm back to new ideas.

Has anyone used 1st person pov to write a sizable work? I'm thinking of using self-contained chunks of 1st person within a 3rd person omniscient pov novel.

Do you think a reader would manage to deal with that change?

Blessings
OGO