Point of View: Take Two

So I've said that 1st person vs 3rd person is a matter of preference, and not something you should spend too much time stressing over. But have you ever started a WIP and then, at some point between the beginning and end (ideally closer to the beginning), you have the mind-breaking realization that maybe... your story isn't being told from the right point-of-view character?

Usually, when we first visualize a story, it seems perfectly obvious whose story needs to be told. 99.9% of the time, that's your main protagonist. (There are exceptions, notably among the classics, but for simplicity's sake, we'll focus on the narrator as the MC)

But sometimes, as you're writing, the story begins to take shape in an unexpected way. The conflict pulls you in a different direction. Who you thought was your main character suddenly fades in importance while the details seem to shine and fall into place around a different character.

At this point, you have to make a decision. Restructure the story and refocus the conflict on your main character, or rewrite the story from the other character's point of view. Either way, it requires some major manuscript reconstruction.

Something similar (sort of) happened to me while outlining my WIP. Two thirds into the outline, it dawned on me that half of the story action--events that would better serve the book if written out instead of mentioned later on--wasn't happening to my female protagonist. I still needed her point of view because she is the main character and her scenes are all still important, but I realized that she's only half of the narrative.

Fortunately, I didn't have to reconstruct the entire story around a different character, but I'd never written in dual pov before (at least not original fiction). The idea of having to do so was daunting, so it took a while for me to accept that this story needed the point of view of my male protagonist. But once I acknowledged that it needed to be just as much HIS story as HERS, everything came together.

I'm a big fan of stories with multiple points of view, but they really do need to be essential to the story you want to tell. Unless you're G.R.R. Martin.

So have you ever experienced the frustration of writing in the wrong character's point of view? Or experienced something similar? And what are your thoughts on dual/multiple points of view?

♥