In his Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the creature Argus as “gifted with a hundred eyes,” and in that way, writers are akin to Juno’s unsleeping sentinel. We have the power to see through many eyes, to look at the world and to dream, simultaneously. We share our strange visions with readers the way that Argus lent his hundred eyes to Juno.

Ovid’s epic poem is woven through with dozens of myths and legends told from multiple perspectives. We see the creation of the world and all the strange things that happen in it through hundreds of different eyes, thanks to the poet’s ingenuity. The tale of Io, the nymph raped and subsequently transformed into a calf by Jove, begins from the perspective of her father Inachus, a river god.

He had retreated to his deepest cave,
And as he wept, his tears increased his waves;
The disappearance of his daughter, Io,
Had left him desperate. He did not know
If she was still alive or with the Shades;
He could not find her anywhere, and so
He thought that she was nowhere; in his heart
His fears foresaw things devious and dark.

Ovid starts the story of Io from the point of view of her grieving father to arouse sympathy and to create suspense straight away. From Inachus, we shift to Jove’s salacious scrutinizing of chaste Io’s lithe body and his scheming to rape her, raising our alarms, and then Ovid gives us the perspective of Juno, the scorned wife who can only lash out at the tormented nymph in her anger. The perspective changes often, sometimes providing and sometimes concealing context, but the grief of her father, the callousness of Jove, and the jealousy of Juno, all intensify, by contrast, the horror of those parts of poor Io’s story that we see through her eyes.

…And Io reached
The shores on which she had so often played,
The river banks of Inachus; she stared
At her strange horns reflected in the waves,
And at her muzzle; and she fled, dismayed
And terrified. Not even Inachus
And all his Naiads knew just who she was;
But she would trail her father and her sisters
And let them touch her as she sidled up
To be admired. Once, old Inachus
Had plucked some grass and held it out to her:
She licked her father’s hands, and tried to kiss
His palms, and then began to weep; and if
She could have uttered words, she would have told
Her name and wretched fated and begged for aid.

How shifting perspectives has helped me in my own writing

I’m not sure I could pull off a cast of hundreds (or that I’d even want to), but Ovid serves as a reminder that I’m not limited to one perspective when I’m writing. My imagination has more eyes than Argus; I only have to open them up. Since I first started tinkering with my work-in-progress Queen Hag back in 2021, it’s been from the perspective of a middle-aged woman called Savvy. She was given up for adoption as an infant, and she never knew anything about her family until she inherited her great-aunt Hazel’s home in coastal North Carolina. When she arrives to claim her inheritance, she finds Hazel alive and well. Hazel has a different perspective; she believes she’s dead.

A while back, I got tangled up in the story and didn’t know how to move forward. I kept trying to force Savvy through scenes to get her where I knew she was going, but it wasn’t working. Then, an article by Rachel Hartman, author of the New York Times bestselling YA fantasy novel Seraphina, came across my digital doorstep. In “Narrative Sleight-of-Hand: The Trick of Writing Multiple POVs,” Hartman describes her own uncooperative novel and how she overcame her obstacles using multiple perspectives. It’s a thought-provoking piece of writing, and it made me think that it might be a good idea to look at Queen Hag through Hazel’s eyes. That shift revealed parts of the landscape I couldn’t see from Savvy’s perspective, literally. Even better, having multiple viewpoints gives me more opportunity for sleight-of-hand in my storytelling. I can leave readers in the dark, enlighten them, or mislead them simply by using the writer’s gift of one hundred eyes.

Some of my favorite novels have used multiple perspectives to play tricks on readers. John Fowles’ The Collector comes to mind, and Sarah Waters won my heart with The Fingersmith, her master course in misdirection via perspective shifts. How about you? Tell me your favorite use of multiple perspectives in a story or share your own perspective on perspectives in the comments.

Post-script for the curious

In the time since I began experimenting with perspective in Queen Hag, I’ve changed the POV from third-person to first-person, and I’ve explored the story from other perspectives in addition to Hazel’s and Savvy’s. All the changes mean that this initial scene from Hazel’s point of view is no longer going to make it into the novel. I’m sharing it below because it’s important to me, even if it didn’t make the cut. You can read the first scene I ever wrote for Queen Hag – before I even knew she was a novel – in this earlier post if you’re interested in comparing the two perspectives.

Hazel sprung down from the porch like a cricket, and with uncannily spry steps, she took the westward path up towards the burying ground to report the girl’s arrival to John Body. He’d been sullen and anxious-seeming lately, and Hazel was happy to have some good news to cheer him up. Nothing aggravated her more than a sulking man. She didn’t have the patience for it. What did the old bag of bones have to worry about anyway?

Herself, she felt better dead than she ever had alive. Her senses were sharp as an oyster shell. Seaside sparrows hidden among the needlerush and cordgrass sang a morning symphony, and Hazel could hear each and every individual bird’s contribution, each trill and aria, and she knew what they meant by it, too.

Everything slowed down just an iota, so she could see the world real good for a change. Right now, for an example, clouds of daisy fleabane along the path’s border were winking open, a thousand eyes witnessing the sunrise, and that wasn’t just poetical. They were looking, really looking, just like she was.

Then again, she could also see things now that hadn’t even been there to see before she died. As a matter of fact, that’s how she knew for certain she was dead despite the many compelling arguments to the contrary, and she’d heard them all. Only John Body and Nettie Quill, her best friend since the cradle, believed her. Everybody else thought she’d gone so far offshore, she couldn’t get back in. She reckoned in a manner of speaking, they were right, so she quit arguing with folks about it unless she was bored and feeling spiteful.

Hazel ducked out of the sun into the forest via a footpath that threaded through the hedge of wax myrtle and yaupon holly. She paused to breathe in the damp scent of decaying leaves and to listen for John Body. Unlikely that he’d be inside on such a fine day, but she heard no sign of him in the forest. That didn’t mean he wasn’t nearby. Ol John was more silent than the grave because he sounded like life; he blended right in with his leathery hide that scritched like squirrels in the undergrowth and his rustling skull, where two bluebirds had recently made a nest, popping out of his eye sockets like sapphire jewels to twitter and chit. Even with her heightened senses, Hazel could rarely hear John if he didn’t want her to.

She followed the footpath in the direction of the burying ground as it seemed the logical place to start her search. She also wanted to check on the door, to see if it had changed since last time. It was the door that had convinced her she was dead in the first place. She’d visited the burying ground hundreds of thousands of times in her life, she reckoned. She and her sister Holly Ann, Savvy’s granny, had played there as girls. They pretended the old brick mausoleum was a child-sized palace or a jungle temple, and the mausoleum did its part by allowing twisting wisteria vines to twine around it for the sake of atmosphere.

Within the dark, chilly room, the tombs of long dead Greenleafs had proved handy playthings, serving as a dining set when the girls had a tea party or as fainting couches in the event of a more exerting adventure. Holly Ann had plundered the Yonder library for romance and adventure novels, but most were written at least a century earlier. As a result, a great many of their games required the girls to faint while a prince saved them from a fate worse than death. They’d recruited John Body as the prince, though it required imagination on everyone’s part as even back then he’d been mostly leather and lichen and not much of a mover.

In decades of games and explorations, Hazel had never noticed a door on the back wall of the mausoleum, and she certainly would have if it had been there all along. She was an observant person, even before she died. But she’d only just noticed it a few weeks back, when she came to apologize to John Body for some harsh words she’d begun to feel remorseful about. Ol John hadn’t been home, but it was a hot, sticky July day, so Hazel decided to sit for a spell in the cool shade of the mausoleum.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed a thin line of gray light running from the floor nearly to the ceiling on the crypt’s back wall. She wondered if it was possible for a crack in the masonry to be so perfectly straight. Curious, she crossed the inky interior to inspect it. What she found was a door where there had previously been moldy brickwork. It was rusted iron and heavy, too heavy for her to budge. She pressed her eye to the crack, expecting to see the mass of wisteria leaves and drooping grape jelly blooms that covered the back wall’s exterior, but instead she saw some sorta chamber or maybe a passage. She couldn’t say for sure. She only knew it wasn’t what was supposed to be there.

She reckoned it was a door to the mansion under the marsh, one of Ol John’s boogedy stories meant to scare her. Yet it couldn’t be all boogedy because there was the door, right where he said it would be. That could only mean one thing: Hazel Greenleaf was at least a little dead.

Reference

The Metamorphoses Of Ovid, Allen Mandelbaum (Translator)