Writing Question: POVs

[fantastic_jackie]

(POVs said Points of View </grammar nazi mode>)

I'd really appreciate some opinions on this because I keep running into it.

You have your main characters, and from them is where the POV is set. It changes in segments and chapters. But how acceptable is it to do POVs from minor characters when they're not going to have a POV very often, if more than once or twice?

Eric Nylund did the random minor character povs in The Fall of Reach and First Strike, and for characters like the random Grunt he followed for a segment... until his death... it was funny. There were also the random officers back on Earth he followed, and though they relayed important bits of information, I wasn't so thrilled with the POV. I also felt a bit of randomness in it; it was sort of unorganized and unanticipated. The Grunt segment didn't even end when the Grunt died; the POV floated around and landed back with the main characters who were creating the carnage.

But then Halo is a highly visual story, and by that, I mean that it's based off a video game; it is a video game, so the action sequences within the books are written like the CG movies in the game. Shifting POVs within a segment is dangerous, yes? You would have to have some sort of plot-related reason for doing it. Which the death of your character would probably work... And written the way Nylund did it, seeing as how the POV almost immediately swung back to the main characters, it was sort of like he knew he was... Well, I hate to say breaking the rules in anything related to writing, but you know what I mean.

I run into this all the time. Writing Tactical Espionage, there are quite a few temptations. In my still untitled action/adventure R/T story that I didn't make the deadline for, I was tempted to switch the view to Kingsley for a moment when he gets stunned, but he's not a main chara, and that story is only a one-shot. Currently, I'm working on a scene in Chapter 6 between Dr. Shino (aka An ^^) and Phantom. I want to do it from Phantom's POV, but he's not a main character; Dr. Shino is.

So what do y'all think? The minor characters in my stories are at least never completely random; they do have major minor roles that they fulfill. And I hate it that I have these scenes in my mind that follow them; I've always just adjusted them to follow a main character instead even though it usually completely changes the scene and eliminates something important that I wanted to reveal.