In the summer of 1929, William Faulkner was working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant. The job was simple: shovel coal into the furnace, keep the electricity running, and stay awake until dawn. He was thirty-one. He'd published two novels that hadn't sold. He was, by most available measures, not a successful writer. What he did have was an overturned wheelbarrow, a pen, and the hours between midnight and 4 AM when nobody bothered him and the only sound was the hum of the generators and the scrape of his own handwriting.
He wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. The novel has fifteen narrators. Fifteen separate people telling the story of carrying Addie Bundren's body across Mississippi to bury her where she wanted to be buried. Some chapters are a single sentence long. Some run for pages. Darl, the second son, sees everything with a strange, almost psychic clarity. Cash, the carpenter, narrates one chapter as a numbered list of reasons why he built the coffin on a bevel. Vardaman, the youngest child, gets a chapter that consists entirely of: "My mother is a fish."
You can picture Faulkner at that wheelbarrow, switching between voices at two in the morning, the coal furnace going, his hand probably cramping. Fifteen people in his head, all of them looking at the same dead woman and the same flooded river and the same rotting coffin, and every single one of them seeing something different. I don't know what to make of that exactly, the image of a man shoveling coal for a paycheck and writing one of the great American novels in the margins, except that it tells you something about what multiple POV requires. You have to be willing to leave yourself behind. Over and over. You finish one consciousness and you walk into another, and the world has to look genuinely different each time, or the whole thing collapses into one voice wearing different hats.
That's the real difficulty of writing multiple points of view. The technical problems are manageable. When to switch, how to signal the transition, whether to use first person or third. Those are decisions you can think through. The hard part is giving each character their own way of being intelligent, their own way of being wrong, their own private logic that makes sense from the inside even when it looks bizarre from the outside. Faulkner could do it fifteen times in the same book, between shifts at the power plant. Most of us are going to try it with two or three characters and find that's plenty.
Each Character Needs Their Own Intelligence
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire runs to thousands of pages across multiple books, and the thing that holds it together, the reason readers will follow thirty-plus POV characters through a fantasy world, isn't the plot. The plot is a mess, honestly, in the best possible way. What holds it together is that every POV character thinks differently.
Cersei Lannister's chapters have a brittle formality to them. She thinks in terms of power and perception, who is watching her, who is failing to show proper respect, who needs to be reminded of their place. Her prose is controlled, clipped, full of judgments delivered with absolute certainty. Tyrion's chapters are looser. He observes more. He makes jokes, mostly to himself. He notices the gap between what people say and what they mean because he's spent his whole life being underestimated, and that gap is where he lives. Jon Snow's chapters have a younger quality, more earnest, more prone to asking questions that Cersei would never bother asking because she already assumes she knows the answers.
Martin doesn't just give each character different information, though that matters for the plot. He gives each character a different prose register. The sentences themselves change shape depending on who's thinking them. And you can feel it when you read. You know within a paragraph whose head you're in, even before Martin tells you, because the rhythm of the language shifts. Cersei's prose is tighter. Tyrion's wanders. Jon's reaches for something it can't quite articulate.
This is what I mean by each character needing their own intelligence. It's the specific way each person processes the world, the details they notice first, the conclusions they leap to, the things they refuse to see. When you're writing multiple POV and every character sounds the same, what you actually have is one mind narrating from different locations. The camera moves, but the eye behind it doesn't change.