How Many POV Characters?

As I’m working on Biloxi Blues, I’m struggling with an issue about how many POV characters to use in the book.  So, I put the question out there to a writer’s list that I’m a member of, in hopes of getting an easy answer.  I got anything but.

Here’s the story: I already have 4 POV characters.  Jack and Kate, of course, the villain, and another important character.  All four of these characters are important to the story line. I also included a brief POV character in the prologue of the book, but she dies, so I don’t think she counts.

The question I had was this: I have two additional characters that are vital to the story line, but they won’t play as big a part in the story as my four main characters will.  In both cases, the maximum number of chapters they would appear in would be three, and it’s more likely they will only be in one or two.

My question was: Is that too many?

I’ve gotten a number of responses from the question that I sent out.  Many of the people who answered back said the general rule of thumb is three to five POV characters, max. One person even said that you should not have a POV character for a single scene. I broke that rule in Biloxi Sunrise. No one seems to have minded.

I also had a number of people that came back and said they have written (and had published) a number of books that had more than five POV characters.  It’s worked for them. And I’m pretty sure I’ve read books where there was more than five POV characters.  My concern, however, is that readers will find it draining to keep up with whose speaking.

To some extent, I’m sure that is just the insecure writer in me speaking.  If it’s done well, I doubt that it will matter that there are four or five POV characters, but I wanted to get a general consensus, just in case I’m wrong.  There doesn’t seem to be one.

I did get one really awesome piece of advice, though. It helped me to reach the decision that I’ll write the story the way I think it should be written. A multi-published author said to me, “Write the story the way it has to be written.”

More profound words could not have fallen on my ears.  The story that NEEDS to be written requires that there are six POV characters, two of which are not full-time POV characters. So that’s what I’ll write.

In the end, the pre-readers may hate it and I may find that I’m removing those extra POVs from the book.  But for now? Well, I’ll write them and well just see where the story ends up.

Probably should get to that…