first noticed this sort of thing in a movie back, I dunno, ten years or more ago. It was during a summer of destruction-from-space-with-a-big-rock blockbusters. Anyway, in one of them, here comes a gigantic rock that will take out all life for certain. A mission sent up to deflect the rock half-fails, breaking it into a big piece (big enough to end us) and a little piece (scary but survivable). And sitting there in that overcold theater, I knew, at that moment, where each was going.

Of course the little one smashes into Earth, releasing a massive detonation of CGI which kills zillions of little stickfigures and topples all sorts of bitmap skyscrapers. Eeek! Argh! Ugh! Yes, bravo to that.

And the big piece, it passes the Earth, giving us a chance to render thanks for our survival to those brave doodah doodahs.

And so, in all this destruction and disaster, we got the best of both worlds. We got to see the almost-end of the Earth, and we got the saccharin ending audiences demand (I still haven’t forgiven them for Blade Runner)

But this opens an interesting aspect in storytelling (including written storytelling). If you are telling a story in firsthand view, perhaps a secondary character can be used to give you an eyeball-level edge to the scene you really want to describe. After all, in some vast and global event, your character can’t be everywhere. Some examples of where this was used in literature?

In War of the Worlds, the main character is in it with both boots from the initial landing. Being that close, he simply could not stay ahead of the express-train-speed Martian advance (besides, he was needed to remain behind the lines, to describe Earth under the Martians (gads, the horror of that)). So, instead, the POV jumps to his “brother” in London, who witnesses the fall of the city, the chaos of the roads, and the last stand of the Thunderchild. We use two characters to keep up with the wave of fast-moving destruction.

And, from my teen years but still in my mind, Winds of War (and War of Remembrance). Here, an extended family deals with the full sweep of World War Two (and their own personal dramas). We have one son as a naval aviator in the Pacific, another on a submarine, his wife in fascist Italy, just everywhere and all over. And when some of them die, in deaths representative of those years (some of them cruel, some of them pointless), the story still goes on but the poignancy remains. Truly a masterwork.

So if you have something to say or something to show and you need more angles, think about additional characters (or smaller asteroid fragments).

>>>DID THIS IN FIRE AND BRONZE WITH MULITPLE POVS (INCLUDING A NIFTY BEHEADING). GET A COPY HERE AND SEE WHAT IT’S LIKE FOR YOUR HEAD TO ROLL OFF INTO THE GRASS<<<