Why I Only Gave Each Character One Section, and What That Cost Me
(Spoiler: a lot of sleep and at least one minor identity crisis)
When people hear that The Foothills is told through six distinct perspectives and each character only gets one section, I usually get one of two reactions:
“Oh, that’s so cool!”
“Oh wow, how does that work?”
Both are valid, so let me explain why I chose to write it this way.
I loved the structure it created.
First of all, I love a good literary device. And I'll be honest, I had to google what this one is actually called: a prismatic ensemble narrative. If it sounds made up, you can blame my search history. But it's essentially how The Foothills is built: multi-perspective POV, no single main character, no returning perspectives. And I love it.
It felt like a reflection of what real life actually looks like. There are people you meet at different stages of your life who are there day in and day out, and then suddenly, for whatever reason, are no longer around. Maybe you had a real relationship with them, or maybe they were simply someone who also chose to work at the same coffee shop all summer. Either way, we all have those people, the ones we think about every so often and wonder what happened to them.
That's how it's meant to feel for the characters in The Foothills. For one summer, they are there for each other, every day. But once summer ends, they scatter, tethered only by the season they shared. I wanted the reader to feel that just as much. To connect with a character, and then be gently forced to move on, learning about the rest of their summer through someone else's eyes.
And that's real. It's how we actually experience other people. We get one version of them, usually. And then we fill in the rest with assumption. No single character has the full picture, and depending on whose eyes you're looking through, the story shifts. You hold all six perspectives in your head and assemble something none of them could have seen alone.
It's a beautiful, messy thing.
The honest reason I structured it this way: I didn't want to write each of these characters for longer than one section. Not because I didn't love them; I do, even the difficult ones. But writing from deep inside a perspective very different from your own requires a certain kind of sustained imaginative effort. One section felt like the right amount of time to give everything I had to a voice without feeling like I was trespassing.
There was something else, too. Something intriguing about not being able to finish a story from the inside. This happens in real life constantly. We may be part of someone's journey for a season, but we often witness their successes and struggles from the outside, missing the intimate, unglamorous work of how they got there. Everyone in The Foothills is working with a limited window to be fully honest, and they all use it the way people use limited windows: imperfectly, urgently, leaving things out they'll probably regret.
One section is, it turns out, both more and less than it sounds like. It's a constraint that became a kind of freedom. You can't put things off. You can't circle back. You just have to say the thing.
And for me, as a writer, that was the fun of it: figuring out what had to be seen through each character's eyes, and what could wait.
What it meant was some unanswered questions.
With a traditional multi-perspective structure, you can course-correct. A character said something in chapter two that doesn't land quite right? No problem, you can clarify in chapter seven. With one section per voice, there is no chapter seven. There is only the section you have.
That constraint is just as true for the reader. They're sometimes left without resolution: did that character change? Did so-and-so choose this or that, and what was the emotional fallout? For a lot of the characters, it's open-ended. The reader has to fill in the blanks and hope that whatever they wished for that character came true.
That's terrifying when you're writing it. In retrospect, I think it's also what makes the book work. Every chapter carries the weight of finality. Every voice is complete, whether it wants to be or not; not unlike a summer, really. You don't get to go back and do it differently. You get the one you got, and whatever happens, whatever you learn, you take it with you.
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*Phyllis Mma is a writer and former digital marketing professional. The Foothills is her debut novel.*
