Sometimes a story can be most effectively told by taking more than one viewpoint. I’ve written several books where we have alternated between two or more voices. There was a couple who wanted to write about the man’s ordeal as an inmate in a third world prison and his girlfriend’s struggle to get him released. We were able to move the reader between the shocking details of the man’s experiences inside a cramped, airless prison cell shared with a dozen others, and the desperate story of his girlfriend who could find no way to reach out to her partner. By cutting back and forth you can achieve much the same effect as a film director might employ to tell such a story.
In another book I wrote for two girls who were travelling together when their plane was hi-jacked and crash landed in the sea. They both had roughly the same story to tell of their near-death experiences, but by alternating their voices we were able to see events through the eyes of two different personalities. If told from just one perspective there probably would not have been enough words for a full-length book.
In another bestselling book, My Secret Sister, ghosted by Jacquie Buttriss, siblings separated at birth and put up for adoption told parallel stories of their lives and their long searches for one another in two distinct voices, until they eventually came together at the end of the story – a narrative trick worthy of a bestselling novelist.