I have a lot of respect for authors who can juggle multiple character points of view and still make the audience fall in love with each character. I’ve talked about writing multiple points of view before with Aurora Rising, but we’re taking a different route today.

Also, because Shadow and Bone just released on Netflix, I figured that a Six of Crows post would be pretty timely.

Six of Crows — Leigh Bardugo

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone. . .

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.

Methodology

The gameplan was simple: I tallied up how many chapters each character got, then counted how much page time we got in their point of view.

There are a few things to note here. To begin with, the first and last chapters of Six of Crows are narrated by Joost and Pekka Rollins respectively. They are not included in the division of chapters, but are included when I counted the number of pages each character narrated. Additionally, to simplify things — and to make my life easier — shorter pages were counted the same as full pages. For example, even though pages before a chapter break tended not to be completely filled with text, they were still counted as one page.

1) Division by Chapter

This is how the points of view were split at face level. Notably, we see that Inej has the most number of chapters, while Kaz, Jesper, and Nina have an equal number of chapters. It also appears that the division is fairly equal between the main characters.

There are a total of 46 chapters, but 2 were subtracted from the overall total (Joost and Pekka Rollins).

I used a bar chart to visually show the number of chapters each character got.

2) Division by Page

Here’s where things get interesting. Because the chapters are all of varied lengths, the number of pages in each character’s perspective is a more accurate depiction of page time per character. Since Kaz is the only character mentioned by name in the Six of Crows blurb and is technically the leader of the Crows, I assumed that he had the most page time.

But according to the data, this is not so. Again, Inej comes out as the character with the greatest amount of page time. Plus, even though Kaz, Nina, and Jesper have the same number of chapters, the amount of pages they narrate tell us that there is a clear difference between how much time we spend in their heads.

Visually, I thought this would be best presented with a pie chart. This made it clear that readers spend the most time in Inej’s head, but while Nina and Kaz have a relatively similar amount of page time, Jesper clearly has less. This in turn also shows that Jesper likely just has a high number of short chapters. Also, Matthias has the least number of chapters and pages in his perspective, so there is no discrepancy between the two charts in relation to him.

Note: there are a total of 491 pages in my edition of Six of Crows. I subtracted 12 pages as these represented the book’s divisions into parts (the book is made out of 6 parts, and a divider takes up 2 pages). This resulted in a total of 479 pages.

That’s all for now!

This was a really quick post, but I hope it was interesting breaking down the PoV divisions in Six of Crows with me. It really goes to show that it’s not always necessary to alternate multiple points of view in a strict order, and that these divisions in perspective are what Bardugo and editors thought would tell the story best. Plus, if they are part of a series, characters who we don’t hear from in the first book can be further developed in the following books.

It’s also good to know that Six of Crows’ word count is around 135K. That’s a lot of time to develop characters, so don’t worry if writing multiple main characters in a shorter novel is difficult. Character development takes work, but it’s not impossible.

Finally, I hope we can all conclude that Inej is the main character.

All the best,

OTHER POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE:

LEIGH BARDUGO’S “SIX OF CROWS” IS AN ACTUAL MASTERPIECE (Spoiler-free)