Picture this: Five guests see someone fall off of a hotel balcony. An accusation of murder seems pretty much in the bag, until one recalls a desperate attempt from the balcony to pull the victim back. There's a second guest who was snooping in the hall, and she's sure the timing is off, but then another guy swears he heard an argument, with a different voice. By the time the fifth person describes something weird with the balcony door, the whole case sounds considerably less certain.

This is called the Rashomon Effect, and it's a really cool way to tell a story. The Rashomon Effect's name comes from Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon and describes conflicting accounts of an event shaped by what witnesses perceive and believe. It is not simply a novel with multiple narrators taking turns. Each viewpoint must alter the reader’s understanding of what happened, and why the teller believes it happened that way.

Iain Pears puts this principle to work in An Instance of the Fingerpost, a historical mystery set in seventeenth-century Oxford. Four witnesses recount the circumstances surrounding a scholar’s murder, with each interpreting the evidence through a different personal ambition. Pears makes their disagreements meaningful because a new account can transform the credibility of the one before it.

For a writer working with four to eight characters or more, the first decision is identifying what each stands to lose if a particular version becomes accepted. Someone protecting a marriage will interpret an encounter differently from someone seeking a conviction. Their reasons must influence what they notice before they influence what they say.

Next, establish where each character stood when the incident occurred. A witness behind a closed door couldn't describe the expression seen by someone facing the room. Such limits make the contradictions believable, particularly when the reader eventually recognizes what one observer missed.

Hernan Diaz uses the technique differently in one of my all-time favorites, Trust, a novel about a wealthy financier’s reputation. Its four connected texts include a novel that fictionalizes the financier's life and a memoir meant to answer it. Later accounts change whose version can be believed, especially when talking about the financier’s wife. Diaz shows how the person with the means to publish a story can influence what others accept as history.

The order of revelation matters just as much as the accounts themselves. Begin with a version persuasive enough to establish an expectation, then introduce another that unsettles it. Each return to the incident should supply information that changes the reader’s judgment. Otherwise, the additional voices become repetitions of a story already understood.

In contemporary domestic fiction, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap follows eight people after a man strikes someone else’s child at a barbecue. The event exposes sharply different judgments among those present, and each perspective extends the repercussions into another household. Tsiolkas demonstrates how competing interpretations of one act can drive an entire novel even as the story moves beyond the original scene.

Finally, decide whether the book will establish what actually happened. A mystery may require an answer, while a family novel may find its ending in the damage caused by competing memories. Either choice works when the differing accounts have changed what the characters can believe about one another.

For writers, the final test is whether each perspective contributes something essential. When every retelling changes the reader’s judgment, the Rashomon Effect can make one incident powerful enough to carry an entire novel.