Readers adopt a POV character as a proxy to experience the story. In the Tommy/Stacie scenes, I’m in Stacie’s head. Me: And as a reader, I’m inside someone’s head, seeing from their eyes. This comment was about one of the omniscient scenes: I’d guess most readers put themselves into a character’s head, even if the author didn’t intend to tell the story from that character’s perspective. We should feel her reactions and possibly analyze her friend’s motivations with her. The solution is for my CP to write the scene from his MC’s head, not as an outsider. As a reader, I didn’t really care what happened to the MC because I was emotionally detached. The scene in question felt like a news report, with no internal thoughts or emotional reactions. Me: Not being in a character’s head is why the scene feels distant.
Which is a little creepy, but we’ll let that go. Him: I was watching the two girls do whatever happened in the scene. The problem is one of those girls is his primary POV MC. He wrote as an outsider, as if he were watching the characters in a play. Him: It wasn’t intentionally in either girls’ head. Let’s pick up the conversation again, as we discussed the POV of a scene where his MC was with a friend. I intentionally used that description because this CP has written most of his previous work in first person, and it’s easier to write in deep POV in first person than in third.īut why bother going into deeper POV at all? Wouldn’t it be easier to stay mostly with one character and leave said character when extra information is required? Me: Limited 3rd = 1st but with third person pronouns. Him: limited 3rd = a fly on the wall, almost? Any back story is already known by the character, and the character/reader can’t know what’s happening when he’s not around unless someone tells him. We see what the character sees and feel what the character feels. That means the reader sees the story solely from the character’s experience and with elements of “authorship” removed (I’ll get to that in a minute). I was trying to steer him towards using deeper POV (limited third in this case). We get to see those in their reactions and speech. So we should never know what’s going on in Nikki’s, Sam’s, Summer’s, or Cero’s heads. Me: Yeah, staying closer to one character is good. Him: When I write a scene, would you suggest I pick a head and just stay there? It got messy when he tried to jump to someone else’s POV when the MC was present. He’s mixing scenes featuring a primary POV MC with other “omniscient” scenes where she’s not on stage. But what is deeper POV, and why would it strengthen anything? Walking through my CP’s problem leads us to the answer, but if you’re already wanting to write in deeper POV and are here just for concrete steps, scroll to the bottom of this post.įirst, a little background on his project. I’m sharing the conversation with you because in many published and pre-published work I read, I believe a deeper POV would strengthen the emotional punch of the story. I want to invite you into a conversation, one in which a CP (critique partner) and I discussed a problem he was having with his WIP. I posed the dream questions as a way to understand how he sees the characters, because POV was the heart of the problem (check out this post for a basic description of the different POVs you can use for your story). If you were taken aback by that last question, hang on to that feeling because I’m coming back to it.
When you dream, how do you experience the dream world? Are you yourself? Do you see things from your own eyes or from the outside? What kinds of dreams stick with you after you wake up?ĭo you jump out of your head and into someone else’s, mid-dream?
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