Mastering Deep Point of View: the Secret to Writing Engaging Fiction by Rebecca Hamilton
Whether we are reading third person or first, we want to feel close to the Point of View (POV) character. We want to experience the story with them. This well-known trick I’m about to show you does something a little more, though.
It will improve several areas of your writing in one shot!
Bang! Exclamation Point!
Get excited, this one is fun!
When assessing if you need to deepen the point of view, what you're looking for is anything that is creating distance. Distance is often created by putting a filter between the character and the reader, rather than allowing the reader to absorb the character's experience.
Distance is most often created by sensory filters.
It's telling the reader that the character heard something, rather than showing the sound. It's telling the reader the character tasted something, rather than showing the taste. It's telling the reader the character saw something, rather than showing what they saw.
If you've ever heard someone say "Show Don't Tell" but found that to be an empty piece of advice, this should at least help you understand it on a sentence level.
I'm going to give an example here, along with some commentary that I hope will help you both see, experience, and understand the difference between distant POV and deep POV. (Deep POV is the one you want.)
Distant: Mary could hear the birds singing outside. (Weakest)
Closer: Mary HEARD the birds singing outside. (Weak)
Close: The birds sang outside. (Strong)
In the first example, we’re three words in before we know what Mary is hearing: the birds singing outside. When we seek to tighten that up a little, we are still two words in before we are inside her experience. But it’s still weak.
Why is that?
It’s still weak because if we are in Mary’s close POV, then any sounds described we know to be sounds she is hearing, as your POV can't describe sounds other people are hearing.
When we master this line, we’ve found we are directly inside the experience. When we are in Mary’s POV, and we read “The birds sang outside” we have stepped into Mary’s shoes and heard the birds with her.
Think of it in terms of if you put yourself in Mary's shoes (which is where you want to put the reader). Would Mary say to a friend, "I can hear birds singing outside" or would she say "There's birds singing outside."
At least in my family, I know everyone just tells me what they see or hear - not that they see or hear it.
For example, a deer was in our backyard the other day, and my husband said, "There's a deer in our back yard." He didn't say, "I can see a deer in the back yard."
While, yes, sometimes people do say "I see" and "I hear" - they don't say it as often as they just say what they see and hear. And when you, in your own mind, are seeing or hearing things, you don't think "I'm seeing something right now." "I'm hearing something right now." It's automatic. You just...experience it.
In the next lesson, I'm not only going to give more examples, but I'm also going to show you how to quickly and easily find these instances of distance in your writing...and how to fix them.
If you've been around the writing world for a while, you've probably already seen advice on what words to avoid. "Don't use adverbs." "Don't use directional words like up and down." "Don't use words like see, heard, saw, felt."
The thing is, there's a reason behind these tips, and if you don't understand them, then your fix might not make anything better.
For example, if you changed, "She walked quickly" to "She walked" to avoid an adverb, then you lose meaning. But if you understand that the problem with adverbs is that they often prop up a weak verb that needs to be replaced, then you know to change "She walked quickly" to "She ran" or "She sped" or "She jogged" or "She zipped to the other side of the yard."
Likewise, if someone says not to use direction words but doesn't tell you why, then you might write, "At his captain's orders, the soldier stood" which has a totally different meaning than "At his captain's orders, the soldier stood down."
But if you understand the reason not to leave off these directionals because they are redundant, then you know that "I tossed my legs over the side of the bed and stood" is stronger than "I tossed my legs over the side of the bed and stood up." - The up is implied here.
Or: The sun shone brightly in the sky above. Above is not needed. We know the sky and sun are above. If the sun is shining below, that might be worth providing a directional for!
The same goes with words like "see, heard, saw, felt, tasted, etc." First you have to understand why these words should be avoided: because they tell us who's point of view we are in instead of letting us experience things from that point of view more directly. The old "show don't tell" theory, but in a way very few people have likely explained it to you before.
So how do we put this into practice?
The first thing is to make a quick list of "alarm words." These are words that you want to stop and take a look at to see if you need to revise those sentences to deepen the point of view. Once you find those words, you can put this advice into action.
I personally like to use Microsoft Word's Find and Replace feature for this. You can either just run the finder and address one instance at a time, or you can mass highlight the words and address them as you do a read over your manuscript.
To quickly find the words, hit CTL+F and type the word into the search box at the top of your screen. Use the arrows to navigate from one instance of the word to the next.
To replace with permanent highlights (so you can highlight all the words on the "alert list" I'll provide below) before going over your manuscript to work on these sentences, first you need to turn on your highlight color in the MS Word Home Tab. Then follow this path in your menu bar: Edit > Find > Advanced Find and Replace.
On the window that pops up, hit "Replace." Then, in the "Find What" box, type the word you will want to highlight, and in the "Replace With" box, type the word again.
In the "Search" section, you can select Find Whole Words Only. This way, if you're looking for the word "see" it won't highlight the "see" in "seed" (etc). Then, in the "Replace" section, hit Format > Highlight. Then go back up and hit "Replace All"
When you're done, all instances of the word "see" will be highlighted. You can do this for all of your filter words, then go through your manuscript fixing the highlighted sentences as you come across them.
Don't forget to turn the highlight color on before you start, or it will highlight in clear, which wouldn't be very helpful.
Here's a quick list of "alarm words" that relate to distancing point of view:
- see
- saw
- hear
- heard
- taste
- tasted
- smell
- smelled
- feel
- felt
- wondered
- noticed
- observed
- thought
- concluded
- decided
But remember: this isn't just a matter of deleting words. That doesn't always work. For example, you can't replace "I saw the bird through the window" with "The bird through the window." These changes require thought and actual revision, such as "The bird on the other side of the window crashed into a tree."
Let's look at some more examples to make sure we have a good understanding of this concept.
Distant: Alice could see Mark through the window. He was pacing in the living room.
Closer: Alice saw Mark through the window. He was pacing in the living room.
Close: On the other side of the window, Mark paced in the living room.
These are all basic examples, but hopefully you can see the benefit of cutting the distance.
The added benefit is that your book won't feel repetitive. Imagine if you *always* used those filters. Mary saw this. Then she heard someone say that. Then she felt this. Then she saw that. Then she smelled this other thing. And then tasted something. Then she felt a different way. Then she heard and saw something else.
While rarely are authors going that overkill with these filter words, you might be surprised to find how often you use them.
Another common distance-creator we see is people "noticing" or "wondering" things, often stemming from authors trying to use "see" less but, again, not understanding why they should use "see" less. So they want to replace the word 'see', but they don't realize the problem is a lack of deep point of view. Replacing the word does not fix the problem.
Mark wondered why Alice was mad at him.
Can you *show* him wondering?
Alice flipped him the finger before storming off. Geesh. What did he do to deserve that?
"Alice noticed Mark wasn't wearing his wedding ring" could simply be "Mark wasn't wearing his wedding ring."
Often what people notice or wonder can just be shown instead of told. Same with deciding to do things. "She decided she was going to the library." versus. That's it. Mary grabbed her purse and stormed toward the door. I'm going to the library!
Some of the sensory details might seem a little harder to convey without those filter words. In the next lesson, I'll go over a few more examples, including some of these harder-to-replace filter words!
In my experience--and maybe you won't find the same--some filter words are a lot harder to eliminate than others. For me, those filter words are feel, taste, and smell. Feel is one that's offered on two levels: physical and emotional. We'll go over a few harder examples in this section. Let's start with one for feel (as in, "to touch").
Distant: Mary could feel the rough bark of the tree.
Closer: Mary felt the rough tree bark.
Close: Tree bark scraped Mary's fingertips.
Notes: This is more of an experience for the reader. To fix this sentence, I asked myself questions like:
- What does tree bark feel like?
- What is the texture?
- What sensation would be caused by touching it?
I also considered the action of touching. I mean, you could touch something with your lips, your fingertips, your toe.
How do we mobilize the character to show their experience, to show what they feel?
For example, you could write...
"I felt the cool pool water"
or
"I dipped my toe into the cool pool water."
Both reveal that the pool water feels cool. But thinking about how the character is feeling can give an active way to bring the reader closer to the experience, rather than just being told about it.
Moving onto the emotional use of the word felt...
Many times, distance will prevent you from showing emotion. And with emotion, the distance is something present on multiple levels. The last thing you want (at least most of the time) is distance when it comes to emotion!
Example 1: Mary felt sad.
This is sometimes an attempt to cut a “was” ... Mary was sad becomes Mary felt sad because it's considered less passive.
But this is another example of not understanding why certain words are "bad."
Personally, I think no words are bad. But some words, used in some situations, can create bad writing. Understanding why that is will make your writing stronger.
For example, the reason words like "was" and "had" are suggested to be avoided is because they indicate passive writing. "I was walking to the restaurant" is less engaging than "I skipped down the sidewalk toward Marty's Bar and Grill."
However, as you can see in the example above, sometimes trying to eliminate a word just to eliminate it doesn't get rid of what made that word a problem in the first place.
If someone changes, "I said sadly" to "I said in a sad voice" then all they have done is replace one problem with another. In trying to avoid the adverb, which was a weak way of telling the emotion, they have now created a problem of verbosity where brevity might be better, by telling the emotion in more words.
Maybe have the character frown. Or their heart sinks to the pit of their stomach. Or create a situation so sad, and dialogue phrased so crushingly, that all you need to say is who said it for the reader to know who is sad.
So let's go back to the example above. Mary is sad. How do we fix expressing that sadness?
It all comes back to asking ourselves more questions.
- What does sadness feel like?
- How does sadness affect Mary?
- What is Mary feeling that tells her the feeling is a sad feeling?
That's what we need to convey.
Mary’s heart sank.
Or maybe you want to build on that more, make it more personal.
Mary's heart shattered into a million pieces. This hurt worse than the time her boyfriend of five years moved out overnight, breaking up with her without even saying goodbye.
Let's look at another example. This one isn't the physical action of touching nor is it the emotion of touching. It's more of a state of being.
Example 2: Mary felt tired.
So we ask ourselves, how can we show this?
Mary’s eyelids drooped.
Depending on the context, you can build more from this. Please keep in mind, showing does not always mean more words, but in this example, it will.
Mary’s eyelids drooped. As her car swerved, she jerked her head up and blinked. Two more miles to home. She slapped her face a few times, trying to keep alert.
Notes: Why might this wordier example be a better way to show Mary is tired? Because it gives us a reason to be concerned about her. Is she going to crash her car? She’s so tired she can barely stay awake. She almost nodded off at the wheel, and only the sudden swerve of the car woke her.
Perhaps some readers might think she is being foolish, wishing she would just pull over. Here is an opportunity. Maybe she will get in a car accident. Maybe she shouldn’t be as tired as she is. Maybe someone drugged her drink at the work party she just left.
Depending on the context of the story, you may have more words, but the subtext of what you provide might make up for it. So don't be afraid to flesh things out when deepening, if it's going to improve the intrigue or resonance of the story.
All this said, there's another aspect to staying close to your character, and that's the concept of using distance on purpose. (Yep!) We'll go over that in the final lesson of this section, coming up next!
One of my favorite things about writing rules is...wait for it...breaking them on purpose!
Nancy Pickard, one of my all time favorite authors (despite writing in a genre I don't particularly love on a personal level overall), has been a huge inspiration to myself (and I'm sure many others) in the way she intentionally breaks the rules when it's for the benefit of the story.
To effectively break rules, you have to understand a few things.
- What problem is this rule meant to prevent?
- Will ignoring this rule create that problem in this situation?
- Is there something greater to be gained by ignoring this rule?
For example, there's the rule of brevity, but I would place that under the rule of show don't tell if it makes the scene more engaging.
Always, the most important rule is to entertain. So if breaking a rule makes your story more entertaining, enjoy your liberty as the master of your own writing to do so. Just make sure that's what it's actually doing. And if you can be entertaining and follow rules that make the writing passage stronger, do both.
This leads me to when you can break the rule on Deep Point of View.
I want you to think about this for a moment: Let's say you've been reading a book where you are always close to the POV character, but then, perhaps in an emotionally traumatic scene, suddenly there is distance.
If your character feels outside themselves, then for the reader to be in the character's shoes, they actually need that distance. They need to also feel outside of the character.
This is where writing with distance can have a powerful impact on the reader.
Perhaps it’s a dream scene, perhaps they are drugged, or perhaps they just received some really bad news. In these cases, it may be more powerful to say something like: I could feel the glass slipping from my hand. It felt like hours had passed before I heard it shatter. My hearing seemed muffled, as if my ears were stuffed with cotton.
Alone, that may not seem like much, but when you have kept a close distance in all of the writing surrounding these moments, the reader will subconsciously take in a distant feel, without even realizing it.
If it's distant for the reader because the character feels distant from themselves, then you're still writing in a deep point of view.
By writing in a deep point of view the rest of the time, thus allowing you to create this juxtaposition, you open the door for more emotional impact. But you can't get that effect if you're always writing a distant POV. It's the differences that make it stand out and create a different feel for the reader.
So with that in mind, remember: there are times where using a filter word is simply the best choice. Perhaps there is a reason you needed to keep that short rather than expand it into a bigger showing scene. Maybe it's just not that interesting or not as important to your story. Or perhaps distance is the emotion you want to convey. But by understanding deep point of view, you can control the distance - from distant, to close, to deep - to have your desired emotional and engagement impact on the reader.
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