I’ve quoted it here a few times, but it’s simply the most apropos quotation to use for this topic:

Obi-Wan: So what I told you was true . . . from a certain point of view.
Luke: A certain point of view?
Obi-Wan: Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

Even if you weren’t an English major, but did pay attention in your required literature courses, you’ll most likely have heard the term unreliable narrator before. Usually, it’s applied to stories that are told either in First Person POV or utilizing a narrator instead of Deep POV. But the reality is that once you’re adept at writing in Deep POV, your characters become unreliable narrators—because you’ve put the reader so deeply inside each character’s thoughts that the reader is experiencing that the “truths” of the story depend greatly on each of your character’s own internal thought processes.

The reality of the human condition is that we lie to ourselves. Things aren’t as bad as they appear. (No, actually, they’re worse.) Things are horrible and can’t possibly get any worse. (Oops, they just got worse.) It’s a lot like when we discussed subtext in the Say What series—there’s a certain amount of stuff revealed (this time through the narrative, which, if done right in Deep POV, is the viewpoint character’s stream of consciousness) but there’s a lot more going on that isn’t being revealed. It’s Scarlett O’Hara deciding she doesn’t want to think about it right now, she’ll “think about that tomorrow.” Though some people are better at it (men, especially), we all have the ability to compartmentalize our thought processes. Some people are completely unsuspicious and unsuspecting—their imaginations don’t go “there” and try to figure things out ahead of time, they just experience them as they come; while other people are constantly questioning and theorizing and trying to come up with an explanation for everything that’s happening around them—much of the time drawing erroneous conclusions that can create wonderful conflicts.

I had a humorous conversation with a former coworker at a bridal shower this weekend. She quipped that as someone who’s twice divorced, she probably shouldn’t participate with all the other married women who were giving the bride marital advice. Once we all laughed and she jokingly gave out some negative advice, she said, “But, you know, the funny thing is that I still believe in love, and I still believe I’ll fall in love and this time it’ll last.”

I looked around the person between us and said, “That’s because you’re an optimist.”

“I am?” she asked, wide eyed. Then she thought a moment. “I guess I am.” She went on to tell us that as a kid she had a bicycle that she always fell off of and hurt herself—to the point that she still has some scars on her knees. But every time she went out to ride that bike, she said to herself, “This time, I won’t fall off.”

“I would have gotten rid of the bike—or put it away and never touched it again—after the second time it happened,” I said. “Because I never would have gotten on it again. I would have looked at it and thought, Every time I get on that bike, I fall off, so why get on it again when I’m just going cause myself pain? But that’s because I’m a pessimist. You know, the kind who doesn’t try anything risky because I know I’m the one who’s going to get injured.”

Now, can you imagine writing the same scene from these two different points of view? Even though each character believes she’s being totally honest (with herself and therefore the reader) in her stream-of-consciousness narrative, because each character’s perception of the world around her is diametrically opposed, the reader only experiences it from one vantage point. (Hmmm . . . I have the movie Vantage Point in my instant queue on Netflix. Maybe I should watch it while I’m doing this series.) While you, the author, aren’t necessarily having your viewpoint character lie to the reader, you can manipulate what the reader learns/finds out about what’s going on in the story by showing each scene through a certain viewpoint—by having the character see/hear/experience only what you want the reader to know, and not see/hear/experience (or not pay attention to it) what you don’t want the reader to find out yet. (I used this technique quite a bit in Stand-In Groom.)

You can also have your viewpoint characters draw conclusions about certain things that lead the reader down a certain path by how they process the experience inside their own head. She believes she’s heard the hero lie to her, therefore because she believes he lied to her, the reader should believe it too—until revealed either by the hero at a later date that’s not what he said/meant or in his own viewpoint when what he said is explained from his point of view.

This is where writing in deep POV actually becomes a much better/stronger tool in your writing toolbox than a more omniscient approach. Even if you’re writing in limited POV but still taking a more hands-off/eye-in-the-sky/narrator perspective, the reader will be frustrated with you as the author if you reveal things later in the story that the reader knows you knew back a hundred pages earlier. Because they’re reading the story more from your perspective than the characters’. By going deep and showing things only from your characters’ perspectives, you give yourself so many more opportunities to bury clues, to keep things from your reader, to have your characters be unreliable narrators than any other POV you could choose, whether in First or Third Person.

For Discussion
How have you used deep POV to keep information from your readers? If you haven’t used it yet, how can you employ it to keep your readers hooked and deepen your POV?

I know what you’re thinking—we’ve already determined that head-hopping isn’t what we want to do, that we want to write Deep POV, with only one viewpoint character per scene. We know: head-hopping is bad, bad, bad, bad. No-no. Don’t do it. No writing the thoughts of any character but the viewpoint character.

Yes, that’s the majority of head-hopping—from one character’s thoughts to another. The other part of head-hopping, the part that’s harder to grasp, is when we jump outside of our viewpoint character into either omniscient or no viewpoint whatsoever.

Huh?

I shared last week a few comments that I make on a lot of contest entries I judge. Another one is that in deep POV, you cannot write anything that your viewpoint character cannot see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or know for him/herself. If you’re in your heroine’s viewpoint and you write: “her face turned red,” you’ve head-hopped. Why? Because that description is coming from an external observer. She can’t see her own face turn red. She can only experience the burning sensation, feel the mortification deep-down inside her soul, wish the floor would open up and swallow her.

Last week, someone posted a question on the ACFW e-mail loop asking if she could write that her viewpoint character smiled, since the character cannot see herself smile. This is taking this part of POV a little too far. Every time I see that question crop up, I think about a line from Steel Magnolias when Ouiser is talking about having run into Drum Eatenton at the Piggly Wiggly, “…and I smiled at the [SOB] ’fore I couldn’t help myself.” We think of ourselves as smiling at other people. Sometimes we may not realize we’re doing it, because it can be a subconscious gesture. And you don’t want to fill your narrative with: She smiled. He smiled back. You want to get to the root of the emotion behind the smile. But sometimes, a viewpoint character just needs to smile. The best thing to do is to imagine yourself as your viewpoint character—and then write only what you can experience as her.

Then, there’s the problem of no viewpoint at all. Have you ever read a book and you got to a certain point in a scene and you had to flip back a page or two to remember whose viewpoint it was in? This happens when the narrative is too objective, especially in a scene that’s dialogue-heavy. Unless you’re writing your whole novel with this objective voice (in other words, you never go into anyone’s thoughts, emotions, gut-reactions at a deep level), what you’ve done is just hopped out of your character’s head. Here’s an example from Menu for Romance—first, edited down, then the full version:

Major changed the subject. “Your mom invited me to drop by their New Year’s open house. You going?”

Meredith shook her head. “No.”

“She said she had something she wanted to talk to me about.”

“Hmm. No—I don’t usually go over for the open house, just for our family dinner later. Instead, I’m fixing to go home, sleep for a few hours, and then head over to the new house—I’m planning to get the paint stripped from all the woodwork in the living room and dining room tomorrow.”

“In one day?” Major grunted. “Wouldn’t you rather relax on your holiday?”

“But working on the house is relaxing to me. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to go off by myself all day and be assured no one’s going to disturb me.”

The elevator doors opened to the dim, chilly underground parking garage. Major stopped her from exiting first. He stepped out, looked around, then turned and nodded to her. “Looks safe.”

“Of course it’s safe. You lived in New York too long.” She walked out past him.

“Meredith, Bonneterre isn’t the little town we grew up in any more. Even before Hurricane Katrina, it was booming.” He stopped her again and planted his hands on her shoulders. “Please don’t ever take your safety for granted. Not even here in the garage with security guards on duty. If anything happened to you…”

Meredith blushed and dropped her gaze.

“Look, I don’t mean to alarm you. But in this day and age, anything could happen.” He kept hold of her a moment longer, then let go and readjusted the straps of his bags on his shoulder.

Whose viewpoint is that scene in? Major’s or Meredith’s? Now, read it again:

Major changed the subject. “Your mom invited me to drop by their New Year’s open house. You going?”

Meredith shook her head. “No.” The simple answer held a magnitude of surprise.

“She said she had something she wanted to talk to me about.”

The porcelain skin between Meredith’s brows pinched. “Hmm. No—I don’t usually go over for the open house, just for our family dinner later. Instead, I’m fixing to go home, sleep for a few hours, and then head over to the new house—I’m planning to get the paint stripped from all the woodwork in the living room and dining room tomorrow.”

“In one day?” Major grunted. Meredith’s new house was anything but: a one hundred-year-old craftsman bungalow everyone had tried to talk her out of buying. “Wouldn’t you rather relax on your holiday?”

“But working on the house is relaxing to me. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to go off by myself all day and be assured no one’s going to disturb me.”

The elevator doors opened to the dim, chilly underground parking garage. Major took hold of Meredith’s arm and stopped her from exiting first. He stepped out, looked around, saw nothing out of the ordinary, then turned and nodded to her. “Looks safe.”

“Of course it’s safe. You lived in New York too long.” She walked out past him.

“Meredith, Bonneterre isn’t the little town we grew up in any more. Even before Hurricane Katrina, it was booming.” He stopped her again, planted his hands on her shoulders, and turned her to face him. “Please don’t ever take your safety for granted. Not even here in the garage with security guards on duty. If anything happened to you…”

Meredith blushed bright red and dropped her gaze.

“Look, I don’t mean to alarm you. But in this day and age, anything could happen.” He kept hold of her a moment longer, then let go and readjusted the straps of his bags on his shoulder.

Now whose viewpoint is this scene in? See how just a few little things that come from deeper inside the character’s head keep us grounded in whose viewpoint it is?

Go deeper.
Don’t keep the reader at arms’ length from the character.
Author intrusion.
Eliminate telling language to get deeper into the character’s head.

I’m in the process of judging entries in the ACFW Genesis Contest for unpublished authors, and these are just a few of the comments I personally have made in past contests (along with explanations of what those comments actually mean on the score sheet). So it’s time to look at some STRUCTURAL techniques we can use to take POV deeper. Whereas many other things in writing cannot be learned, only honed and polished (like voice or the storytelling ability), these are some tried-and-true techniques for making Point of View seem much more immediate, for putting the reader right into the character’s head and make them forget they’re reading a story.

GO DEEPER. DON’T KEEP THE READER AT ARMS’ LENGTH FROM THE CHARACTER.
Sometimes it’s almost as if we’re afraid to go too deeply into our characters’ heads. We’ll write their dialogue. We’ll write italicized internal thoughts. We’ll write their visceral (physical/knee-jerk) reactions to what happens around them. We’ll write that they were angry or happy or sad. But we never go beyond that very surface-y layer. We never get down to the why of the thoughts or reactions or emotions. Just as many of us, in real life, are loath to show emotion publicly (at least deep emotion, we’re okay with laughing and fun emotions), we’re also loath to get down to the root of emotion in our characters. That’s not to say that everything has to be melodramatic or maudlin or weighted down with an exploration of the emotion behind why she laughed at something funny the hero said. We just need to make sure we’re going beyond the surface reactions and finding the real reason behind why a character is doing something.

AUTHOR INTRUSION.
Any time you break into your character’s narrative to share something with the reader, be it a description of the character’s own hair color or other physical attributes, that’s author intrusion. Any time you use a character’s thoughts or dialogue in an attempt to pass along backstory in a way that isn’t natural and realistic, that’s author intrusion. Any time you feel like you must explain that something set in italics and written in first person when the rest of your narrative is in third person is someone’s thoughts (by following it up with “she thought” or, more heinously, “she thought to herself”—click here to read more about this), that’s author intrusion. Unless you are specifically crafting a story that uses a narrator to tell the story who isn’t one of your main characters, any time you do write something that wouldn’t naturally spring from your characters, that’s author intrusion. That’s one of the things that most modern readers don’t like about classic literature. We’re seeing the story through the eyes and hearing it in the voice of the author. In modern genre fiction, we want to lose ourselves in the story by experiencing it through the eyes and voice of the viewpoint characters.

ELIMINATE TELLING LANGUAGE TO GET DEEPER INTO THE CHARACTER’S HEAD.
In the Showing vs. Telling series, I covered more than I’ll be able to get to here when it comes to eliminating Telling language. One of the main reasons for this is to get deeper into the characters’ heads. For example:

Character Descriptions
See this post also.
When we, as the author, step back and turn around to the reader to describe what the character looks like by having the character look at herself in a mirror, it’s author intrusion. The only thing that does is show the reader that we’re not deeply enough into the character’s head—that we’re still just telling a story and haven’t figured out how to realistically develop a narrative style that shows what the characters look like by using types or by seeing the characters through someone else’s eyes.

I’m currently reading John Grisham’s The Rainmaker. While the first-person narrator does describe the other characters he meets, I’m about halfway through and couldn’t even begin to tell you what the main character looks like. I don’t know if he’s blond or brunette (and no, I haven’t seen the movie and have assiduously avoided looking up the cast list to see who was cast in the role). I assume he’s probably about six feet tall, because he doesn’t have the emotional stuff associated with a guy below average height and he doesn’t tower over other people. He’s probably average to somewhat good looking. Women don’t stop in their tracks to look at him, but they don’t run from him when he strikes up a conversation. And yet in this story, it doesn’t really matter to me what he looks like—because I’m so deeply into his head and into his world and seeing everything through his eyes, it doesn’t make a difference what he looks like.

Character Emotions

There are two standard signposts of telling when it comes to descriptions, senses, and emotions:

Character WAS adjective. (Ned was handsome.)
Character FELT adjective. (Charlotte felt tired.)

This is the type of writing that comes natural to most of us. Starting today, however, train your brain to associate the word FELT with that heavy, scratchy, stiff fabric used for arts and crafts and not character emotions. Felt does not make comfortable clothing, so why “dress” your characters with it?

One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever received was in a seminar in grad school: make the emotions DO something to the character. Make the emotion the subject of an active verb instead of just an adjective. (Get out your grammar book if you must.)

Which of the following sentences gives you the best visual of the emotion being experienced?:

• Molly felt scared.
• Fear made Molly’s skin tingle.
• Fear tingled on Molly’s skin.
• Fear ran down Molly’s spine like a hundred tiny mice with cold feet.

Though we’re getting there with the third example, it’s the fourth line that really puts us there in the moment with Molly—it’s her unique way of experiencing the moment.

There are so many other ways in which using showing language can help us make our POV deeper, so reviewing that series might be helpful as we get further (deeper) into this study of Point of View.

For Discussion
After reading this, are there any writing habits you can break to stop holding the reader at arms’ length from the character and start putting them right into the character’s head?

After having lunch with fellow Tennessee author Kathy Cretsinger yesterday (who’s on her way to Scotland—I’m so jealous!) and talking with her about the upcoming ACFW National Conference, I had dreams last night about being at conference. Which made me think about all the things we hear from other writers when we’re all clustered together in places like conferences. I’m not talking about what editors and agents tell us in panels, but what other writers may say in workshops they teach or the information we exchange amongst ourselves at mealtimes or in the hallways. I have no experience with secular conferences, but I know at events like ACFW, all information is exchanged with the best of intentions. Just not always with the proper information.

Sometimes, an editor or agent may say something to an author in a one-on-one meeting about that author’s particular manuscript. The editor or agent may tell the author that the author needs to change the Point of View from 3rd to 1st, or needs to cut down on the number of Viewpoint characters. The author, without meaning to, internalizes this advice and takes it to mean that this whole genre of story should be written in 1st Person, or that there can never be more than a certain number of POV characters in any subsequent stories written in this genre.

A great example of this is from when editors and agents began saying many years ago at conferences to “prefer active verbs,” just like it says in The Elements of Style (Strunk & White). We authors took this to mean we could never use anything BUT active verbs and not only that, we had to find the most obscure and colorful active verbs we could possibly find. I had an editor tell me—in a personal conversation, not in an “official” manner—that she actually missed seeing an occasional “was” in the manuscripts submitted to her.

So let’s look at some common misperceptions about Point of View.

1. First Person is easier to write than Third Person. When we tell someone a story about something that happened to us, we’re automatically crafting it in First Person. So we should all be experts in this Point of View and find it easy to write in, right? However, telling someone a five-minute-long story and writing a three hundred–page novel are two beasts entirely. Just like a Third Person Viewpoint character, a First Person Viewpoint character has to have something to reveal to the reader, a little at a time; have an interesting and dynamic character arc; and be able to build suspense by not revealing important information to the reader. In the series Hooking the Reader, we looked at how one of the best ways to keep a reader turning the pages, to keep them in suspense, is to be able to jump away to another character’s Viewpoint at a pivotal moment in the conflict. In First Person, you can’t do this (unless you’re using more than one First Person Viewpoint character, which can be done, but isn’t always effective and should be shied away from by writers who haven’t already mastered limited Third Person POV). In First Person, it’s harder to keep important information from the reader until the end of the story without the reader feeling cheated.

2. Omniscient POV and head-hopping are the same thing. Omniscient POV means that the author is basically narrating the story and can dip into any character’s thoughts at will. But authors experienced with using this POV are actually narrating and dipping. Authors who write in a headhopping style jump from one character’s thoughts to another without any transition between them, sometimes from sentence to sentence, sometimes within the same long sentence. Headhopping is jarring and sometimes confusing. Omniscient POV is more of of a “godlike” viewpoint on the story and one in which the narrator of the story becomes an invisible extra character. (Authors to read to study true omniscient POV are Hemingway, Dickens, Toni Morrison [Beloved], Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jane Austen.)

3. As long as I’m not head-hopping, I can use multiple Viewpoint characters in every scene. You can—if you’re writing in Omniscient POV. But for genre fiction, editors are looking for authors who have a good command of writing Limited Third Person—meaning only one Viewpoint character per scene. Limiting yourself to only one character’s Viewpoint per scene will not only strengthen your story, it will also strengthen your skills as a writer. [You can break a scene into two character’s viewpoints—as long as you’re giving each character a sufficient chunk of the scene (e.g., half a chapter) before changing viewpoints with a definitive scene break.]

4. Bestselling authors in my genre head-hop and use omniscient POV, so I can, too. Many bestselling authors are grandfathered-in and don’t have to write to the same requirements that an untried, unpublished or newly published author must live up to. Why? Well, let’s look at what they’re doing right instead of what they’re doing wrong. The reason these authors have gained bestseller status is because they’re first and foremost great storytellers. They craft compelling characters. They’re experts at generating suspense. They use words in describing the setting the way a painter uses oils to create a masterpiece. And they sell books.

5. I have to write in the same Point of View (person) as every other author in my genre. For unpublished authors, this is one that isn’t necessarily a misperception or myth. Editors and agents are going to want to know just from looking at your sample chapters that you understand the genre you’re writing. They want to know that you understand that romance is typically written in Limited 3rd Person using the hero’s and heroine’s Viewpoints. We should always start out by choosing to use the accepted standards of our genres until we’re experts at them. Once we’re experts, then we can start writing outside the guidelines, experimenting with bringing different POVs to freshen up tried-and-true genres.

What are some other things you’ve heard or read and you’re wondering if they might also be mythical or misperceived?