Deepening POV
Have you ever been told to make your POV deeper?
A POV that stays on the surface deprives your reader of a rich experience. They won’t feel their hearts race along with the protagonist. Dialogue will flit by with little emotional impact. They’ll be outside, looking in.
Deepening POV means finding ways to eliminate that barrier and pull the reader deeper into the story–by being more intentional about HOW the story is being told, depending on WHO’s telling it.
đź’ˇ Minimize distractions.
Simple things like having too many dialogue tags or flashy tags (he snorts, she guffawed) can pull the reader out. Look at your filter words and see how many you can trim. Examples: see, think, watch, realize, feel, remember. A lot of “stage directing” can also remind the reader that they’re READING A BOOK.
POV errors like head hopping between characters can prove especially jarring. Your POV character might wonder about other characters’ intentions or assume they’re feeling a certain way, but Character A cannot relay as fact things only Character B knows.
đź’ˇ Keep it immediate.
Life is a series of events–and our reactions to them. Sure, we have flashes of insight and we draw conclusions (and those can be great ways to deepen POV). But a lot of the time, we are simply reacting in the moment. If something confusing is happening, your characters should be asking questions. If your protagonist has to escape a situation, show us their brain at work, considering their options.
Use different techniques to show. You can use physical symptoms (fists clenching, eyes smarting), but you can also describe emotions in a more tangible sense (Ex: I felt hope flutter up through me, soft and warm). You can use internal reflection (characters process what’s happening). You can use direct thought. Showing doesn’t have to be a one-note song.
đź’ˇ Make it distinct.
Your POV character sees their world uniquely. What details they notice and how they describe them should reveal something. Keep your POV character’s voice in mind, their priorities, their tendencies, their quirks. If it could be just anyone telling it, you’re missing out on so much opportunity.
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Consider this excerpt from Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge:
She flung her arms around me. My shoulders tightened and I almost jerked away, but instead I made myself embrace her back. She was my only sister. I should love her and be willing to die for her, since the only other choice was that she die for me. And I did love her. I just couldn’t stop resenting her either.
“I know Mother would be proud of you,” she muttered. Her shoulders quivered under my arms and I realized she was crying.
She dared to cry? On this of all days? I was the one who would be married by sunset, and I hadn’t let myself cry in five years.
There was ice in my lungs and in my heart. I was floating. I was swept away, and out of the cold I spoke to her in a voice as soft as snow, the gentle and obedient voice that I had used to consent to every other order that Father and Aunt Telomache ever gave me, every order that they would never give Astraia because they actually loved her.
“You know, that Rhyme is a lie that Aunt Telomache only told you because you weren’t strong enough to bear the truth.”
I had thought the words so often, they felt like nothing in my mouth, like no more than a breath of air, and as easily as breathing I went on: “The truth is, Mother died because of you, and now I have to die for your sake too. And neither one of us will ever forgive you.”
Then I shoved her aside and strode out of the room.
The reader is kept deep in POV, feeling what the protagonist is feeling as the dialogue flows. In a scene like this—where what her sister thinks is happening and what she’s actually thinking are quite different—revealing more underneath the dialogue brings much more depth and tension to the scene.
Give your reader a rich, immediate experience by considering the different ways to keep them immersed in POV.
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