How to Warm Up Your POV

A comment that I frequently make on manuscripts is to point out a cool or distant POV. I make this comment in workshops, on rejections for full manuscript submissions, on client manuscripts, and even notice it in published books.

A distant POV isn’t always a problem—it might be done intentionally, either with a certain character or to indicate a certain mindset of a character at that moment—but in general, the author is unaware of what she is doing, and pulling us away from the POV.

One of the most common ways to express a distant POV is the use of filtering words. Let me give a quick example that I'll expand on later.

Andrea looked outside, where she saw two young boys playing in the street. Even through the closed window she could hear them shouting in excitement. It reminded her of the way her daughter had laughed and played, and she gripped the windowsill to steady herself.

I’ve marked the filtering words, which have the effect of pushing these details through Andrea’s senses, almost as if she’s telling us what happened. Change it up a little and we can get right into her head.

Two young boys were playing in the street outside. The window was closed, but their excited cries came right into Andrea’s living room. It reminded her of the way her daughter had laughed and played, and she gripped the windowsill to steady herself.

This is an example tossed out there, so it’s hardly deathless prose, but note how we haven’t lost either the visual or auditory sense and we are deeper into Andrea’s POV. Now let me show you how you can warm it up just a little bit more by changing the last sentence.

Old version:

It reminded her of the way her daughter had laughed and played, and she gripped the windowsill to steady herself.

New version:

Her daughter Jillian had laughed like that, full of joy and life. My God, had it already been three years? She gripped the windowsill to steady herself.

This version is only slightly longer, but note how deeply we drop into Andrea’s head between the first and second sentence. That’s a hot POV, and it makes us feel more intimately a part of her story. We’ve gone from something a little dry, to something intimate.

I shouldn't have to tell you why a warm POV is almost always preferable to a cool one--my guess is that you feel it instinctively--but it has to do with how closely the reader identifies with the character, and that draws us more deeply into what I've called the fictive dream. Make us feel as though we are the character, not just reading about her, and we won't be able to put your book down.

Your Protagonist Smells Funny, and I Want Him to Die

Does any of this sound familiar?

 "I hate your main character. She's whiny and entitled, and I didn't buy her transformation."

"Why on earth would she go up to the attic anyway? Her Dad told her not to, and then she goes and pries open the old sea chest in a way that he'd be sure to see later."

"You need a new villain. This guy is just pure evil. I half expected him to twirl his mustache and tie up the protagonist on the train tracks."

Advice from your beta reader, hopefully, but maybe from your agent or editor.* It's cringe-worthy, no matter its source. The first thing to do is to take a step back, remember that you are not your manuscript, and vice versa, and that almost any problem can be fixed in revisions. Ultimately, nobody is going to care about the clunky first draft, only what you come up with in the end.

It's safe to say that if one person in your writing group tells you to do something, and everyone else shakes their heads violently in disagreement, you should toss the advice in the round file. But what if they all say the same thing, and it doesn't ring true to you? Or worse, if everyone says that a scene or character doesn't work, but they all have a different solutions for fixing it?

What's really happening is that you're waking readers from the fictive dream. They were immersed in your story, convinced at some deep level that it was real, and then your story telling showed its seams. The reader woke up, looked around, and thought, "My God, she's just making it up as she goes along!"

Of course, that's what we're all doing, and there are always seams. Find the best book, play, or movie and start discussing it, and you quickly find flaws in the story. You just have to force yourself awake to do it.

So when the reader says he doesn't believe your protagonist would defy her father and open the sea chest, it just means that you didn't put the reader asleep deeply enough. Re-imagine the scene, go back and give better justification, find the villain and give him a better back story, or a period of doubt, or something that he does that is noble enough to offset the mustache twirling.

The critique, at the end of the day, is not saying "Fix this problem in this specific way." It's saying, "In this spot, your storytelling is not as skillful as it could be. I woke from the dream, which frustrated me."

* Author Densie Webb had an interesting blog post a couple of days ago about getting the dreaded editorial letter that you might check out.