Deep POV: Fast Track to Compelling Character Voice

Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

Deep POV is single viewpoint on steroids.

In the first article of this series, I compared single POV to viewing a scene through the eyeglasses of one particular character. Deep POV takes single POV and intensifies it. It's like putting two tiny cameras with powerful microscopic lenses in those glasses; installing microphones in the character's ears, and sensors in her nose, tongue, and skin; then finally inserting a silicon chip in her brain to channel every single thought, perception, sensation, and emotion directly to readers.

Lars Norgaard, "World's First Cyborg Artist"

 Handling POV like this is a fantastic way to immerse readers in your story. Although I'm not a gamer myself, it seems to me that Deep POV is like turning the protagonist of a novel into an avatar of the reader: the line between fictional character and reader of fiction gets blurred, so that the reader experiences the events of the plot as if they are happening to her. Readers slip so deeply inside the skin of a book's narrator that it's as if the two are fused into one.

I told you Deep POV was intense!

The best way to get a feel for the difference between "regular" single POV and Deep POV is to read it in action. Here is a masterful example from the Okay for Now [Clarion 2001], a Newbery Honor book by the gifted children's writer, Gary D. Schmidt. The novel's narrator is eighth grader Doug Swietek. Here is he speaking about a Yankees baseball cap that his older brother had stolen.

"I guess now it's in a gutter, getting rained on or something. Probably anyone who walks by looks down and thinks it's a piece of junk. 
They're right. That's all it is. Now.
 But once, it was the only thing I ever owned that hadn't belonged to some Swieteck before me."

This is Doug, talking straight to readers. There is absolutely no sense at all of any author sitting there with a pen or a typewriter or a computer making this up. Rather, Schmidt is writing as if he were possessed by Doug, being used by the character to transcribe his words onto the page. Now that's how to create a vivid, authentic, compelling character voice. Schmidt's novel is persuasive testimony of the power of Deep POV. There is no better way to bring a character to life. 



Contrast this with regular single POV, in another wonderful middle grade novel, A Drowned Maiden's Hair [Candlewick Press 2006] by Laura Amy Schlitz.

"Maud had a hazy idea that the Battle Hymn had something to do with with war and slavery. She felt that by singing it she was defying authority and striking a blow against the general awfulness of the day."

Though this is single viewpoint, since it's written from within Maud's head, it is not Deep POV. It's phrases like she felt and Maud had a hazy idea that put readers at a subtle but real distance from the heroine.

The cumulative effect is a slightly more formal, slightly more adult voice. There is nothing wrong with this, but for me at least, it makes the ghost of the author more evident. I'm aware that there is a writer at work here; I don't feel that Maud is speaking directly to me. 



"Duh!" you may  object. "That's because Schlitz was writing in third person, and Schmidt was writing in first person, Nancy, you dolt." But it is possible to write Deep POV in third person. How? 

First, avoid writing anything that distances readers from your POV character in any way. Here's an example.

She jumped when she heard the door slam.



The phrase she heard is a tiny little wedge driven between the narrator and the reader. Do some quick and simple word-surgery, and you've gone a little deeper into your character's head.

             

The door slammed. She jumped, her heart ping-ponging in her chest.


You don't tell readers that she heard the slamming door, you simply show it happening—followed immediately by the character's response. So one way to achieve deeper POV is to follow the same old literary advice you've heard time and time again: show, don't tell.



In a similar vein, avoid distinguishing the narrator's thoughts in any way from the rest of the text. Certainly don't treat them like dialogue and set them aside in quotes, and don't italicize them either. That creates distance between your character and your readers. 

Also, don't apply what I call "thought tags," words such as thought, felt, surmised, guessed, supposed, etc. Again, just write the thought directly. For readers, this creates the sense that they are in the narrator's mind, hearing her thoughts by some kind of literary telepathy.



One of the places that it is easiest to slip up and forget to remain in Deep POV is in descriptive narrative. Writers—myself included—get carried away in describing a scene and start writing lyrical passages that their thirteen-year-old skateboarding hero would never say or think. Writing Deep POV is a humbling experience. With every word, you are trying to make readers forget that you, the author, exist. If you succeed, kids won’t even remember your name. Your goal is to convince them the main character is the one telling them the story, not you. 



So it's definitely possible to write Deep POV in limited third person. But don't assume that you are automatically in Deep POV simply by virtue of writing in first person. I've read many first person narratives that remained aloof from the narrator. I see this mainly in student work, and when it happens, I think it's because the writer gets so caught up in setting down the events of the plot or what other characters are saying and doing that she forgets to let her narrator react to all of it.



Another way of putting that is to say that the POV glasses that the writer sets on her first-person narrator's face have clear lenses, as if the hero were a scientist recording "just the facts, ma'am." And who of us sees and responds to life in such a completely neutral fashion? It's the way a first-person narrator shares plot events and her observations of other characters that reveals to use what kind of person the narrator really is. There is color to the narrator's lenses.

[© Infrared photos by Nancy Butts]

A fine example of this is the Newbery-winning novel Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson. Told in first person, we believe that the cutting remarks Louise makes about her twin Caroline are accurate. It isn't until the end of the book that we realize that Louise has been envious of her sister all along, and that her observations have been tainted because she has been looking at her sister through green-colored glasses.


That taint is what you want when writing in first person: that is, if you want to achieve Deep POV. Let every word your narrator says—even if that is about something as ordinary as the weather, the menu in the school cafeteria, or the shoes his sister is wearing—reveal more about your hero than perhaps he'd like to admit.



I've read articles and books that are almost prescriptions or recipes for how to do Deep POV, but I'm not sure that's the most helpful way to look at it. You don't have to go "all in." Such intense identification with a main character can get claustrophobic, especially if she is whiny, depressed,or unpleasant in some way. Not being able to get out of her head for even one moment can turn readers off. So you need to choose your project well. If you've got an anti-hero, or a character who might initially seem unlikeable for one reason or the other [perhaps the point of your book is show their transformation], Deep POV may not be the technique to choose, not exclusively.



Perhaps you could use it only for brief passages, borrowing techniques from Deep POV so we can hear your main viewpoint character's voice loud and proud. To me, and to many editors and readers, the voice of your protagonist is what makes a book stand out. What makes a thousand books about yet another dysfunctional family forgettable, and one book like Okay for Now so memorable that it haunts you for weeks after you finish it? Character voice. And one of the most powerful techniques for creating that is Deep POV. What better reason is there to learn as much as you can about it?


[© 2014 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.]

Next in the series—Power Can Go To Your Head: The Perils of Omniscient POV

Fight Club: Multiple POV Fights Back [Part I]

Note: This is the third in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts here on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

Photo by Arash Hashemi, in the public domain

The POV Puritan is back—and I think I may have experienced a conversion. In part 2 of my series on demystifying viewpoint, I stood up loud and proud and gave my testimony as to why I thought single viewpoint was best, both for readers and writers. Nevertheless, at the end of that piece I promised to give multiple POV a fighting chance to defend itself.

But the more I tried, the more I struggled to find anything good to say about multiple viewpoint—that's how much I dislike it as a reader. Months dragged by. Every once in a while I would sit down and try to write this post, and every time I'd draw a blank. Finally I had a brainstorm: I realized that I needed to let proponents of multiple viewpoint speak for themselves. I would find four well-reviewed middle grade novels that used several viewpoint characters, then let them speak on behalf of multiple POV everywhere.

And despite my Puritan prejudices and preconceptions, I found myself enjoying the books. I'm not a complete convert, but after reading these books, I think I've come to appreciate that in the hands of a capable writer, multiple viewpoint can work well.

QUICK BREAKDOWN OF THE FOUR BOOKS

Wonder [Knopf, 2012], by RJ Palacio

What's a wonder about this book is that it didn't get a Newbery nod. Can you tell I loved it? This contemporary drama is about a ten-year-old boy named Auggie who was born with severe craniofacial dystopia that even after dozens of corrective surgeries makes him look like ET. Homeschooled all his life, the book follows fifth grader Auggie's first year at a private school in Manhattan. Although there are  many painful moments for Auggie, the theme of this book is that kindness can triumph over anything.

The book has six main viewpoint characters—and that's not counting three other viewpoints that are briefly presented, in epistolary fashion, as emails in one chapter. For me, the reason why the multiple viewpoint works in this book is due to Palacio's brilliant evocation of the kid-like voice of Auggie, his on-again off-again best friend Jack Will, and his classmate Summer. Palacio captured the hearts and minds of these three characters beautifully.

I can also see why the author chose to include the viewpoint of Auggie's sister, Via. That is important to show that things in Auggie's life aren't always the way he sees them; and also to show that as much as Via loves him, her brother's disfigurement has burdened her life as well.

However, I think Palacio could have dispensed with the viewpoint chapters written from the perspectives of Via's boyfriend and Via's best friend. And I also think it would have been possible to show the sister's side of things without getting into her head. It could easily have been done through dialogue instead.

*******

Because of Mr. Terupt [Delacorte, 2010], by Rob Buyea

I thought it a bit odd that this book features adult novelist John Irving so prominently. There are blurbs from him on both the front and back cover, Buyea singles him out in the acknowledgments, and Irving even wrote a foreword to the book. You almost never see a foreword in a middle grade novel. It made me wonder who the publisher saw as this book's primary audience: kids or adults?

In any case, I did enjoy this book, though not as much as Wonder. It's another book about a year in fifth grade, this time at a small school in New Hampshire with a new teacher.

It is told in the constantly alternating voices of seven fifth grade students, which didn't always work for me. I found that often I had to flip back to the title page of each chapter to remember which student was talking. Also, no one character had very long to speak, as each chapter was only two to three pages long.

But I can see how this multiple viewpoint might work well in a book that was being studied in a classroom setting. No matter what role a child may have assumed in school, or what label they may have acquired—joker, troublemaker, bully, mean girl, bookworm, nerd, fatso, or the Invisible Kid—they can find a viewpoint character in this book who speaks for them. That is what is so lovely about this book. I think it might be great for a group of students to read it together, almost as if it were a play and each reader took a part.

*******

Every Soul a Star [[Little Brown, 2008], by Wendy Mass

Of the four books I read, this one about three kids coming together at a remote campground to watch a solar eclipse was most successful for me in its use of multiple POV. I think that was for two reasons. First, there were only three POV characters. Second, the author spent a significant amount of time in each character's viewpoint before switching away to another. To me, this is crucial. The longer you spend with each POV character, the more a reader can settle into his or her head. If you are constantly jerking readers from one character to another every couple of pages, it's bound to be both distancing and disorienting.

[And I should note that when I was twelve, I went through a serious astronomy phase myself, so I may have connected with the story more because of that.]

*******

A Tangle of Knots [Philomel, 2013], by Lisa Graff

This whimsical, light-hearted book about how we are all tied together by fate is like a rainbow-colored version of Neil Gaiman, which I mean as a compliment. It was the only fantasy of the four, and since that is my favorite genre, I expected to like it the most. And it did have a lot of charm. Nevertheless, I think it was the least successful in its use of multiple viewpoint, primarily because it had nine—count 'em—NINE viewpoint characters. Aiyee!

That doesn't even count the prologue, which is written in omniscient narration that dips periodically into the head of an 18-year-old man who shows up later in the book as a viewpoint character. There is also some second person narration early on, and then there are nine other viewpoint characters: the heroine, Cady; three other children; and five adults. 

This parade of characters made it difficult for me to say that Cady is the true protagonist of the book. Rather, I would describe her as the hub around which all the other characters revolve. But with so many characters to read about, I never felt that strong a connection to her. Although perhaps that was Graff's point. She may have deliberately written a book in which no one character predominates in order to make her point that each of them got where they were through the tangled actions of many others.

.... [continued in part IIhttp://chiralangel.blogspot.com/2014/04/fight-club-multiple-pov-fights-back_28.html]

[Note: This article is running so long that I am publishing the second half in a separate post. The entire article is archived as a single downloadable PDF at my website.]

Finally researching that piece on multiple viewpoint

I've just ordered five middle grade novels via inter-library loan that use the dreaded multiple POV: Wonder by RJ Palacio, Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass, Because of Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea, A Tangle of Knots by Lisa Graff, and A Week in the Woods by Andrew Clements.

© Photo by Nancy Butts

I make no bones about being a single-POV Puritan; in fact, I wrote an article about that which I published both here and on my website last summer. At that time I promised that I'd give multiple POV a chance to defend itself, but I'm only now getting around to it. Sorry! After trying rather unsuccessfully to set aside my POV prejudice and write a fair, objective piece on why and when and how to use multiple viewpoint, I got a brainstorm. Why don't I let some the best examples of it that I can find in middle grade literature speak for themselves?

So that's what I'm doing. It may take a while for all five books to arrive, so I can't give you a definite date for when the article will be published. But in the meantime, if you have any favorite examples of multiple POV, please share them with me in the comments!

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth

I'm recovering from knee surgery six days ago–my third operation in 25 months. I often joke that I should just find those scientists who gave Wolverine his adamantine skeleton and get one myself! And check out what I call my Transformer crutches: much easier to use than the axillary crutches they give you in physical therapy, even if they do make people stop and stare at me when I hobble down the street.

I'm up and limping around, feeling fairly good, all things considered. But surgery takes something out of you, mentally as well as physically, so I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on my writing, teaching, or editing at the moment. As a three-time veteran, I was prepared for that this time. So I'm logging lots of hours on my Kindle, catching up on seventy—yes, seventy—books in my " find time to read someday" pile. It's heaven, but I have to work hard not to feel guilty about "goofing" off this way.

A few days before my surgery I came across this link in the Guardian to a speech that fantasy writer Neil Gaiman gave in London earlier this month. I want to write something profound in response, but I'm reduced to saying, "Oh wow oh wow oh wow." Gaiman plucked every word I might ever think to set down about this glorious craft of fiction writing and said it so much better than I ever could. So please, please–if you love books, either as a reader or a writer, do yourself a favor and read his speech. I'd quote my favorite parts, but by the time I was done, I'd have reproduced the entire thing.

What exploded in my heart most of all was when Gaiman said that fiction writers—especially those of us who write for children—have an obligation to daydream, to entertain, and most of all, to tell the truth. Gaiman didn't mean that writers should teach or moralize: far from it. He specifically lists as one of our obligations that we should avoid preaching at all costs.

So what did he mean? I'll let him explain.

,,,truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are.

To me, that is another way of saying that truth in fiction isn't a simple regurgitation of facts. There is an alchemy that happens when you enter a book, a combustible reaction between word and reader that can forever change the way you see life, the world—even yourself. That I think is what Gaiman meant when he said

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Now if that doesn't get you to read his speech, I don't know what will!

Couldn't have said it better myself: kick the adults out of your stories for kids

Can I hear an amen? This quote from my friend Mary Scarbrough's article over at Quick and Dirty Tips says it so well: get those Buttinskys out of the books and stories you write for kids. 

"Real kids get told what to do, how to do it, and what not to do all the time. Parents, teachers, older siblings, coaches, music instructors – kids have to listen to adults blathering all the livelong day. Think of a child you know and start enumerating how many adults/authority figures that child interacts with on a daily or weekly basis. Sure, a lot of this instruction from one’s elders is necessary in real life, but it doesn’t make for good literature, not for a young reader, and not if you are the adult reading to a youngster. Ugh. It gets old fast. Give kids a break!"

Resisting the urge to insert a wise older adult into stories for kids seems to be difficult for a lot of my writing students and freelance clients. I think this is because as adults ourselves, we are hard-wired with a strong instinct to protect the children under our care—even the fictional ones. But as writers we have to step back; we have to set the young heroes and heroines of our books free and allow them to take wrong turns down dark and even dangerous alleys. Because this is what makes stories interesting, whether that means scary, dramatic, funny, or sad.

I wish Mary had written this article a long time ago, so I could have been recommending it to my students for the past fifteen years! But I'm glad it's there now. Take a look at the entire article, and also at Mary's other columns about the crazy craft of writing for kids while you're there. She manages to dispense a lot of wisdom in a candy-coated wrapping of zany humor.

For kids, there is no contest between print and e-books

My fellow wizards and I—meaning those of who write for middle graders and teens—were recently talking on a listserv about e-books, and just what role they are playing now in the lives of our once-and-future readers. This study by Scholastic is illuminating. E-books do seem to be a factor in kids' belief that reading is fun, especially among boys, though kids still prefer print for certain reasons.

Often when this subject is broached among adults, whether they are parents, teachers, media specialists, or children's writers, the discussion is framed in binary terms—as if it were some kind of contest between print and e-books to see which one is "better." But if this Scholastic study is accurate, young readers don't see it that way at all. For them, it's not either/or—it's both. Sometimes they like to read print books, sometimes they like to read e-books.

Here are two interesting statistics pulled from the report about this.

“Fifty-eight percent of kids age 9–17 say they will always want to read books printed on paper even though there are ebooks available.

“Half of children age 9–17 say they would read more books for fun if they had greater access to ebooks.”

One part of this study asked kids about how often they read, and about their attitudes towards reading. This was the part that both reassured and alarmed me.

• Among girls, there has been a decline since 2010 in frequent readers (42% vs. 36%), reading enjoyment (71% vs. 66%), and the importance of reading books for fun (62% vs. 56%).
• Compared to 2010, boys are more likely to think reading books for fun is important (39% in 2010 vs. 47% in 2012), but they still lag girls on this measure (47% for boys in 2012 vs. 56% for girls in 2012).
• Frequency of reading books for fun is significantly lower for kids age 12–17 than for children age 6–11; frequency of reading books for school is also lower for kids age 12–17 than for kids age 6–11.

We are finally reaching boys, but losing girls. I wonder why that is?

I know that teachers need to be concerned about print vs. e-books in terms of how the two different reading modalities affect comprehension and retention; the Scholastic study doesn't address that.

But as a writer, what I get from the study is this—it shouldn't matter to those of who create books for kids how they end up reading them, on paper or on-screen. Our focus needs to be on creating stories so mesmerizing that kids would rather read them than do anything else.