by Rayne Hall
Mary has just been told that her job contract won’t be renewed. On returning home, she finds a pile of junk mail, a publisher’s rejection for her novel and a vitriolic missive from her bitchy sister. When she tries to turn up the heat for warmth, the heater breaks down again. She picks up the phone to ask her boyfriend if she can come to his place, and finds that he has dumped her with a text message. That evening, when she walks down the road to the nearest pub, she’ll notice depressing things: the garbage clogging the gutters, the mangy stray cat scavenging for food, a cracked window pane and rude graffiti on the walls. When she walked down the same road the night before, she hadn’t noticed any of these things.
Mary is homeless and freezing on a chilly winter evening. She’s intensely aware of the warm air coming from the ventilation shaft in the pavement. When she walks down the road, the shop windows catching her attention are those displaying cosy fur-lined boots and woollen coats. She sees the steamed-up windows of a coffee shop, and the coals glowing in the hot chestnut vendor’s stove.
Mary is on the second day of a rigorous low-calorie diet. She’s intensely aware of food smells—especially the scent coming from the fish and chips frying stall, the roasting chestnuts, and the freshly baked gingerbread. She sees pedestrians munching snack bars and carrying bags filled with groceries. As she walks past the shops, her eyes are drawn to displays of chocolates and nuts and the menu boards of the coffee shop, she sees every succulent detail of the gateaux in the baker’s window.
HOW DOES THE CHARACTER PERCEIVE THE DETAILS?
Even if two characters observe the same details, they will perceive them differently, depending on their mood. Don’t tell the reader what mood the character feels. Instead, choose words which create that mood in the reader’s mind.
Let’s say your character walks along the beach where waves move across the pebbles. Here are seven different ways to convey the same image:
Waves raked the pebbles.
Waves played with the pebbles.
Waves scraped the pebbles.
Waves licked at the pebbles.
Waves teased the pebbles.
Waves drenched the pebbles.
Waves caressed the pebbles.
Which of these creates the mood your character feels like now? That’s the one to choose.
When selecting words to convey the character’s mood, focus on verbs, because verbs evoke the strongest impressions without patronising the reader.
I advise writers to show the weather in every scene. Try to show it the way the PoV character perceives it.
Let’s say Mary walks in a forest clearing on a sunny day. Here are two versions. In one, she feels happy, in the other, dejected. Neither version tells the reader about Mary’s mood. Instead, they let the reader experience it.
The late afternoon sun brushed the clearing with golden light. In the treetops, birds twittered their sweet melodies.
The late afternoon sun dragged dark shadows along the path. Even the birds in the treetops twittered their mockery.
After a rain shower, Mary’s walk in the forest clearing might yield one of these descriptions, depending on her mood.
On the underside of the branches, raindrops sparkled like glass beads on a necklace.
The branches dragged under their sodden weight.
If Mary is indoors during a rain shower, she may perceive the drops hitting her window in one of these ways:
Raindrops tinkled against the glass with their silvery sounds, and stayed to freckle the view.
Rain hammered against the window panes and streaked the grey view. The water dots on the glass combined into slow downward streams.
Describing the weather filtered through the PoV’s mood is good—but selecting the weather to reflect the mood can lead to clichéd writing.
If your PoV feels inner turmoil, don’t automatically show roiling clouds. If the PoV is sad, this doesn’t mean it has to rain, and a PoV in love doesn’t call for instant sunshine. Your writing will be fresher if you contrast the weather with the PoV’s mood. Describe what thunderclouds look like to a girl who is happily in love, or how golden sunshine annoys the grumpy guy.
The assumption that the weather changes to adapt to a character’s mood is called ‘Pathetic Fallacy’. It’s typical for fiction penned by novice writers.
ASSIGNMENT
Revise a scene you’ve written, adding details which reflects the PoV character’s current preoccupation, and filtering descriptions through the character’s mood.
Chapter 8
ESTABLISHING THE POV
As soon as possible, perhaps in the first paragraph, reveal the following:
Through whose PoV are we experiencing the story?
What kind of person is the PoV character?
Where and in what situation is the PoV character?
This allows the reader to enter the character’s mind from the start, and experience the story as that character.
WHICH CHARACTER IS THE POV?
Let the reader know inside which character’s mind she is going to journey through the story.
The quickest and most effective method is to describe a physical sensation, such as:
Mary rubbed her aching shoulders.
Needles of hail stung Mary’s cheeks.
Droplets of sweat trickled down Mary’s armpits.
Nobody else but Mary would experience those details, so it’s clear that she’s the one.
This is especially important when your story opens with a scene in which two or more characters interact. Your reader needs to know from the start with whom to identify.
WHAT KIND OF PERSON IS THE POV CHARACTER?
To get mentally into the character’s role, your reader needs some basic information. Is the character male or female, old or young? The more information you can reveal early on, the better.
But the critical word here is ‘reveal’. Don’t tell the reader about the person! Instead, weave subtle clues into the narrative.
How not to introduce the character in Deep PoV:
Mary was an elderly woman who suffered from arthritis.
Instead, let the reader experience what it’s like to be an elderly woman with arthritis. You could start your story like this:
Mary rubbed her aching knees and grabbed her cane.
The gender is easy to establish if you’ve chosen Third Person for your story. Just using the character’s name often achieves this, if the name is a typical women’s or men’s name. The pronouns he-his-him or she-her-her settle any doubt.
With First Person, this is tricky, because the pronoun ‘I’ doesn’t reveal the gender, and the name isn’t normally used.
Mention a garment, object or activity that your readers will mentally associate with that gender. Do this in a casual way, so it feels natural. For example, if you write a story from Mary’s PoV in First Person, you could weave any of these phrases into the first paragraph:
I smoothed my skirt and...
As fast as my high heels allowed, I raced towards...
I applied another layer of lipstick and...
I brushed my unruly locks and tied them into a high ponytail.
Although theoretically, this could be a man with long hair or a cross-dresser, readers will assume that this is a woman.
IN WHAT PLACE AND SITUATION IS THE POV CHARACTER?
To identify with the PoV, the reader needs a clue about where the character is when the story begins.
The best way to do this is to show how the character experiences the place and situation.
Let’s say your story begins with a downpour. Without PoV, you might write it like this:
Rain sloshed down and blackened the asphalt. Car wheels ploughed furrows in the drenched road, spraying the pedestrians. People hurried along with their bodies bent
forwards, clutching umbrellas and pulling hoods tight, their faces determined and grim.
This paints a good picture of what the downpour is like—but the reader doesn’t experience it. She doesn’t know if she’s watching from the cosy shelter of her living room window, if she’s driving a car, or if she’s out there, walking in the drenching rain.
Compare this version:
With her hood pulled tight against the sloshing rain, Mary hurried down towards the farmhouse. Her sodden jeans clung to her thighs, and her boots squelched with water on every step. Careless motorists ploughed their cars through the deepening puddles. Mary dodged the sloshing sprays as best she could.
Now the reader knows that Mary is out there on foot, that she’s walking along the road to the farmhouse, and that she’s wet.
HOW MUCH INFORMATION DO YOU NEED TO GIVE?
Establishing the place and situation is important not just at the beginning of the novel, but at the start of every scene.
Give some clues about where the character is and why. You don’t need to cram many hints into the first paragraph—that would probably not flow well—but mention a few things. A couple of sentences, or perhaps a dozen words sprinkled across the first paragraphs, are enough.
In outdoors scenes, consider the weather and how the PoV experiences it. A few words about how the icy wind stings Mary’s cheeks, or how the warm breeze ruffles her skirt is enough to show that she’s out of doors, and at the same time it hints at the climate or the season.
For indoors scenes, a brief interaction with furniture serves well. Perhaps Mary sinks into or rises from her favourite armchair.
You can also help the reader by establishing the time of the day. If the PoV is out of doors, mention that the sun stands high in the sky, that the shadows are lengthening, that afternoon sun gilds the houses with warm light, that the horizon flares orange in the sinking sun, or that clouds waft across the gibbous moon. Indoors, sun may pour through a crack in the curtains, or people may draw the curtains against the evening chill and flick on the ceiling lamp.
It won’t take much to make the reader feel anchored in the time and place—but you need to give the reader something.
ASSIGNMENT
Write or rewrite the first two hundred words of a short story or novel. Take care to establish the PoV, and let the reader immediately experience the story from that character’s perspective. Give strong early hints about the PoV’s person (such as age and gender) and the place. If appropriate, weave in clues about the time of the day and the weather, as well as the PoV’s situation and purpose.
Chapter 9
CHARACTER THOUGHTS
When writing Deep PoV, don’t tell the reader that the character is thinking something. Simply state the thought. It will feel natural.
CHARACTER THOUGHTS IN SHALLOW AND DEEP POV
Example 1:
Shallow PoV:
She wondered what she should do now.
Or
‘What should I do now?’ she wondered.
Deep PoV:
What now?
Example 2:
Shallow PoV:
He realised he had to cross the river before the dog caught his scent.
or
‘I have to cross the river before the dog catches my scent,’ he realised.
Deep PoV:
He had to cross the river before the dog caught his scent.
Example 3:
Shallow PoV:
She knew he was a lying bastard, but she kept her smile plastered to her face.
Or
‘Lying bastard!’ she thought, but kept her smile plastered to her face.
Deep PoV
Lying bastard! She kept her smile plastered to her face.
As you can see, the Deep PoV versions are much tighter. They’re also more exciting and intense.
Whereas character thoughts in shallow PoV are pace-slowing at best, and tedious to read at worst, in Deep PoV they grab the reader with their impact and urgency.
BARRIER WORDS
Watch out for the following verbs in your fiction. If they tell that the PoV character is thinking those thoughts, you can simply delete them. You may need to tweak the syntax a little, but you won’t lose anything and gain a lot.
Think
Ponder
Wonder
Realise (American English: realize)
Know
Understand
Reflect
Consider
Muse
Deliberate
Contemplate
Ask himself/herself/myself
Each time you use one of those words, you push a barrier between the reader and the experience. Remove them.
ASSIGNMENT
In a draft you’ve written, flag up all the barrier words. You may want to use your word processor’s Find & Replace function to highlight them with colour. For example, you could search for ‘think’, ‘thought’, ‘realise’, ‘wonder’ etc., and replace them with the same letters on a pink background.
This way, you see at a glance how many of those words you have, and address them one by one.
How to do this depends on what kind of word-processing software you’re using. It will probably be similar to this method:
Click ‘Edit’
Click ‘Find & Replace’
Search For [[type the word]]
Replace With [Type the same word]]
Click ‘Other Options’
Click ‘Format’
Click ‘Background Colour’
Pick a colour
Click ‘OK’
Click ‘Replace All’
This way you can highlight certain words throughout your manuscript. It’s worth finding out how to do it in your software, because you can use this function for many editing processes, such as checking if your characters ‘sigh’ too much or if you’ve overused the word ‘nod’ again.
Rewrite those sentences, so the PoV character’s thoughts are simply stated, without a tag telling the reader that this is a thought.
Chapter 10
TRIGGER AND RESPONSE
To make it easy for your reader to experience events as they unfold, show them in the order in which they play out.
I’m not talking about the novel’s overall structure here, but about paragraphs and sentences.
Here’s an example:
A giant spider dropped at Mary’s feet. She leaped back in horror.
The spider dropping at her feet is the trigger event. The leap back is the response. To the reader, this makes sense, because one flows naturally from the other. This allows the reader to experience the story as it unfolds.
Novice writers—and some veteran authors—sometimes get this wrong.
They show the response first, then reveal what the trigger was:
Mary leaped back in horror. A giant spider had dropped at her feet.
This creates a moment of confusion in the reader’s mind: ‘Huh? Why is she leaping back?’ While the reader wonders why Mary does this, he’s no longer inside Mary’s mind. This ruins the realism and intensity of the experience.
EXERCISE
Since it’s easier to spot weaknesses in other people’s writing than in our own, I’ve written some sentences with the response before the trigger.
Rewrite them so the reader experiences the trigger before the character’s response.
John cried in pain after a blow hit his side.
Mary fell after stumbling across a root.
John ran as fast as he could because the thugs were closing in on him.
Mary’s heart pounded with excitement when John leaned close to her.
ASSIGNMENT
Read a draft scene you’ve written. Identify any sentence
s where the PoV character responds before the reader has experienced the trigger. Rewrite those sections.
You may not find many, and perhaps none at all—or you may discover an embarrassing quantity of these blunders. The ideal type of scene for this assignment is one with fast action, perhaps a fight or chase scene.
Chapter 11
CHARACTER EMOTIONS
In Deep PoV, don’t tell the reader what the character feels. Instead, let the reader experience the character’s emotions.
The following sentences are shallow PoV. The reader knows what the character feels, but doesn’t experience the feeling.
Mary felt angry.
John was worried.
Mary was scared.
John felt triumphant.
How can you replace these bland tellings with an emotional experience? Show the reader what the character feels in a visceral way.
Every emotion has physical effects. Where in the body does the character experience this? How does it feel? Simply describe the physical sensation.
Here are examples. Some of them name the emotion, others don’t.
If you like, you can adapt them for your own story, but bear in mind that every character and every situation is different, so you probably won’t find exactly the right phrase here. I suggest that instead of copying them, you use them as a starting point to inspire your own creative phrases.
AMAZEMENT
Mary’s skin tingled, and blood rushed through her limbs.
For a moment, Mary’s heart stood still, then it pounded in an excited dance.
ANGER
Mary’s body tensed, and her heart pounded.
Mary’s neck stiffened.
Fury churned in Mary’s guts.
Mary’s stomach soured.
Anger fermented inside Mary’s stomach.
Hot anger rose in Mary’s throat, acid like half-digested food.
Mary’s fists clenched.
Mary’s stomach bubbled with hot anger.
ANXIETY
Mary’s insides quivered.