Deep POV – More feels, less filters

This week I had an epiphany. I got something from my new editor that I wasn’t expecting. I think we all hope our readers are going to read our work and be awed by how amazing it is. We want to hear from our editor that there is nothing wrong and it’s ready for the world. That rarely happens, if ever. But if we are being honest that is not why we hired the editor. We want to hear the hard truth.
It’s appalling how hard it is to educate yourself in the craft of writing beyond the basics. Did you know in Europe you can get a PhD in Writing? Not in the United States. I may be oversimplifying this, but teachers will show you a few tricks of the craft and give a some examples and set you on your way. They tell you to write a million words and it will all become clear.
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I’m being a little facetious, but it’s not far from the truth.
I remember getting the first critique back from my first MFA mentor. He told me I needed to go deeper. “Read Coma,” he said. He actually meant was: “Read the opening chapter. See what it means to have a deeper point of view.”
But that wasn’t what I heard (because that wasn’t what he said.) I read the entire novel in a couple of days. I didn’t understand what he really meant, and I learned nothing from that exercise. I understood at a very rudimentary level that he wanted me to get in closer to the main character’s perspective.
My next mentor, who was amazing, cut filter words from my text. Words like, thought, felt, saw, heard. I understood that. I learned to use body cues to show emotion. I learned a lot of other things as well that had nothing to do with point of view.
I wrote a lot of words. My writing incrementally improved. But my understanding of Deep POV did not.
Then a friend of mine who went through the same MFA program, but had better mentors (we did share one,) decided to try out the editor gig. He has a pedigree. He taught writing at the collegiate level for several years and had gleaned a lot more about the process than I had. Writing was still a hobby for me. It was a job for him.
If you want to get good at something there is no better way than teaching. It worked the same for me teaching systems for the KC-135.
I put my manuscript in his hands to read, simply as background for the second book in the series, but he put on his editing hat as he was reading and next thing you know I got a 122 page document on the problems with my story.
My next blog is going to be about taking critique…
Jacob Baugher knows the keys to Deep POV. He talked about genre and plot, and yes, those need addressing, but the big lightbulb moment for me was when he started talking about Deep POV. I ordered a few more instructional books based on his recommendations.
It just so happened that same day I got an email from writersinthestormblog.com, talking about, you guessed it, Deep POV.
Serendipity.
The writer of that piece is Lisa Hall-Wilson and she talks almost exclusively about Deep POV on her blog. She talked about how hard it was to find ways to educate yourself beyond the basics and spent years learning Deep POV. She has written a book about it, which I now have, and teaches a master class on how to do it.
For at least a decade, Deep POV was one of the techniques I’d aspired to learn. Although I didn’t know that’s what people were calling it.
My favorite books are those that make you forget you are reading. It feels like you are experiencing the story along with the main character. Matthew Woodring Stover is one of the novelists I can point to that has Deep POV down. He has written eleven novels and several screenplays, including my favorite Star Wars book, Shatterpoint. But even though I could point to stories that I love, I still wasn’t recognizing what they were doing that I wasn’t.
Not until Jacob talked about it in the pages he sent me. The light bulb went on.
I have started on Lisa Hall-Wilson’s book, Method Acting for Writers: Learn Deep Point of View Using Emotional Layers.
She claims that the skill isn’t hard to learn, but it is not an intuitive way of thinking. My hope is that by the end of my rewrite it will become more intuitive.
So, what is Deep POV exactly?
It’s an immersive technique that eliminates any distance between the reader and the character. It’s writing in a way that puts you in the head of the point of view character (POVC) and keeps you there.
Which means cutting out telling about what is going on or explaining how the character feels about something.
You need to show it in a visceral way.
This is “Show, don’t tell” on steroids.You have to dig into the underlying emotional state of the POVC and get to the root of WHY they feel that way. It will require you as the writer to deeply understand your POVC.
You will need to remove the author’s voice as much as possible, meaning no narrator other than the POVC. Everything must come from the character’s perceptions and worldview. The fundamental key is understanding what is motivating the character at a deep-seated level, rooted in the events that have formed the character’s world view, for better or worse. The reactions in a given scene may be the result of a multiplicity of emotions and understanding that is key to being able to write Deep POV well.
Now, not every story needs to be in Deep POV. And not even an entire book necessarily, but I do think it will take your writing to the next level if you can master it. I hope to.
Special thanks to Jacob Baugher for setting me on this path. I hope together we can achieve something elevated. I cannot say enough great things about his approach. I highly recommend him if you are looking for an editor.
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