Inside Your Character's Skin

Telling a story from inside your character’s skin is one of the things that a novel can do better than a movie can. Movies do many things beautifully, and showing scenery is only one of them. You get to see everything in a movie from the point of view of the director (the camera itself). But in a book, you can go even farther inside the pov, so that we not only see, but also feel and think everything that the pov does. I think this is a wonderful thing and something many authors do not use often enough or deeply enough.

If you are writing a scene and tell about the setting, for instance, you can do it in as a bland camera angle, telling about the color of the furniture, perhaps what brand it is, how old it is, if it has been cleaned recently, perhaps even if it smells. But when you are telling all of this in the point of view of your main character, you get to do so much more than just give details about your setting. You get to tell all about your character, even if you think you aren’t. What details does your character notice? You know what? Those are the only details that matter. If your character doesn’t know what to call something, the likelihood is that your character isn’t going to notice that thing at all. So leave out general, vague descriptions. Focus on the specifics that your character knows and cares about.

If a character I am writing about is obsessed with numbers, the first thing he is going to notice when entering a room is the things that he can count. Floor tiles, numbers of mounted photos or images, books on the shelf, bits of debris on the floor, number of hooks (including which ones are broken), number of light bulbs (including the ones that are burned out), if the pictures are straight or not, how many holes or dents are in the walls, and so on.