Choosing the Right POV Characters

Last weekend I spent eight frustrating hours attempting to pummel a scene into shape.

Throwing out paragraphs, revising others, sharpening the character’s internal dialogue—nothing worked. Finally, the proverbial light bulb sputtered to life above my head: If I provided point-of-view (POV) for this particular character, I risked veering my mainstream novel into the fantasy genre, which wasn’t my intention.

Until now, all of my novelshave fallen somewhere between the women’s fiction category, wh...