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    Deep Point of View
    Deep Point of View
    Deep Point of View
    Ebook162 pages2 hours

    Deep Point of View

    By Marcy Kennedy

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    About this ebook

    Do you want readers to be so caught up in your book that they forget they’re reading?

    Then you need deep POV.

    Deep POV takes the reader and places them inside of our characters—hearing their thoughts, feeling their emotions, and living the story through them. Compared to other writing styles, it builds a stronger emotional connection between the reader and our characters, creates the feeling of a faster pace, and helps avoid point-of-view errors and telling rather than showing.

    In Deep Point of View, writing instructor and fiction editor Marcy Kennedy brings her years of experience into showing you how to write deep POV. You’ll learn specific, practical things you can do immediately to take your fiction to the next level.

    Each book in the Busy Writer’s Guide series is intended to give you enough theory so that you can understand why things work and why they don’t, but also enough examples to see how that theory looks in practice. In addition, they provide tips and exercises to help you take it to the pages of your own story, with an editor’s-eye view. Most importantly, they cut the fluff so that you have more time to write and to live your life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarcy Kennedy
    Release dateFeb 10, 2016
    ISBN9781988069050
    Deep Point of View
    Author

    Marcy Kennedy

    Marcy Kennedy is a speculative fiction writer who believes fantasy is more real than you think. Alongside her own writing, Marcy works as a freelance fiction editor and teaches classes on the writing craft. You can find her blogging about writing and about the place where real life meets science fiction, fantasy, and myth at www.marcykennedy.com.

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      Book preview

      Deep Point of View - Marcy Kennedy

      DEEP POINT OF VIEW

      A Busy Writer's Guide

      Marcy Kennedy

      Copyright 2015 Marcy Kennedy

      Smashwords Edition

      Deep Point of View: A Busy Writer’s Guide

      First Edition

      All rights reserved.

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This e-book may not be re-sold, as a used file or otherwise, and may not be given away to other people. Purchase and download is a one-time final use of this product. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Editor: Christopher Saylor

      Cover Design: Melinda VanLone

      Published February 2016 by Tongue Untied Communications

      ISBN: 978-1-988069-05-0

      WANT A FREE BOOK?

      Free Book Strong Female Characters

      Sign up for the author's mailing list and get a free copy of Strong Female Characters: A Busy Writer's Guide.

      Click here to get started or visit www.marcykennedy.com/freebookforwriters

      INTRODUCTION

      Why A Busy Writer’s Guide?

      A few years ago, I started creating Busy Writer’s Guides for a very simple reason—I wanted to give hope and practical help to writers who were struggling to reach their goals and dreams because of the demands life placed on them.

      This became my passion because I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by responsibilities that can’t be ignored or delegated and to prioritize the needs of those I love over my own desires. I know what it feels like to make it through a day with no energy or creativity left to write.

      And I knew I couldn’t be the only one. The more writers I talked to, the more I found so many others who felt stretched too thin. They were trying to fit writing in around full-time jobs or around caring for children or aging parents or grandparents. They were battling physical and mental health problems. They had life commitments that were as important to them as writing.

      They were people who wanted to achieve their dreams, but who didn’t want to do it at the cost of their health, their relationships, or their moral compasses.

      While I can’t solve all the problems in the world, or in anyone’s life, I wanted to help make writing a great book more achievable for those people—people like me.

      And that’s where the Busy Writer’s Guides were born.

      They’re short, yet in-depth and practical. The intent is to give you the full coverage of a topic that you need to write well, but to do it in a way that still respects your time.

      How does that work?

      These guides leave out the filler and fancy prose padding meant to impress you. My goal isn’t to make you think I’m fantastic. My goal is to help you become fantastic. I cut the fluff while keeping the substance so that you can have more time to write and more time to live your life.

      Each book in the Busy Writer’s Guides series gives you enough theory so that you can understand why things work and why they don’t, but also enough examples to see how that theory looks in practice. Approaching it from two sides like this streamlines the learning process and speeds up your learning curve.

      In addition, these guides provide tips and exercises to help you take what you’ve learned to the pages of your own story with an editor’s-eye view. There’s a leap we all need to make from intellectually understanding a topic to proficiently applying that topic to our work. The Take It to the Page sections give you a way to start, trying again to make this transition easier and quicker for you. If you’re not ready to apply it to your work yet, you can skip these sections and come back to them later.

      The final way that I try to respect your time is by separating some topics out into appendices. A lot of writing craft concepts overlap. I try my best to keep the material in the body of each of my books fresh. In other words, I minimize the content overlap between books as much as I can without sacrificing clarity. (In some cases, I still do have to re-explain elements or I wouldn’t be doing justice to the concept at hand.)

      When I think there are elements of other topics that aren’t absolutely essential to understanding the current topic, but which would help you understand the topic of the current book better, I add them as appendices. That way, if you’ve read my other books and don’t need a refresher, you can save time by skipping the appendices. If this is the first one of my books you’ve read, or if you want to refresh your memory on a topic, you can read the appendices.

      And that’s quite a long enough intro, I think. Time to get to the meat. If you want to find out more about me, you can visit my website at www.marcykennedy.com or check out the About the Author section at the end of this book.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Defining Deep POV

      Deep POV is actually a shortened way of saying deep penetration point of view. It refers to the most intimate, closest writing style, where the reader experiences the story as if they were inside of the character—feeling what the character feels, experiencing what they experience, and hearing what they think—without any distance between them. It’s emotionally intense and the author must stay completely invisible.

      Deep POV was originally called close or intimate limited third-person point of view, and it first appeared and started gaining popularity between 1975 and 1995.

      The reason for this steep rise in popularity is the connection deep POV creates between the reader and the viewpoint character. It makes the story interactive in a way that more distant approaches to point of view can’t. It allows the reader to live vicariously through our viewpoint characters.

      From a purely writing craft standpoint, when we master deep POV, we’ll also have a stronger grasp on showing vs. telling and internal dialogue, and we’ll be better able to avoid problems like backstory or info dump and point-of-view errors.

      In this book, I’m going to help you understand deep POV better and learn how to apply it to your writing. To start, we need to look at how deep POV can improve our writing, come up with a working definition of what makes a passage deep POV, and dispel some of the biggest misconceptions about it.

      HOW DEEP POV IMPROVES OUR WRITING

      Since you picked up this book, you’re probably already convinced about the value of deep POV. Just in case anyone ever challenges you, though, I want to give you a few of the many ways deep POV improves our writing.

      Deep POV creates a stronger emotional connection. The reader experiences the story from the inside out because they’re inside the character. A shallower POV creates an experience from the outside in—we’re looking at the character externally. The difference is like that between feeling your own emotions and watching someone else’s.

      Deep POV eliminates unintentional telling. Show, don’t tell is one of those foundational writing guidelines that show up in every best writing tips list. Properly executing that advice becomes more challenging, but if you master deep POV, you’ll also improve your grasp of showing. This doesn’t mean you’ll never tell. It means you’ll better understand when to show and when to tell, and you won’t accidentally default to telling.

      Deep POV feels tighter and quicker in pace even though it often uses more words. Tight writing is less about the number of words used and more about making every word count. Deep POV cuts out a lot of the filler words and emotionally empty words and replaces them with strong words that hold the reader’s interest. When they’re interested, the book feels faster-paced.

      Deep POV helps the reader forget that they’re reading. Emotional depth, connection to the viewpoint character, smooth writing, and a fast pace all combine to form a reading experience that blocks out the world around us. We no longer consciously see the words on the page and instead vicariously live the story.

      Now that we know a few of the reasons and can better explain our choice should we be asked, it’s time to define deep POV.

      WHAT DEFINES A DEEP POV PASSAGE?

      It’s almost impossible to hit a target if we don’t know what we’re aiming for. We might accidentally get lucky, but that’s no way to write a book. Writing a book takes too much time to depend on hoping for lucky accidents.

      Because of that, we need a practical definition of what sets deep POV apart from other writing styles. Once we know what type of writing qualifies as deep POV, we can work on developing it in our writing.

      Deep POV is defined by the following aspects:

      Limited knowledge

      Inside-out perspective

      Interior life

      Interpretations

      Immediacy

      I’ll give you a quick overview of these elements now, and then we’ll spend the rest of the book exploring them.

      Limited Knowledge

      While we’re writing in deep POV, we’re constrained. Before that terminology turns you away from this technique, consider this—we’re constrained in the same way that we’re constrained by our body in life. It binds us to one physical place at a time. We experience life through the medium of

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