Are you struggling to create characters readers care about? Critique partners, editors or agents telling you to dig deeper emotionally? Do you want to write emotional arcs into your stories to keep readers engaged and turning the pages?
Deep point of view (POV) is dynamic, visceral, and immediate. The goal of this writing technique is for the writer to disappear and minimize the perceived distance between the reader and the point of view character (POVC). At the heart of deep POV is an immersive experience for the reader through an emotional connection to the character. Think of it like handing your reader a virtual reality headset. THAT’s how close to the action your readers want to be.
This intimate and emotive style of writing resonates with contemporary readers if you’ve got the guts to “go there” with your characters. This book will explore the ultimate write-what-youknow principle. These aren’t difficult skills to master, but this requires a shift in how you tell stories and sometimes those shifts don’t seem intuitive.
Why Deep Point Of View?
In the early 2000s, I began to notice my favorite writers using a technique that pulled me deeper into stories than ever before. There had always been books I couldn’t put down, but the frequency with which I encountered them increased exponentially. I was fascinated and did some digging. At that time, this technique was called close third person or some variation of that.
There wasn’t much information out there about this technique, but the more I read the more I picked up intuitively. Fast forward five or ten years and this technique has a name: deep point of view. There are free and paid resources out there, but many cover the same basic foundational steps of this writing style making it really hard to leap frog from intermediate to advanced. It’s really hard to take your writing to the next level when you don’t know what you need to learn next.
I’ve spent ten years going to conferences and taking workshops, reading blogs and books, talking to published authors, paying for critiques, and paying professional editors to look at my work in order to learn deep point of view. I could only ever get one small step ahead at a time. It was frustrating to be told I still didn’t have all the pieces over and over, and never knew which pieces I was missing.
This book is the result of an online class I’ve taught for a few years about writing in deep POV. I have a teacher’s heart, so I’m always breaking things down to make it easier to share and teach. My goal is to equip those taking my class and get them back to writing FAST! I’d rather spend my time writing than learning about writing—maybe you’re like me. I want the information hard and fast.
This book is a deep dive into deep POV. Over the years, my students have helped me hone and clarify the lessons and suggest where additional teaching was needed. I continue to coach many of them online.
This book aims to give you the reasoning behind many of the stylistic choices of deep POV so you’ll know when to use these techniques in each of your stories, when not to use them, and how to use them to achieve specific goals or effects. This is a technique I’m passionate about, so I’m always blogging about the new things I’m learning or breaking things down for readers in a way that’s easier to understand.
This book will cover the foundational building blocks necessary for this writing technique, but then I dive deep into the stylistic choices that can really take your writing to the next level so your stories grab readers by the throat and won’t let go.
Thanks to all my readers and students for helping me test these ideas and put them to work!