Deep POV Lesson 2.2 What Deep POV Isn't

[ScienceGirl]

First, some background on Jill Elizabeth Nelson, our source of all this vast knowledge. I should have probably put this in the first lesson. She's an award-winning, multi-published author with Harlequin's Love Inspired imprint. She's written over 20 books, and that's at least the ones I know that were published through Harlequin. Highly experienced, seasoned, and dedicated to helping people. She's known for her mission work in Thailand, and she calls herself "a wild and crazy writer who can hardly wait to jot down all the things my characters are telling me, so I can share them with my readers." 

She's often referencing her literary agent, Karen Ball, who I've not met directly but I've seen in person at a gala dinner. Actually, I'm pretty sure Jill was there, too, but I didn't know who she was then. Side note: Ted Dekker was the keynote speaker, and I had the pleasure of meeting him at the hotel reception desk--while having a serious allergic reaction so bad that my eye was swelling out of my eyelid, and dressed in my shabbiest, holiest (okay, "hole-y"est) capri sweats (that I still sleep in faithfully because I love them and I'll never give them up!) and one of my high school (employee) t-shirts that boasts "It's always a great day to be a pirate!" He was gracious and awesome and helped me get Benadryl.

Of Karen, she says, "She is the editor who yanked my skill level up by the bootstraps by imparting these techniques during the editorial process for my debut novel." In other words, if Karen hadn't forced Nelson into writing this style, she may not have enjoyed the success that she's experienced since. 

Karen is retired now, but she's notoriously known for her high quality standards and her dedication to landing only the most worthy writers to the right publishers. After spending a bit of time trying to find an agent myself (I eventually decided the speaking engagement/book table route works best for my busy teacher/professor/soccer mom lifestyle at the moment), I realized that these ladies fully understood the difference between "market trends" and "timeless trends" and that deep POV is a timeless trend that isn't going away anytime soon.

We've studied her definition of deep POV. Now, let's look at what it is not:

Deep POV is not a long string of internal monologue.

This is HIGHLY important. To fully achieve deep POV, you need all the components of good character and setting development. There should be a blend of action, dialogue, and contemplation. As Nelson puts it, these contemplations are "clear-cut comments form within the character's psyche." She says:

In Deep POV, no gulf stretches between what the character feels internally and what is going on around him. They feed off each other in smooth and dynamic rhythm.

Let's first examine our sample of omniscient POV from Breakfast at Tiffany's that we looked at in the last lesson. 

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

This sample is EXACTLY what Nelson says deep POV isn't. It's a long string of internal monologue from the narrator. 

Here's an excerpt from Lynette Eason's When the Smoke Clears (Revell Publishing). I chose this one because it has several different components (the flashback, some action, and dialogue) and it also has an example of filtering (from the last lesson). I'll show you how to fix that with the deep POV thought as well.

Flames licked higher, swallowing everything in their path. The curtains, the recliner... her father and sister.

Blinking the nightmare away, eighteen-year-old Alexia Allen clutched her diploma and looked over the audience. The families of five hundred students hovered around their proud teens in the downtown auditorium. Camera flashes nearly blinded her, and she decided she didn't care a bit that she didn't have even one family member in the audience.

She had her diploma. That was all that was important. That and the bus ticket she had in the back pocket of her only pair of jeans. She would've worn a dress if she'd been able to afford it, but the graduation cap and gown had already taken enough of her savings. A dress wasn't a necessity.

Jillian Carter sidled up to her. "Are you going to the graduation party?"

To analyze this excerpt, I've highlighted action in blue, deep POV thought in green, the filtering in red. 

Flames licked higher, swallowing everything in their path. The curtains, the recliner... her father and sister.

Blinking the nightmare away, eighteen-year-old Alexia Allen clutched her diploma and looked over the audience. The families of five hundred students hovered around their proud teens in the downtown auditorium. Camera flashes nearly blinded her, and she decided she didn't care a bit that she didn't have even one family member in the audience. Note that I'm rating this as action because of the verbs. Alexia clutched, the families hovered, the camera flashes blinded. And, there's our filtering. "She decided she didn't care" should read "She didn't care a bit" if we're going to write it in deep POV.

She had her diploma. That was all that was important. That and the bus ticket she had in the back pocket of her only pair of jeans. She would've worn a dress if she'd been able to afford it, but the graduation cap and gown had already taken enough of her savings. A dress wasn't a necessity. Also note that this is a longer monologue, BUT IT WORKS because it's embedded in all the other components of the deep POV technique.

Jillian Carter sidled up to her. "Are you going to the graduation party?"

Hopefully you can see the marked difference between Capote's excerpt and Eason's. 

Deep POV isn't italicized. 

Well-meaning critiquers may point out your thoughts and tell you they need to be in italics, because a lot of writers have not studied deep POV and don't really understand how it works. That said, there are direct thoughts that could work as both. But here's the argument against italics.

Subconsciously, when someone reads a story in print or online, they have a general flow that momentarily stops when they encounter something that catches their attention in the text. What follows next had better be really good, because otherwise you've taken the reader to a "good stopping point" which runs the risk of them putting down your book and never finishing it.

This is also the argument against things like dashes, capitalization for emphasis, and exclamation points. In a work like this one, a technical article, those strategies work to your advantage. In fiction, they can be distractors. The advice with such punctuation is to use it very sparingly.

If you aren't writing in deep POV, italics are fine. They actually don't distract as much because readers become accustomed to the switch between italicized and non-italicized text. But in deep POV, the use of italics references something really important. Don't disappoint your readers by making it lackluster.

Here's an example Nelson gives written with italics. Note that since italics are representing direct thought quotations, you can't get away with those lovely rule-bending fragments and such like you can with deep POV. Without even reading, just take a quick glance at the two samples and scan for the italics. Try to notice when your eyes start and stop to notice something new in the sentences. Where do you "feel" a pause? 

Third Person, not deep POV

Jane looked out the window. Wow! Look at that sunshine and the dew sparkling on the roses. What a perfect day for gardening. I'd better get my tools. 

She went to the garage and scanned her shelves. Now, where did I put my gloves and trowel?

Third Person, in deep POV

Jane looked out the window. The dew on the roses sparkled in the morning sunlight. Wow! Would there ever be a better day for gardening? She went to the garage and searched the wooden shelves. Where had she stored her gloves and trowel? 

Now that you've experienced the pauses, go back and read the excerpts. See where the dew is personified? See how the direct thought quotation becomes a contemplation in a question form? We still have that Wow! italicized, and notice how it pops. We feel the wow just as Jane does. Cool, huh? I love playing around with emphasis like this. It really makes a difference in how your story is perceived.

Deep POV is Not Telling

For a new writer, it can become exhausting to sort out what is the difference between showing and telling. The lovely thing about deep POV is, as Nelson says, "It renders telling nearly impossible, because that annoying, invisible narrator has been given the boot!"

It avoids filtering phrases like she saw, she noticed, she tried, she watched. It has a built-in cause-and-effect trigger (Action happens, character reacts with contemplative thought). It delivers detail through physical interactions between the character and the setting. If you master this technique, your writing will become so much richer. 

Deep POV is Not Lazy Characterization

According to Nelson, 

The writer must live inside the character in order to keep the reader inside the POVC's head. Maintaining that level of intimacy will require you to become saturated with every aspect of your POVC so actions and reactions become believable at a profound leve.

Deep POV is Not Voiceless

I used to get so frustrated with editing the "telling" out of my fiction because it came across as bland. Sure, I had plenty of good description. Lots of action. But the story wasn't resonating with my audiences. Even with my published works, I had some reviewers comment on finding certain characters not relatable. And now that I have the rights back to all my books, I have plans to publish new, revised editions with richer character development and such. I can see how this method can take all my books to a new level.

Contemplative thoughts allow the edgy "bad-girl" to have redeeming qualities and earn sympathy from your readers. They allow your Mary Sue characters to have realistic depth. The most proper, prudent, upright old church lady can have secret thoughts and call her annoying friends "crazy old bats" and suddenly we see that she's not so proper after all. She has flaws, and readers love flaws. This is a powerful tool! 

Deep POV is Not the Only Writing that Belongs in Your Story

Although professional editors preach show, don't tell, there are times in the story when telling is a useful tool for pacing. One of the issues with deep POV is that sometimes you can write a scene as too intense. Suppose, for example, a character is sitting through a reading of a will. You're not going to want them to listen to the whole will. There are parts of that you'd want to summarize. And a brief telling phrase or two can hurry those bits along so you can get back to the action of the story. Using this strategy will give your readers a mental break. 

These include phrases like A few minutes later, The next week, When the lawyer finished reading...

Notice that these telling phrases are not filtering, and they are not info dumps. Nelson explains that they:

eliminate paragraphs of mundane activity that could turn tedious and are unnecessary to the story. 

So, a VERY brief telling phrase can work well to manage the time transitions so that you don't feel compelled to include every single detail of a scene.

[pelwrath]

Then what do you call the opening of The Tale of Two Cities by Dickens? It seems to be a good hook yet also fails the above for Deep POV, yet not in italics.

[ScienceGirl]

Honestly, I call that a gimmick. Dickens was really the first person to take that "it was this, it was that" and use it in an effective, repetitive way. I think it speaks to people because it's more like poetry than story.

Let's look at it from an analytical viewpoint:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."

Story-wise, it might seem like there's nothing there except the "was". But Dickens has this lovely poetic contradiction that gives us pause and serves as a hook. Granted, it gets really old after a line or two.  

Now, let's move a bit deeper:

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood. 

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

Hopefully you've noticed that it's a narrator talking and not the characters themselves. A very wordy, and in the mind of a lot of folks, terribly boring narrator. In fact, We're now about 400 words into the story, and we still don't have any idea who the main characters are. You might think Mrs. Southcott would be, but she just gets this passing allusion. There's no dialogue, no action, and no real conflict. Basically, nothing has happened other than the narrator recounting what "has happened." There's not a hint of dialogue in that book until halfway into chapter two. 

This is all just my opinion, of course. I think part of Dickens' success is just the time he lived. Years ago, that would fly, but in modern fiction, no one wants to read those heavy blocked pages that read more like an old literature textbook from the sixties. Well, that ARE basically an old literature textbook. 

I personally find third person omniscient POV a challenge to read. Some people love it. I have friends who read Jane Austen's Persuasion every single summer. I can't even get past the first chapter. But, I also love action and thrillers. I'm so excited about the Black Widow movie releasing later this week. The more action, the more I struggle to put down the book and do something else.

So, why does someone like Dickens get such a huge following? IMHO, it's because readers fill in a lot of the blanks for him. He has an interesting, and likely for the time it was written, relatable sequence of events. Sometimes a sequence of events can be a hook in itself because you want to know what the next thing is that will happen. Also, he lived in a time when books didn't have to compete with all these other forms of media. And, books didn't really have to compete that much with each other. Now there's literally millions of books at people's fingertips, so why would they settle to read something that doesn't have any action?

[pelwrath]

Okay, I was right, yeah! Yet, it was written a long time ago, and writing styles...no reading styles as well have noticeably changed. Yes, he does have a prose poetic style that I never noticed. Yes to that filling in the blank. I do that when I read. Trying to figure out what'll happen next or who done it. Thanks for taking the time to provide an in-depth answer.