Carrie Lofty shares how to add deep point of view to your stories

What is deep point of view anyway? Carrie Lofty helps clear up our questions:

"If you’re a writer who’s dedicated to better understanding the craft of storytelling, you may have come across the term “Deep Point of View.” Critique groups bandy it about. How-to books mention it ad nauseam. And all the time your brain may be spinning, asking, “What does that really mean, anyway?”

I have my own light bulb moment with regard to deep point of view while teaching a workshop on integrating research into a novel. This was of particular concern to me because I write historical romance. I’m constantly faced with choices regarding what details to be left out, what to include, and what tidbits of history are far more interesting to me than to a potential reader. It all comes down to POV.

While teaching this workshop, I was in a very bare-bones, industrial looking classroom. The walls were dull gray. Fluorescent lights glared down onto my students’ faces. All in all, it was not the most exciting place—for me. But my children, ages six and seven, would’ve viewed that room with vastly different eyes. The 20 or so plastic chairs were blue, red, and yellow. The tables were 15 feet long, stretching the width of the classroom on three tiered levels. My daughters may have started by counting how many chairs there were of each color, and then they would’ve tried to run along those long, tempting tables.

Now consider this picture of the state capital building in Madison, Wisconsin:

I see a marvelous summer day, only a few months after our family moved to Madison. I see brilliant, beautiful architecture and remember the happiness I felt.

And yet, is that the only way to view this photo?

Imagine, instead, a character who is a newly-elected state senator. Is this character a woman? Or a man whose father held the same seat 40 years earlier? Perhaps he’s a freshman senator who just turned 76 and must battle the impression that he’s too old to serve in the legislature.

Taking a different tactic, what if the character is an accused man petitioning the governor? Or a lawyer standing before the state supreme court to defend such a man? Their reasons for being at the capital dome could be a matter of life and death.

What if the character is just arriving for work as a janitor? Or as a tour guide—a college student who desperately wants to get the facts right? Or an art thief casing the place for security? Every single character I’ve just described would look on the contents of that photo with very different eyes. Anxiety, joy, eagerness, dread, resignation—these emotions should be there for the reader to grab hold of.

(From my six-year-old’s POV, she could just think it’s very, very tall. And where’s the bathroom? Where are my sunglasses? Can we get a cookie at the farmer’s market?)

Each of these subtle shifts should be reflected in how you, as the author, set the scene. If the character’s nervousness is overwhelming, he or she may not have the clarity of thinking to notice the architecture. A man fighting for his life through the criminal appeals process will have other things on his mind. To stop and describe the building in great detail will diminish the scene’s tension and draw the reader out. But if the new senator has been working toward this day for years, even decades, she might stand there, gazing up at the dome, in reflection of what she’s achieved.

Once you are best able to burrow deeply inside your character’s mind and see the world through his or her eyes, the question of what research facts to insert or delete becomes much clearer. That’s deep point of view."

Learn more about Carrie at her website http://carrielofty.com/Pressroom.html

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