A Point On POV
One of the most devastating things a writer can hear from a reader of their work is “I just didn’t feel I could get close enough to, or see, hear, and feel things as [your main character]; I just couldn’t get inside her/him/them.” And after you’ve re-read and revised for just that—emotion—over months, generally tearing up at the moving moments on your pages.
An independent editor with whom I’ve worked over many months on several drafts of my YA novel, Sudden Sisters, dragged me into a zone called “POV,” point-of-view. The reason I say dragged is that, from my reading of my own pages, I had a solid grasp of who was speaking in the exposition, who was seeing, hearing, and feeling the situational forces affecting my characters. Yet, in reality, I later learned, the POV wasn’t “close” enough to satisfy the objective reader, who, whether we know or like it or not, HATES such “narrator presence,” or “narrator intrusion.”
We came to call this kind of distraction Sweater-guy, imagining an elderly man who we figured must wear a knit sweater-vest as he stands behind us when reading my pages. His arms would be crossed, and he’d have a contemplative look in his eye. The image reminded me of the public television my parents used to watch, where the British journalist Alistair Cooke would introduce, and later comment on, the mystery or drama being shown.
In the reading experience, unlike watching TV in the 1970s, the presence of a '“commentator” who seems to know all from outside the story, away from the action, and apart from the setting, is nothing less than a pure nuisance. And all the kibutzing about characters’ motivations, tensions, and things that were about to happen or just did happen, from this “intrusive narrator” interrupts the reader’s own sense of a scene, of anticipation within it, or of how things in it connect.
When reading, we love to be the one figuring it all out, tracking the little details, following along and predicting where things might go, all at the same time.
When writing, therefore, it’s important to avoid becoming that Sweater-guy, “intruding on” our readers process (as manifest in exposition that “interjects” or “describes” what our characters are seeing, hearing, or feeling).
How can we avoid slipping into the deadly Sweater-guy mode as writers? One way is to write in first or “close third-person” POV. That is, to write about things, and not how our characters experience them.
I know how that sounds, but in describing directly how our characters experience things, we would write a sentence about, for example, the mountains in the distance, and how the snow reflects the sunset with the perfect pink glow that gently shifts to violet as it descends on the mountain’s rocky surfase . . . instead of about how ‘She/He sees the pink glow of sunset reflecting in the snow on the mountains before her,” etc.
Another trick that helps one avoid or cure these kinds of sentences—which are telling vs. showing, of a kind—and that “intrude” on the reader’s desire to stay connected to, even within, the character, is to avoid using Name/Pronoun-Plus-Verb constructions. Like “She saw the mountains in the distance.”
Instead, focus the sentence on what she saw—the mountains. Write about the thing your character would [verb] about—see, touch, sense, hear, etc., instead of just saying (telling) that she [verbs] it.
Once the sentence focuses on the Thing Itself, and less on the character’s [verb] of that thing, it becomes much, much less Sweatery. And in so doing, it becomes less intrusive and distracting. After all, a reader, upon hitting one of these intrusive bumps, might just (unconsciously) realize they’re tired or hungry, and put down the manuscript.
And, once down, who knows if it will ever be taken up again . . . .