Writing Deeper

For Christmas my hubby gave me this wonderful book called Rivet your Readers with Deep Point of View by Jill Elizabeth Nelson. It's already majorly changed the way I edit and write.

Jill's focus on the book is using your narrative and characters to show rather than tell, and to keep the narrative voice out of the way when it comes to the story and character experiences. In all my years of writing I've developed bad habits along with the good ones, and writing "deep" POV was never one of my strong points.  Occasionally I would write deep POV and not realize it, but much of my prose, even after editing, involved a lot of telling and mundane narrative.

There's a lot to say about this book, but this isn't a book review. The easiest way to sum up what this book says is to write characters how you think to yourself.  Look around you.  Do you think to yourself, "I see this computer and how white the Blogger screen is"? No, you'd think "the white screen blared at me, as if berating me for not updating for over a month." I already see it, so only the description matters.

Sorry if that didn't make sense; it's hard to explain without throwing examples in, but I was thinking of saving that for an editing video on Book III of LI. This post is really about my relationship with my characters and how Jill's book has affected us.



Wow, you'd think my characters were real people! During my writing and revision of The Legacy Incarnate, I've worried about the main character, Sabra the Incarnate. I've worried about her true personality coming off right to the reader, and whether Sabra really has had a personality in the prose at all. However, with the new techniques on deep POV that I've learned, Sabra and other characters have already started to become more "real" than I thought possible, their quirks and attitudes and feelings jumping off the paper, so to speak, instead of drowning in shallow telling and redundant descriptions.

I still have lots of work to do, including changing my old writing habits, and I want to go back to Books I & II to rework how I present the characters, especially Sabra. I just didn't really know how until now.

Is it weird that I feel bad about not presenting my characters to the best that they could be? Was that really my fault? Or maybe I just wrote in blissful ignorance. I can see my characters in my head, and up until this point, I never did them justice on paper. From now on, I hope readers can see them better than ever.