Point of View: Getting Inside Your Character's Heads

Point of View Made Simple In This Link!

When I began to write, the first person (the "I" narrator) felt most comfortable.  When you are in a character's head, "I" helps you relate to that character.  I wrote 5 novels ( 3 published) using the "I" (first person voice) to help me understand the character of my narrators. 
I  wrote short stories from various points of view, including even some beavers, but I was still most comfortable in "I' mode.  Here is an example from "The Rich Are Different" in the anthology Coast to Coast: Murder From Sea to Shining Sea. Here us Molly introducing herself. 

I got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale in early June hoping to find a cooking gig. What turned up was a chance to sling hash for the hired crew sailing the Marie Galante, a sixty-three foot yawl, to New England for the summer. Except for a husband who wants to kill me, I’d still live in my old Chicago neighborhood. Said husband is just your normal Neanderthal who went bat shit crazy when served with divorce papers and a restraining order. 

Bud, the skipper, took me under his wing, and gave me a small advance. I bought some warm second-hand clothes that I hadn’t thought to bring along and a cheap cell with pre-paid minutes. I had much to be thankful for, and I didn’t want to screw up.  

Then I began a new book with a character, Maxine. It was weird. Maxine sat on my shoulder and practically dictated the first quarter of the book to me.  But Maxine was never "I."  She was always "she."  And then I needed to get into the head of Lotto, the drug lord who wanted Maxine to disappear. It was fun to be Lotto.  He had a weird sense of humor and he fainted at the sight of blood. He thought everyone he dealt with was stupid. Lotto was not the main character, but his point of view was necessary. Maxine had a sister she was searching for. If only she could find the sister. But the sister had gone off track many years back, and wasn't anyone Maxine wanted to find, but she didn't know that. When Maxine finally found her, I was in the sister's head. She was terrible, but it was fun. She had great survival instincts, and a yen for money.  I enjoyed writing in the sister's head as much as in Lotto's.  

I wrote a women's novel and also used she, not I. It's actually the story you are writing that dictates the point of view, which writers abbreviate POV.  In that novel, I only used one point of view. Now I have started a novel set in two time periods, 1953 and the present, and of course I have two narrators. One is "I" and the other is "she." We'll see how this works out. So far so good. 

I have never written in second person, the "you" voice, but a few writers have had success with it. Here is a passage by Annie Dillard in the second person "You." 
"You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder like a cofferdam around the entire pine, and grease its inside walls. You climb your ladder and spend the next week pouring wet plaster into the cofferdam, over and inside the pine. You wait; the plaster hardens. Now open the walls of the dam, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air." (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper, 1974)
 There is also the omniscient POV,  in which the author is in everybody's head.  This was more common in prior periods, although some authors (especially in Britain) are very adept at it. It's called "head hopping." In the hands of an inexperienced writer, it can be deadly.  

When we learn to write, we learn that there is such a thing as a point of view violation, which comes from not understanding the rules. It can be blatant or so subtle no one is likely to notice.But it's best to learn and apply the rules.

Writing is a part art and part craft. The craft can be learned. My college English teacher told the class, "I can teach you to write not badly, but not well."

Ah, the subtle difference.     

These writers also have something to say on the subject.  You will be pleasantly surprised at the different takes on the same topic. Take a gander.

Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1ag
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Anne de Gruchy https://annedegruchy.co.uk/category/blog/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/ 

A sad goodbye to summer

Since I was a little kid, summer was always my favorite season.  Of course, when you are a child, summer seems to last forever.  It is still my favorite season, but now it comes and goes in the blink of an eye.  This year, I thought I was doing pretty well coping with fall in the garden, but I still have to pull frost-killed and frost-dying plants out of several planters.  Wash out the pots and store in house or garage.  Plant the garlic, transplant the thyme.  Plant the bulbs.  Cover the table, the chairs, the barbecue.  Eeek!  This is starting to sound like work.  Tomorrow is the day, but I may need more than one.  Ah summer, when one just stood around lazily with the hose.

I cope with fall foods better than fall chores.  With the cold weather comes thoughts of chili, stew, big heaps of pasta.  We've been living off a cauliflower, pasta, garlic, walnut concoction for  2 days, and it's really good,  Sometimes, vegetarian is a snore, but this has lots of flavor due to the red pepper flakes and the garlic.  Tomorrow we'll have pork chops in a cranberry-portwine sauce with fresh rosemary from the living room window.  Yup.  The rosemary is indoors.

I've been trying to finish my book, but four scenes required a POV (point of view) which isn't easy to do, because now  I am in another character's head, and you really have to strive to make them real, make them whole, and in this case, make them snarky, which makes the excercise sort of fun.  And I rewrote the exciting conclusion.  Now I have library books on Panama and Cuba to bring some scenes to life.  Hope it works.

Tonight we had to eat the rest of the bananas before they ripened into black and brownness, so I made a banana clafouti.  The recipe said 2 servings, but that would have been incredibly piggy.  
The photo is of a cherry clafouti because for some weird reason the banana photo wouldn't load.

I am going to read Leslie Wheeler's new book.  It is such fun when friend's books are published.  My Shadow Warriors will be up on the Kindle soon.  Yay!