Deep POV Dive: Lesson Eight
Welcome back to Deep POV Dive! We’re on the last lesson, and wow what a journey it has been. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning along with me on this writing course as I have. I have learned so much and I am so excited to apply all of this knowledge to my future projects. So, for our last lesson today, we’re gonna wrap up this series by rounding up our writing skills to learning how to write tight. That’s right. If you recall all those examples I have provided throughout the series, the difference between a regular, limited third person paragraph and a deep POV paragraph is the word count is larger. Deep POV provides more insight on how the character feels, using metaphors and their character voice to express and describe the situation around them. It takes so much longer to do that than in a simpler narrative where we simply report in our own author’s voices and simply tell the reader what they’re feeling and what’s going on. Well, going back to what I was saying in the last lesson, we need to make sure that the reader is also being pulled along with the story without being carried away by too much description and unnecessary content.
One way to do this is to summarize. Summarizing in Deep POV can help skip over unnecessary or mundane details that are both unnecessary to the story as well as taking the reader out of the world you’ve created. This is not narrating. Narrating is the author/character’s voice telling the story and not showing it.
Summarizing an action can be seen as merely saying, “ I ate lunch,” instead of going into detail of how the character ate lunch, or the food they ate or what it made them think of. If it doesn’t move along the story or add any new revelation to the reader( remember, readers are smart and anything that gets extra attention in the story will be cataloged as important) then just summarize it. If it’s not important to the character at the moment, only as a simple after thought, then don’t go into major detail.
Another way to keep your word count down is by using more words with more weight added to them. What I mean is when using words in Deep POV, almost every verb and noun has to add some emotional weight to them where they add more meaning to the sentence without necessarily having to use so many words to describe a particular thing( unless that’s your character’s voice to ramble on a little, and that’s fine). Here’s an example:
Example 1:
She ran after him pumping her small but powerful legs, driven like a thunderous, mad machine. His coattail flickered just within reach before her. She pushed her legs to jump and her fingers barely grazed the coarse fabric before skidding across the harsh ground. Burning pain scretched across her cheeks. Her hands bloodied and scraped against the ground. He couldn’t do this. He can’t. Not on his own. She had to stop him. Her knees found themselves under herself and she launched herself after him again. Lewis raced ahead towards their impending doom, the arch enemy destroying this world they found. The fortress city was closing before her, its gate a closing maw Lewis ran to meet like a lamb to the slaughter. She couldn’t reach him. She wasn’t going to make it. She was going to lose her best friend that she’s gotten to know over the course of time they’ve been there. She was going to lose him. And it was all her fault…
Here we have several examples in bold of what sections that could be condensed for sake of word count and flow. In the first sentence, she ran after him can simply be replaced with “ she pumped her small but powerful legs” since it will be implied that she’s chasing after someone( let’s just say we’re jumping right into the middle of a book and we’ve already been introduced to the characters). The phrase “ before her” is really a redundancy if you think about the fact that of course if someone’s coattail was flickering before them, then yes it would be logical to assume it was right in front of her, so there was no need to mention that fact because it was already shown.“ She pushed her legs to jump” is a good sentence, but can be condensed to a better a more straight forward word that doesn’t have to clutter up the sentence, like “ she leapt”. And the word “ barely” isn’t needed since “ grazed” is when something barely touches something anyway. Again, redundancy( it would be a good idea to look up definitions of words you use just to avoid those definition redundancies like this one). The word “ again” was unnecessary( because it’s obvious what she’s doing) and the entire phrase in her direct thought just before the end slowed down the intensity of the scene. So condensing it to just “ She was going to lose her best friend” is more straight forward and immediate especially when this situation is dire. Those are just some examples of how to write tighter and still keep your story top notch. If a word is unnecessary or a phrase that doesn’t need to be that long, condense it to a more specific word or delete it completely. This is good to use especially for the editing process for deep pov, and practically any other pov you’re using.
Another way to cut out unnecessary word count is the lack of dialogue tags. We’ve discussed this before in the beginning of this course, but we haven’t delved into how to introduce dialogue in deep pov style. Again, we’re going back to our number one rule, show don’t tell. A good example of how to use and introduce characters with dialogue is make them recognizable. Make the dialogue unique to each character and develop their personal way of speaking. Here is an example on how to deal with the absence of dialogue tags while still introducing characters:
Example Two:
Tori scratched his pen on the paper, scribbling his useless whims and sighed. He’ll never write an appropriate poem for the gathering. Maybe his father was right. He’ll never be a decent writer. His brain was just too bogged up. He needed some air. Tori stood up and stalked towards the kitchen, taking his tea mug from the counter sipping its cold contents. The sun was setting and the time to the party was coming upon him. He had to finish soon. He indulged in several takes of the now stale beverage that helped carry him through the sleepless nights and leaned against the counter.
“ Hello Tori.”
He froze. His mug slipped from his fingers crashing on the floor. He couldn’t be. He couldn’t be back. He was dead, they said. And good riddens at that. He had said that. He knew he had said that and had heard them say he died. But it was undeniable. Unmistakable. That same deep and wretched voice that haunted his mind every night and day was back. He was back.
You can see here that without the use of a dialogue tag, I was still able to ( at least hoped I did) convey how the voice was someone that he never expected, someone Tori had feared all his life. Even with direct thought, I was able to describe his voice, which you can also use other means to be able to indirectly show the reader how a character’s voice sounds without telling. Like the size of people determines their voice( most of the time) as well as their age. But the best way to convey whether a person’s voice is harsh or soft is the pov character’s reaction( and other character’s reactions). Like wouldn’t you flinch if someone yelled at you? Or wouldn’t you nod your head in agreement as others smiled a friend’s kind remark? Things like that can really enhance your story and do without the use of dialogue tags.
To carry on a conversation between multiple different people and acknowledging every new character added to the conversation without dialogue tags can be handled through body language and direct thought: Example:
Example Three:
“ Elena, please drink your tea. You haven’t touched hardly a thing all night.”
Theodora pushed the cup towards her.
“ She’s probably just worried that her husband hasn’t come back for nearly two weeks.”
Flora smirked, as if she enjoyed the mere fact of telling the world about her rapidly descending feelings.
“ Now don’t be pushy, Flora, she’s had a tough time of it. Now Elena don’t fret. He’ll be back soon, as always. If not a little later, I’m sure he’ll still be back in time and be telling his wild stories as usual.”
Patricia patted her arm soothingly, though it didn’t help the dread, aching feeling in her gut. She sipped her tea slowly holding back the tears. The ladies continued chattering as if nothing was amiss with her. They were just trying to be helpful, but sometimes she wished she could just be alone in the world and not be bothered like this. What if he doesn’t come back? Who knows what would happen if he decides to catch another case of gold fever and try to go off to one of those dangerous mines. She didn’t need anymore treasure that was worthless and an angry, sad husband trying to provide a fortune for his wife. What was worse was that she couldn’t say a word. She accepted the role of the silent, compliant, miserable wife. Every time he went out on one of his “ business trips” something always went amiss and several times he’s come home almost shot. But this time it was different. This time she was pregnant. And she really hoped that this time wasn’t the time his luck would finally run out…
Well there you have it! Deep POV lesson eight complete! Thank you guys so much for following along and reading my articles.
Just to sum up this lesson, to write tight is basically just writing with purpose, using the words that are necessary and really diving into our dictionaries to expand our vocabulary for words that hold more meaning. Summarize wherever you need to, and just bring attention to the facts that the readers will find important. There have been some deep pov books that have broken the rule for no dialogue tags( which is fine) but I just wanted to show you that they’re not necessary. If you have the right tools, you can express your characters through deep pov, moving the reader through the journey through the character’s eyes.
I really appreciate the support for these articles and I hoped you’ve learned a lot from them and taken some new tools and ideas you could use for your future writing projects.
There is one more bonus lesson with this course, so if you would like to, stay tuned as I will be posting next week on Deep POV’s bonus lesson on how to write fear and excitement!! Oooo. If you like thrillers or just exciting drama( like me) then I’m sure you’ll love this next lesson. Please comment if you loved this series and what was the best thing that you learned out of this entire series. Thank you guys so much for reading and good night!
Deep POV Exercise Eight:
Write a story/scene in deep pov and try to condense your words as much as possible without sacrificing the emotion and meaning. Try to write it within a one thousand word limit to help practice your skills at summarizing. Write with purpose. Post your story/scene in the forum if you‘d like. Have fun!
