Point of View
Revealing a character's thoughts through their "point of view" (POV) is one of the most effective means to help your readers become one with the character in body, mind, and soul — to feel joy and pain, experience the brain's reactions to such emotions, and to contemplate the most subtle of thoughts as they unveil themselves through love, hate, or any other emotion.
Since POV strengthens the reader's tie to the action and emotions being portrayed in a scene, there are advantages to assigning the POV to the character with the greatest emotional exposure in that part of the story. This provides the reader with the greatest opportunity for buy-in of the realistic portrayal of the character's innermost feelings.
Some writers think you should choose a character, typically the hero or heroine, to be the one POV character throughout the book. However, many feel that readers benefit from having multiple characters with POVs at different locations throughout the book — just don't hop around too much, particularly within the same chapter or scene. You don't want the readers to start engaging with a character only to have the POV shift to a different individual too quickly.
I'm sure most of you have watched a movie where an attractive voice (sometimes a well-known actor or actress) narrates the entire movie from the perception of a single character (or animal) throughout the story. It's an approach that is pretty simple and easy for the observer to invest themselves into that defined POV.
What's missing is that you don't get to experience the deeper feelings of some of the other key characters. Why not select the character with the greatest emotional investment of a certain chapter to be the POV? By relating to many characters in the tale, the reader feels a greater reaction to the twists and turns that effect more characters — not just a single participant of your literary creation.
Once you choose who you are going to use as the POV for a chapter (or scene), firmly establish your POV character in the reader's mind by using their name as the first individual mentioned in the initial sentence of each chapter (or scene). Then all perceptions, introspections, and internal dialogs within themselves should be from that person's senses and thoughts.
For further examples of the use of POV, take a peek into the "Look inside" feature of my sequel, The New World: Blue Moon Generation, on Amazon!
Since POV strengthens the reader's tie to the action and emotions being portrayed in a scene, there are advantages to assigning the POV to the character with the greatest emotional exposure in that part of the story. This provides the reader with the greatest opportunity for buy-in of the realistic portrayal of the character's innermost feelings.
Some writers think you should choose a character, typically the hero or heroine, to be the one POV character throughout the book. However, many feel that readers benefit from having multiple characters with POVs at different locations throughout the book — just don't hop around too much, particularly within the same chapter or scene. You don't want the readers to start engaging with a character only to have the POV shift to a different individual too quickly.
I'm sure most of you have watched a movie where an attractive voice (sometimes a well-known actor or actress) narrates the entire movie from the perception of a single character (or animal) throughout the story. It's an approach that is pretty simple and easy for the observer to invest themselves into that defined POV.
What's missing is that you don't get to experience the deeper feelings of some of the other key characters. Why not select the character with the greatest emotional investment of a certain chapter to be the POV? By relating to many characters in the tale, the reader feels a greater reaction to the twists and turns that effect more characters — not just a single participant of your literary creation.
Once you choose who you are going to use as the POV for a chapter (or scene), firmly establish your POV character in the reader's mind by using their name as the first individual mentioned in the initial sentence of each chapter (or scene). Then all perceptions, introspections, and internal dialogs within themselves should be from that person's senses and thoughts.
For further examples of the use of POV, take a peek into the "Look inside" feature of my sequel, The New World: Blue Moon Generation, on Amazon!