Pov Deep

Pov Deep
Writing in Deep Point of view keeps the reader solidly engaged and grounded in a story. Writers can achieve such Depth with six specific details, all of which are covered in this post.
Your characters are alive . Readers experience a story through your characters, which is why applying Deep POV is so important. This is done with six details
Using details that involve the five senses is key to pulling your readers beneath the surface of your book and keeping them immersed—in a good way.
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So, you’ve got an intriguing story idea and you’re picturing some of the scenes in your mind, eager to get them down on paper and begin wowing readers. But unless you ground your readers with deep POV right from the start, you'll have a hard time getting them to care what happens.
There are specific techniques that master writers use to draw readers in and keep them engaged. In this article, I’ll be teaching you about the first and fundamental—absolutely indispensable—technique that pulls readers in and makes them forget they’re reading.
So get out your notebook and prepare to level up your writer’s toolbox. This will be a game changer!
Readers have millions of books to choose from. They don’t waste much time on a book that doesn’t immediately engage their curiosity and get them anticipating future events. We have mere seconds to grab them before they move on.
As if that’s not enough of a challenge to a writer, we have to compete with social media, streaming services, video games, and all sorts of other avenues of entertainment. Ours is a tough job, one that requires discipline, dedication, and a willingness to keep learning and honing our skills.
But if you have a passion to tell a good story and serve your readers, this is a good place for you to be!
Notice how I said, “serve your readers.” I believe that’s what it’s all about. The reader.
It’s important to realize there’s an actual person on the receiving end of your words, that they have real wants and needs. Great writing—the kind that sells—is about creating the sort of quality reading experience that living, breathing person craves.
Often, first time writers think it's all about the story. I was no different. I jumped into creating stories without realizing that the story is just the path to reaching the reader. Writing is about connecting with someone and making a difference, however small or fleeting, in that person's life.
Readers want to escape into a story, to sink beneath the page so they’re no longer just reading—they are immersed in the story. This kind of reading imparts a sense of immediacy and becomes an experience, a satisfying and sustaining way to spend the precious commodity of time.
It’s our job, as fiction writers, to give our readers what they need so they can have what they want, and the essential place to do this is in the opening pages of the book.
There’s a trio of forces that drive a reader forward through your story—curiosity, surprise, and suspense. I talked about the superpower of each in my last article, What is Suspense? Why and How It Makes Better Books .
But in order for these forces to function as they must, the reader needs to be solidly engaged and grounded in your story. And this has to happen from the very first sentences of your book.
The most powerful technique for achieving this is often called Deep Point of View (Deep POV).
You may be asking, “What is deep point of view?” I think of it as the magic of applied POV . My mentor, Dean Wesley Smith, refers to it as Depth.
He explains Depth as what you do to take your reader deep into the story so that he cannot leave, keeping him away from the surface where he might break out of the story and put the book down.
Writing in deep point of view is accomplished through the use of specific types of details, and the omission of others.
Before we dive into that, there’s a crucial concept I need to drill home, because everything really hinges on understanding this one key aspect.
In the context of your story, your characters have a real life, and the reader experiences the story through them. They are the interface. They are what allows your reader to “plug in” to the story and feel the power it generates.
Every word of the story must come through a character’s point of view, whether first person or third person, if you want to pull the reader beyond the page and ground them in the setting of your world. If you allow author intrusion, you risk losing your reader.
In other words, if you—as author—look around and start describing the setting through your own viewpoint, you’ll never pull the reader into the character and story. You must go through your POV character.
This means you have one filter. Your story might have multiple viewpoint characters, may even combine first person POV with third person point of view, like James Patterson does in his Alex Cross novels.
But it's important to stick to one point of view per scene, with clear scene breaks between. Bobbing around from one character’s thoughts to another's doesn’t allow the reader to attach and grow inside the viewpoint character’s head.
Worse, it can be confusing and send a reader speeding away from your book.
While it’s possible to tell a story in this superficial manner, you won’t achieve the depth, the absorption, the commitment from your reader that we’re addressing in this article.
One POV character per scene. One filter. And everything in the story comes to the reader, undiluted, through that single viewpoint and filter, in your character's voice.
When writing, consider the different types of filter words, the details, you’ll need to pull your reader deep and ground them in the story’s setting so they'll want to stay.
There are six types of details that will help you achieve Deep POV.
The goal here is to pull your reader deeply and immediately into the story through a connection with your viewpoint character, making it hard to put your book down.
This POV can be a single character for the length of the book, or dual POVs that each share their own viewpoint.
Regardless, these are the specific types of details you'll use in the opening lines of your story and the beginning of each chapter to achieve this deep POV.
Remember, your viewpoint character is alive, a functioning individual with a background of experience. And every word of the story is filtered through that character's experience.
Have you heard of the Rashomon Effect , named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film? It describes how people can witness the same event and give substantially different accounts about what happened. That’s because many of the things people notice are unique to them.
Is your character a professional chauffeur? What kinds of details would a chauffeur notice that others might not? Would he pay particular attention to the makes and models of cars? The state of a vehicle’s tires? Would he notice a suspect’s peculiar tan line from wearing driving gloves in a convertible?
Is your character a baker? What kinds of details would a baker notice that others might not? Would she pay particular attention to the quality of bread served in a restaurant? The state of another character’s kitchen? Would she notice that yeast infection rash on a suspect’s hands that comes from kneading too much dough?
When you get inside a character’s POV and deliver the scene to the reader through that filter, the character—and the story—come alive.
This sucks the reader deep into the story world, and tightly holds them to a new character or group of characters they like.
In Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing , James Scott Bell writes, “You, the author, must identify with the character so closely that you feel what the character feels, think what the character thinks. This is what great actors do.”
When I’m working on character development, I get into that character. I adopt the physiology of the character, meaning I get up and jump around, energize myself, if I’m writing that type of character. Or I slump in my chair, exhausted, if that’s appropriate to my character’s state. I take on their body language.
I might augment this by running through an internal dialogue in my character's voice until I sound like he or she sounds. Or pretend I'm choosing off a menu or dressing for a party as they would. And so on.
This technique comes from theater director Michael Chekhov, and the theory behind it is that our physiology informs our psychology. It helps get me into the same state of mind as my character so I can provide the kind of details peculiar to that individual.
And, of course, I try to think as a chauffeur or a baker would think.
It’s always a smart idea to learn from the masters. I'm defining a master writer as an author who’s consistently produced bestsellers over the last thirty or forty years.
So, let's look at an example from the masters.
The opening paragraph of Michael Connelly’s book The Scarecrow is delivered through the point of view character, Wesley Carver, chief technology officer for a data security firm. Notice the types of details he uses to ground the reader in the setting and inside his own viewpoint:
Carver paced in the control room, watching over the front forty. The towers were spread out before him in perfect neat rows. They hummed quietly and efficiently and even with all he knew, Carver had to marvel at what technology had wrought. So much in so little space. Not a stream but a swift and torrid river of data flowing by him every day. Growing in front of him in tall steel stalks. All he needed to do was to reach in, to look and to choose. It was like panning for gold.
Carver is a computer guy, steeped in data. The details he notices and thinks about relate to the abundance of data and what it can do for him. Like rivers and fields he can harvest and mine for gold. Do you see how these details tell us more about his character and ground us inside his head?
In the opening of your own book, make sure you get firmly inside the head of your viewpoint character and deliver the story to your reader from there. Think about what your character would notice and include fresh, character-focused details that will pull the reader in there beside you.
Remember, every piece of information that comes to your reader must pass through your viewpoint character and how do we receive information but through our senses?
Again, this is where “getting into character” is useful. Feel what your character is feeling; see what they see. Hear, taste, and smell what they're experiencing. Whether it's the sticky heat of an Amazon jungle or the shriek of brakes on asphalt, pass it on to your reader.
It’s a good idea to use at least four of the five senses in every depth opening during the first third of your book. But another sensory technique you can use to convey a feeling of being overwhelmed is to focus lavishly on one sense.
For example, if your character is assaulted by noise:
The cacophony rose higher, coming in shrieks and great whorls of sound that swelled in a distorted symphony, wracking Joanie’s eardrums. When she thought she could bear no more, a loud maniacal laughter joined the riotous stew, and then a new sound, strange and frightening above all else. It was her own scream.
Or, your character may be plunged into absolute darkness:
Inky black pressed against Paul’s eyelids like coins on a dead man’s face, drenching him in its clutching grasp. The darkness was thick as tar, sticky, smothering him, working gloom-clawed fingers into his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, until he was drowning in it.
Using details that involve the five senses is key to pulling your readers beneath the surface of your book and keeping them immersed—in a good way.
Let’s go to some examples from the masters. Here’s the opening of James Lee Burke’s story Big Midnight Special :
You know how summertime is down South. It comes to you in the smell of watermelons and distant rain and the smell of cotton poison and schools of catfish that have gotten dammed up in a pond that’s about to be drained. It comes to you in a lick of wet light on razor wire at sunup. You try to hold on to the coolness of the night, but by noon you’ll be standing inside your own shadow, hoeing out long rows of soybeans, a gunbull on horseback gazing at you from behind his shades in the turnaround, his silhouette a black cutout against the sun.
Do you see how Burke made his readers smell the watermelon, rain, and fish? See the light and shadow? Feel the searing heat? Did you catch how these details pull us right into the viewpoint character and the setting? Reading this, you know he's a prisoner on work duty in the fields without being spoonfed the information in a boring backstory info dump. Genius.
Don’t neglect to use thick, rich sensory detail to open your story and pull your reader deep.
This is where we talk about something my mentor calls a fake detail. You need to understand that the words you write are symbols that represent ideas for the reader. You produce these symbols and the reader interprets them.
If you want the reader to stay immersed in your story, you need to be in control of what you communicate.
That means using specific details that communicate clear pictures and ideas to the reader. We can never transport the story in our heads in undistorted and perfect form into a reader’s head, but we need to come as close to that ideal as we can or risk bumping the reader to the surface.
Let’s say in your story you mention a dog.
Dog is a very general term, and if the dog is unimportant to the story and won’t be mentioned again, you can probably get away with letting your readers conjure up any kind of dog they like.
But if the dog is to play a role, or in any way re-enter the story, you’ve just put yourself in a dangerous position by using such an unspecific term.
Here’s why: the reader takes the coded symbols you’ve given him and formulates a picture in his mind of what’s going on in the story. You wrote that a dog was running along the street, so he imagines his favorite kind of dog, a Great Dane, loping in great strides.
Your reader is grounded in the setting and things are flowing along smoothly until your story tells how the beagle stopped running and started barking, a whiny, high-pitched yipping sound. And—Bam!—you’ve popped your reader to the surface.
Your coded words don’t match the picture in his head, reminding him it’s just a story, only words on paper, and he might as well put the book down and go to sleep.
Wherever feasible, use specific details. And keep these two rules in mind:
You never want to do anything that sends a reader to the surface and away from your story.
Your character was not born on page one. Remember, they have a history of life experience which has given them, among other things, opinions. Their opinion should color everything they pass on to the reader, like a hot key combo into their personality.
Those opinions animate your character, making them real, and this helps pull the reader down beneath the surface of your story. Their opinions also make them distinct from other characters in the book, allowing them to stand out and be a three-dimensional individual.
Characters are revealed by their behavior and their interactions with others. By making sure your character’s attitudes and opinions come through to the reader, you’ll ensure a deeper, more satisfying reading experience.
Elizabeth George demonstrates this well in the opening of her book With No One As Witness . She delivers a paragraph packed with opinionated details perfectly suited to her character, giving us a vivid picture:
Kimmo Thorne liked Dietrich best of all: the hair, the legs, the cigarette holder, the top hat and tails. She was what he called the Whole Blooming Package, and as far as he was concerned, she was second to none. Oh, he could do Garland if pressed. Minnelli was simple, and he was definitely getting better with Streisand. But given his choice—and he was generally given it, wasn’t he?—he went with Dietrich. Sultry Marlene. His number one girl. She could sing the crumbs out of a toaster, could Marlene, make no bloody mistake about it.
These details, dripping with opinion, pull us immediately into Kimmo Thorne's head. We know what he likes and how he feels about it. He loves impersonating female vocal stars and Marlene Dietrich is his favorite. Once we're inside his head, we're grounded in the setting and ready to experience the rest of the scene through his perceptions.
When you express your viewpoint character's opinions, you bring your characters alive and readers deeper into your story world, ready to follow on as the story progresses.
Using details that convey your character’s emotion is another key way to pull the reader below the surface and get her actively involved in your story, feeling some of what your character is feeling.
Because your reader is a real and individual entity with life experiences of their own, the emotions of your character will stir your reader’s own emotional embers to evoke authentic, personalized feelings.
What a powerful way to draw the reader deep into your story world and get them invested in what happens to your character.
Focus on describing what it feels like to the character to be angry or hurt or deliriously happy, rather than naming the emotion outright. Show, don't tell.
What physical reactions are taking place? How do they cope with them? What kind of memories or insecurities do they evoke? Emotions, like opinions, will color the details you choose to include.
For example, here's the opening of Dean Koontz’s book Sole Survivor:
At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to this chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness. The anguished and haunted quality of his own voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him not all at once but in trembling veils, as attic dust falls off rafters when a house rolls with an earthquake.
When he realized that he did not have Michelle in his arms, he held fast to the pillow anyway. He had come out of the dream with the scent of her hair. Now he was afraid that any movement he made would cause that memory to fade and leave him with only the sour smell of his night sweat.
Notice how Koontz describes the effects of the man’s emotions, rather than labeling them as grief and longing. Did you also happen to notice how Koontz included the character-focused details of a native Californian? And sensory details including sight, sound, touch, and smell?
All in the first two paragraphs of the book.
Including emotional detail creates intimacy and draws a read
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