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Using Deep POV

October 15th, 2007

Friday was a big writing day for me. It was the last day I could “attend” the Muse Online Writers Conference, and I put everything I learned in Laurie Sanders’ Deep POV and the Suspense workshops into the rewrite of Chapter 2 of TMA. When the rewrite was about halfway done, I had to step back and take a break. I was drained, emotionally exhausted. It’s a very stressful time for Alex, remembering her father and the circumstances of his death combined with her apartment being robbed and vandalized.

I posted what I had to my writing group to see what they had to say about it. While the events haven’t changed, the way I approached them did. I’m looking forward to seeing what they think of it. The original version was a lot of telling, not showing, and Alex was acting inappropriately. I changed it to make it a lot more personal, pulling the reader into her head and letting Alex’s emotions out. Of course, now I’m afraid it’s too much.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I changed…

Original:

I pushed the door open with my foot and looked inside. So far so good. This time the thieves hadn’t knocked over the small table in the hall where I kept the phone books, though the mail I’d left on top of it was gone. The thieves had gotten my bank statement. Double damn.

The first doorway on the left was the kitchen, and I crept up to it and peeked around the corner. My heart dropped. It looked like every dish and cup I owned was in pieces and mixed with the contents of my fridge to cover the linoleum.

Rewrite:

Scooping my phone up off the floor, I ran down the hall and slammed the door to my apartment open. My cry of dismay was probably heard in Timbuktu. The smell of sour milk, rotten eggs, and something like wet dog assaulted my nose. The small table where I kept my mail and keys was overturned and smashed, and the envelopes that had been there this morning were gone.

Two steps deeper into the apartment and I saw my kitchen and my heart twisted. Every dish and cup I owned was smashed and mixed with the contents of my fridge to create a criminal impressionist painting on the linoleum.

That’s typical of the changes I made throughout the chapter so far. I added the reference to a wet dog to foreshadow something else that’s going to be happening later. The Suspense workshop made a point of telling us we need to sprinkle the clues for what’s going on throughout the book, otherwise the reader might feel cheated because he wasn’t able to figure out what’s going on himself. You never want your reader to feel cheated.