Stephanie here! We are so thrilled to have Roseanna with us today!
Roseanna and I have been friends since 2007 when we met at the American Christian Fiction Writers conference. We both had baby bumps, the same red briefcase, and were much younger than most attendees so we hit it off right away. (I’m very sad we have no pictures of this conference. I know it sounds weird now, but at the time neither of us had phones with cameras. That makes it sound like we’ve been friends since the beginning of time.)
Our writing processes are so different that I’m always learning from Roseanna, and I was thrilled when she said she would write a few guest posts for us this summer. Welcome, Roseanna!
I’d been writing books for ten years and had an equal number of manuscripts finished before I learned the rule of “no head-hopping” and was introduced to the concept of Deep POV. I remember ranting over this rule. Railing. Deeply frustrated that I’d have to get rid of such lines as “Brown eyes met blue—they were both thinking the same thing,” since characters don’t think of their own eye color and can’t know what the other’s thinking. I remember a few weeks of utter self-doubt as I went through my WIP trying to figure out how to take it from slightly-omniscient to deep POV.
And then the competitive rebel in me helpfully reared her head and I decided, if I was going to do this thing, I was going to rock it. I started asking myself how a character would know what they know about the world and the people around them. The result was learning to go on a journey not just WITH my characters, but INTO my characters. It’s not a journey I’ve paused to think a whole lot about over the last ten years of writing, but it’s one I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. And then I’ve had multiple people start asking me how I do it—other authors I respect immensely call out my characters as the deepest POV they’ve read in third person. So I figured it was time to put some words to the process.
There are a gazillion articles and classes out there on writing deep characters. I’ve never taken them or read them, LOL, but I’ve heard enough about them to know that my method takes everything from a slightly different angle. So below, you’ll find four questions you can ask yourself as you write or tricks you can use to transform both main POV characters and secondary ones into soul-deep people that your readers will connect with at the heart level.
Through what lens do they see the world?
We writers talk a lot about finding our voice. And for a while there, I was a bit confused about the difference between my voice as a writer and my character’s voice—because of course not all of our characters sound the same, right? I’ve decided that the way I personally differentiate this is to first know that there are ways of arranging sentences and putting words together that I’m always going to do, no matter the POV. This is my voice. But each point of view is indeed going to read differently—and it should. Because each character views the world through their own lens.
Sometimes this is really easy—Margot, my codebreaking mathematician heroine with what we today would call a mild case of autism, views the world through mathematical concepts. As she’s walking up the steps, she’s counting. When she steps onto the street, she sees intersecting and parallel lines. Her idea of a game is to estimate how many bricks are in the building across the street or how many stitches are in the seam of her colleague’s shirt. This lens is always there, before her eyes, which of course determines the way I write her. Her entire perception is colored by this basic truth: she is a mathematician.
Margot’s brother and sister-in-law are, on the contrary, both musicians. They see the world as a symphony. People are individual players. Everything to them is harmony or dissonance, notes on a scale rising or falling. They notice rhythms and sounds that Margot never would. They even relate to God on these levels—the musicians hearing Him through music in their spirits, Margot through beautiful or unsolvable mathematical proofs.
Something I’ve realized more and more as I write character after character is that each of us has this lens. I go through my day trying to put everything into words, from the way a streetlight turns the mist to silver to the way my son is standing as he’s gearing up to ask for something he knows he’s not going to get, LOL. Maybe you’re similar. Or maybe at your heart, you’re more artist than writer—maybe you’re always paying attention to the play of light and shadow, how what our eyes tell us is a curved line actually looks straight from the right perspective. Maybe you notice symmetry that I never would.
One of the key tricks to writing characters with a compelling, deep POV is to identify your character’s lens and stick with it throughout the entire book. That means learning about the thing that defines them—for me, I had to brush up on my mathematical and musical terms for the examples above. For my most recent character, I had to sit there with a massive book on flora and fauna at hand, so I could make analogies that my botanist or naturalist would have made. This can be time-consuming, but it’s so rewarding!
Let’s practice! How would your character finish this sentence? (I’ll give a couple example of mine.)
He folded his arms across his chest, ____________.
…forty-five degrees of stubbornness and anger. (mathematician)
…effectively putting a mute on the words she’d been about to say. (musician)
…as forbidding as a locked garden gate. (botanist)
Who Do They Have to BE to Achieve Their Goal?
A while back, I was doing a free-writing prompt every morning, the questions geared toward marketing, and somehow this realization came out of it. When I’m writing characters, I do NOT ask myself, “What do they have to DO to achieve their goal?” For me, it isn’t about the steps they have to physically take to get to the result I want at the end. Instead, I ask, “Who does my character have to BECOME to achieve their goal?”
Margot had to connect not just with her mind but with her heart—she had to become emotional, which is entirely antithetical to how she’d always considered herself before. To achieve that, I had to take from her the one person in her life that would shake her down to her core. The journey to becoming the Margot who could win the victory in the story dictated what had to happen earlier on.
In the next book in that series, my hero, Phillip, had to become a man who still wanted to live—he spent the first half of the book with the certain knowledge that death was right around the corner, and that he deserved it. He thought of himself as having no heart left, no life in his body, no blood in his veins. But to be the hero who could save the day at the end, he had to first realize that life was worth fighting for, and that he was worthy of it. He had to go from a man who thought of himself as a villain to a man who dared to be a hero.
So yes, this is “just” your character’s arc, their growth, their journey. But framing it in the way of the changes they need to make in order to succeed in the big goals of your book can really help you plan the other parts of their journey and the plot itself. More, it’s something I started asking myself in real life, too. If I want to achieve X, instead of planning physical steps 1, 2, and 3, instead I began asking myself, “What changes do I need to make to myself in order to achieve this?” Maybe it’s going outside my comfort zone in this particular situation; maybe it’s giving up this thing I always focus too much on; maybe it’s surrendering one battle or taking up another.
Let’s practice! Who does your character need to BE by the end of the book? Who are they at the beginning? What needs to happen to spur them ever onward?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award nominated author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. You can learn more about her and her stories at www.RoseannaMWhite.com.
I only recently started purposefully using Deep POV, for a couple of (kinda random) reasons, but I’ve found that I like it better than any other approaches I’ve tried. This post is really timely for me, so thank you! You’ve given me some good thoughts to consider as I move forward with my WIP.
So glad to hear you’ve developed a love for deep POV! Glad I could be helpful. =)
Thanks for the post, Roseanna! It was very helpful! I just typed “the end” on my rough draft of my WIP today (so excited!!), but I’m excited to use these ideas to help me in edits when I get started on them in a few weeks! Character arcs and POV have always been struggles of mine, so thank you for your tips on how to do them well. Thanks again!
Congratulations, Adi! That’s awesome!
Thank you!
Wooohooo!!! Congratulations! Nice work!
Thanks!
Congratulations, Adi!!! That’s so exciting. =) I hope you enjoy the process of deepening as you edit!
Thanks! I think that I definitely will enjoy the deepening process!
Congratulations! That’s so exciting!
Thank you! I’m so excited too!
Thanks for this wonderful post, Roseanna. I love writing in deep POV. I go about it in a different way, but I LOVED reading how you achieve it. I’m going to remember these when I tackle my next WIP.
There as many methods as there are writers, I’m sure, LOL. But it’s always so fun to hear another perspective on it, isn’t it?
Wow. Thank you soo much for this post! I’ve been working on creating clear character voice, and this was super helpful. As I continue writing, I’ll definitely going to keep these concepts in mind.
So glad it was helpful, Camille!
Love this post. I’ll definitely come back to it when I edit my WIP. The book is in third person limited with multiple POVCs, but so far, the different views don’t feel different enough, so that’s something I want to hone in on and have as part of the finished product. Thanks 🙂
That’s definitely one of the challenges of writing with multiple POVs…but also one of the really fun parts, once you’ve discovered each character’s lens. =) I usually have 3-4 POVs in each book (sometimes more, sometimes only 2), and it’s so helpful to have that lens you can just “click” into place whenever you switch!
Such good things to think about. Thank you so much for sharing!
My pleasure, Ashley! I hope it’s helpful!
GREAT post, Roseanna!!
Why thank you. 😉 Thanks for stopping by, Pepper!
I’m excited to read these posts. I’ve decided my next story I’ll be focusing on learning to write strong characters!
When you talk about going soul deep, does it only apply to deep POV? Can it be used in 1st or 3rd person?
Tonya, I think it could be applied to ANY writing of a character whose head you’re in, whether in first person or third. =)
Thank you for this incredibly helpful post! This is an area I really want to grow in, so I’ll definitely be coming back to this for tips! 🙂
So glad it’s helpful, Kristianne! And Part 2 will be coming next month. 😉
Thank you so much for this post! As I’ve been writing my WIP, I’ve been noticing how my main character is kind of flat, and I think it’s just because I’m writing the plot through her point of view, but deepening her character with these helpful tips will be amazing! Thank you!
Digging deeper can definitely help us fix those flat characters! Hope this proves helpful, Lillemore. =)
This is so awesome! Great post, it’s sooo helpful!!! I can’t wait to try these methods out on my own characters!
I love how the same actions are described so differently depending on the character. Among the people I know, we all have different interests, and talk about things differently.
Me and my two best friends, we’re all really different, and we like different things, and you can tell, because of what we talk about. One friend (my cousin, actually) is always explaining to me and my other friend about different math solutions, and randomly drilling us with math problems. My other friend enjoys telling me and my math-loving cousin about music CDs he listens to, and about a new piano or organ he’s been practicing on, and about his aunt’s new songs, and I’m the one who likes talking about my favorite stories (whether it be from a book or a show) and about stories I’m working on, and about a drawing I’m working on, or art supplies I’ve been wanting. It’s really funny, how much we differ in our interests, but still we get along so well!
Trying to do the exercises you had in the post, I found that some of my characters are kind of difficult. Some were kind of easy, my mirror-loving narcissist king might describe the example you used something like, “He folded his arms across his chest, as if focused on cracking a brand-new mirror.”
Thank you for the post! So helpful! I’m excited for Part 2!!!!
Exactly! We’re all so different, and it affects how we view the world. Finding words for that in our stories is definitely easier for some characters than others, but I think you’ll find it adds undeniable flavor for them. =)