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.)

Here we are a year ago on a writing retreat! This year’s has been delayed. *Cries*

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.