You’re writing your novel in the third-person limited, referring to characters as he or she or by their names, and confining yourself to one perspective character—your camera.

That means everything you write must be seen through that camera: your perspective character’s eyes, ears, and mind.

If you’re a beginning writer, this may sound tricky, because you might assume you must write in the first person, having your perspective character refer to himself or herself as I.

But, no, you’re writing in the third-person limited—the most common style for contemporary prose.

It must be clear to the reader who the perspective character is—even if they don’t think in those terms. In the example that follows, that character happens to be alone, so, naturally, she’s immediately identified.

A writer submitted this to me, asking how he could better describe this character so her legalism and self-righteousness are depicted.

The original:

Mother Clotilde sat behind an ornate desk absentmindedly fingering a string of beads encircling her waist. She looked like something you unearthed at a dig. She leafed through a thick leather-bound Bible.

Did you catch the POV violation?

Mother Clotilde is herself the perspective character, and because she’s alone, you can’t really say she “looked like something you unearthed at a dig.” Needless to say, she would not describe herself that way.

It’s not a bad word picture, but to get it into the story, it’ll have to come up in conversation. Perhaps another nun describes her to a novitiate, thus: “You can’t miss her. She looks like something unearthed at a dig.”

Having an experienced nun finger her rosary beads while reading her Bible really says nothing about her, let alone that she’s self-righteous or legalistic.

It would be a mistake and appear to be obvious “telling” to reveal this through an inner monologue wherein she muses about the good old days, the stricter rules, and the folly of the new nuns who seem so liberal to her.

Better, for now, to just hint at this and let the reader deduce it, thus:

Mother Clotilde sat at her immaculately arranged [See how this says something about her while ornate merely says something about the furniture?] ornate desk, fingering a string of beads encircling her waist as she slowly read [There’s a big difference between a woman who slowly reads her Bible and one who merely leafs through it; she takes this seriously] from her thick leather bound Bible.

Now it would be good to linger on her a bit, to subtly convey character traits. You might say she “glanced at the clock and noticed she had six minutes and 15 seconds more reading time before her next obligation. But before turning back to her Bible, she meticulously repositioned her letter opener, which had somehow become no longer exactly perpendicular to the edge of the desk.”

See how that fastidiousness and precision and sense of obligation reveals at least the legalistic side of her, if not the self-righteous?

In the Comments section, tell me how you’ll apply these POV tips to your work-in-progress.

The post Avoid These Sneaky (but Deadly) Point-of-View Mistakes appeared first on Jerry Jenkins | Write Your Book.