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How to incorporate deep point of view in your writing

Today, I’m going to explore in depth a very famous piece of advice for writers:

show, don’t tell.

Mastering the art of ‘showing’ in your writing can be the difference between being an average writer and a great one.

But what’s ‘showing’ and how can you incorporate it into your story?

‘Showing’ (also known as deep point of view) is writing as if you’re in the character’s head – you get to know everything they see, hear, feel, understand, and experience.

Everything is filtered through the character’s senses and how they view the world.

While ‘showing’ paints a vivid picture in one’s mind, ‘telling’ (also known as shallow writing) is simply stating what’s happened in the story.

Showing gives the reader a much richer and more interesting experience, which is why it should be incorporated into your story as often as possible.

And then there’s telling.

Here’s an example of telling in a sentence:

Sara felt cold, so quickly put her woollen coat on.

As you can see, this sentence is just simply stating the facts.

Now let’s edit it to incorporate showing:

Sarah shivered, teeth chattering violently as she hurriedly put her woollen coat on, hugging herself tightly amidst the biting winds.

The second example is a much stronger sentence, putting a more vivid illustration in the reader’s mind, as it shows how cold Sarah is, while the first sentence just tells us how cold she is.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
– William Faulkner

A story is a mixture of both showing and telling, and knowing which one to incorporate at any given time is crucial.

However, YOU the author are always the boss, and must decide on when to show and when to tell.

Generally telling is used for minor events in a story that aren’t dramatic or emotional, to move the pace along.

For example when:

Time has passed;
A character travels from point A to point B;
Sharing facts about backstory;
Sharing facts about the character’s world;
Sharing facts about the setting;
Sharing facts about mundane events.

Use showing for:

The character’s emotions;
The character’s attitudes;
Dramatic events;
The character’s sensory experiences, for example being hot and sweaty, cold and wet, thirsty or hungry,

As mentioned before, you’re the ultimate boss over your writing, so you can break the rules when you see fit, but try to use showing and telling as appropriately as you can.

If you continually ask yourself, how can I make this sentence better? you can hardly go wrong!

BEAUTIFUL WORD OF THE DAY: BIBLIOPHILE. Meaning someone who loves books (me!). Someone that takes their love of books too far is a BIBLIOMANIAC.

Now let’s talk about filter words. They’re words that put the character in the spotlight of the text, instead of the character’s experience.

They go against the show, don’t tell rule because they tell the reader what’s happening, rather than let the reader interpret what’s happening for themselves.

They include verbs such as saw, heard, listened, tasted, smelled, felt, touched, noticed, looked, etc.

They also include verbs related to thought processes, such as decided, knew, considered, regarded, realised, wondered, remembered, noted, thought, etc.

They state emotions rather than showing them, creating a less immersive experience for the reader.

Remember: don’t state – show!

Here’s an example of a paragraph with several filter words, which I’ve underlined:

I woke up and felt my head throbbing from the excess wine I had last night. I also felt sick in the stomach. I knew I’d be far too sick to go to work that day. I turned my head and looked around my bedroom. I saw my mobile phone lying on the bedside table, glinting in the sunlight. Time to call in sick, I thought.

Let’s try revising this paragraph, taking out the filter words and incorporating showing:

I woke up with an uneasy stomach and a pounding head. The wine last night really packed a punch. Going to work that day would be absolutely impossible. I turned my head, and the mobile phone on my bedside table glinted in the sunlight. Time to call in sick.

As you can see, the revised sentence is tightened up and much stronger as a result.

Imagine you’re in a stadium, watching your beloved team play football, when halfway through, a security guard suddenly whisks you away from the stadium, towards another room. Once there, he tells you which team won, gives you a polite nod, and then scurries you out the exit.

No doubt you’d be angry. He just deprived you of the sensory delights of the game, the excited jumping for joys and the looks of crushing defeat, the cheers and boos of the crowd, the anticipation of the final kick, the excited tone of the commentator, the tension of not knowing what the outcome would be, etc. It’s what you’ve paid good money for!

This is similar to what the reader experiences when the writer tells them what’s happening in the story.

They’re really just reading a report, while being deprived of all the interesting sensory details.

This not only distances the reader, it tells them that they’re not being trusted to figure out what’s going on for themselves.

YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE: THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams. This is a comedy science fiction novel as well as a franchise! Originally it was a radio broadcast on the BBC, then it was later adapted to a novel, stage show, comic book, TV series, game and film. The Earth has been destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and Arthur Dent escapes the destruction with help from Ford Prefect (an alien writer for the travel guide The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). There, Dent’s adventures begin as he explores the galaxy with Prefect.

Filter words put distance between the reader and the story (also known as narrative distance) because the reader is being taken out of the story.

In other words, they’re not being given an immersive experience, where they feel as if they’re there.

When going over your draft, see how many filter words you can get rid of to improve your text.

It may not be possible or realistic to get rid of every single filter word, but see how many you can let go of.

They often clog your paragraphs up, making them unnecessarily wordy.

Showing, telling, and filter words all have their place in writing, and with practice, you get better and better at deciding where that place should be.

For further reading and examples on this, I recommend Fiction Editing Tools by S.A. Soule.

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Related post: How to improve your writing.

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How to improve your fiction writing

Writing is not an easy job. It involves lots of hard work and solitary hours bashing away at the keyboard, trying to create something interesting.

It can be lonely and frustrating, and you have to deal with other villains too, like writer’s block, self-doubt and procrastination.

I’ve definitely been there and dealt with all the common struggles writers go through (you can read about them in my previous blogs, From beginner to author – what I’ve learned, part 1 and part 2).

It can be a rough and bumpy road, this writing gig, but if you love it you’ve got to learn to deal with the bad stuff and just keep on going. Keep striving to be better.

But how do you get better?

In this blog I will share the many ways you can improve on your writing.

Practice

First and foremost, like any other skill, if you want to get better you’ve got to practice. It’s like building a muscle. If you want to get stronger, you’ve got to put in the work to get there.

Practice writing every day, or at least most days of the week, even if it’s just for five minutes. You can do this without having a writing project going on too. The more you write, the better you’ll get at it.

Want to write a novel one day but don’t feel confident in your writing skills just yet? Why not try honing your skills with writing prompts and/or short stories for six months to a year beforehand?

Write Now by Ellie Marney is chock-full of over 90 creative writing prompts for you to cut your writing teeth on.

Keep a journal

You can also practice writing by journaling every day. Sharpen your writing skills by describing a scene or a setting of your choice using all some or all of your senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and hearing.

Write down everyday observations, or just describe how you’re feeling on the day – this can have therapeutic benefits too.

Literature is also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
– Julian Barnes

If you want to try something a bit different in your journal, experiment by trying a bit of free writing.

This is just writing whatever comes into your head, without any pausing or back-editing. This is both good writing practice and a good ideas generator.

Some writers do a bit of free writing before they start working on their novel for the day.

Keep it simple

If a sentence is too wordy, it makes it hard to read. Are there any words or phrases you can leave out?

Can the language be simpler or more direct? Can one word say what you mean instead of two?

Simple sentences are much easier to read than complicated ones.

Kill your darlings

Are you over-explaining things and adding too much detail?

Get rid of anything that’s not necessary in your story – be it a character, storyline, paragraph, sentence or piece of writing.

You may have spent a lot of time working on it and become attached to it and it might hurt, but you must do it. You must kill your darlings.

This is where you’ve got to be ruthless for the sake of a good story.

Go over your writing and if anything doesn’t move the story forward or need to be there, get rid of it.

Vary sentence length

Make sure you vary the sentence length so that your writing has a nice flow.

Keep a notebook handy

Jot down ideas so that they don’t run away from you. Keep your notebook handy at all times, so you never miss an idea.

WEIRD WORD OF THE DAY: HANGRY. Meaning anger caused by being hungry.

Get feedback from others

It’s essential to get another pair of eyes on your manuscript, as you’re often too close to your work to be truly objective. It’s surprising how many little errors you can miss, just because you’ve seen your work too many times!

There are many ways to get feedback.

You can get yourself a critique partner whose opinion you respect, or get feedback from members of a writing class, or from beta readers.

Part of being a writer is learning how to handle criticism and use it in a positive way to improve your skills. Having said that, you don’t have to agree with every bit of feedback you get.

A thick skin is a necessary part of the process, as not everyone will like your writing or give your book a positive review. Learn to roll with it, and always get your book professionally edited.

Read widely and often

It’s essential to read a lot if you want to be a good writer, for several reasons:

It expands your vocabulary;
You acquire knowledge;
You gain a better understanding of language;
You gain inspiration and ideas;
It teaches you how to be a better writer through learning what works and what doesn’t;
You learn more about your chosen genre;
It enriches you on a personal level;
Studies show it even increases empathy.

Read outside your genre too. The reason for this is that you may discover useful things in other genres that you may not have found elsewhere.

For example, you may be a fantasy writer, but reading an occasional thriller may teach you valuable lessons about pacing and tension that you haven’t found from reading your regular stuff.

The more you read, the more information there is to draw from, and the richer your inner world will be.

Cut out unnecessary adverbs

My Macquarie Little Dictionary definition of adverbs is “a part of speech comprising words used to limit a verb, adjective, or another adverb, by expressing time, manner, place, cause, degree, etc.”

Adverbs are words that often end in ‘ly’. It’s okay to use adverbs every now and again, but if you’re using them all the time, you’re most likely using weaker word choices.

Think you’re using them too much? Then try other things.

For example:

Instead of writing ‘she was really beautiful’, write
‘she was gorgeous’.

Instead of writing ‘it was extremely cold’, write
‘it was freezing’.

The first sentences use adverbs, while the second sentences use stronger word choices.

Show, don’t tell

Showing an emotion, person, thing or event through your words is stronger than telling about the emotion, person, thing or event.

For example, consider this sentence:

Cecilia was a nice person.

Then this one:

Cecilia devoted every weekend to driving around the city, feeding the homeless from meals she prepared with her own hands.

The first sentence tells us that Cecilia is a nice person, while the second shows us that Cecilia is a nice person.

Showing is much more effective and interesting than telling, however, having said that, stories are a mixture of both showing and telling.

It’s a matter of getting the balance right, of deciding when to show and when to tell in your story.

Most of us live fairly sedate, mundane kind of lives, where that sort of life and death, the enormity of those moments, most of the time, thank God, is not part of our daily existence. And so, the story then becomes, in some ways, a surrogate for that kind of intensity of experience.
– A.J. Hartley

Read your story out loud

Reading your story out loud can really help you pick up bits of your story that aren’t flowing well.

Keep a thesaurus

Sick of using the same words all the time, and want to find something different? Then keep a thesaurus handy, a reference book for finding similar words. You can check out a free online thesaurus here.

Learn from others

Learn from the wisdom of others, who’ve done everything and made all the mistakes before you. You could do a course on writing if you prefer learning this way, through the countless online courses available out there, or if a course isn’t your thing, you can get great tips by reading books on novel writing.

You could try reading Creative Writing for Dummies by Maggie Hamand or Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

Why do everything yourself and learn the hard way, when you can take a shortcut and get valuable advice?

There is so much help out there, so make sure you take advantage of it, but at the same time feel free to disagree with advice that doesn’t feel right to you.

Use software to improve your writing

Software like ProWritingAid and Grammarly give you feedback on your writing as well as provide regular writing tips.

Scrivener helps you organise your writing work and research, so everything’s there at your fingertips when you need it. It does many other things too, including allowing you to order your scenes and move them around easily.

Striving to improve is an eternal process. Never stop doing it, and happy writing!

Finally, before I go, it’s time for – drumroll:

YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE: A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, this historical novel is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time. Set in London and Paris against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. A French Doctor named Manette is held in the Bastille as a political prisoner and is finally released after a long 18 years to join his daughter Lucie in England. Their lives later become entangled with two men that fall in love with Lucie, and they find themselves drawn back to Paris during the height of the dangerous Reign of Terror.

It’s impossible for me to talk about A TALE OF TWO CITIES without talking about the opening first sentence, which has become very famous. It’s beautifully written and intense and I LOVE it! Here it is:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

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How to write believable emotions for your characters

characters, writing tips / Tania

This blog talks about how to nail your character’s emotions in your story, in other words, bring a sense of authenticity to their emotional self.

Why is this important? Why not quickly throw a character together without doing the slightest bit of research?

And why not have them act out their emotions in a way that suits you and goes well with the plot?

The simple answer is your characters need to be believable. If a reader doesn’t believe that a character would act in the way you’ve described, they’ll fail to engage with the character.

Readers want to feel engaged and connected to your characters. They want to relate to your characters on a personal level and have them evoke something in them, and they can’t do this if the characters don’t feel believable to them.

Believability is important to your story too, as it helps the reader feel as if they’re there in the world you’ve created.

Even if what you’ve created is complete fantasy, there still has to be an element of feasibility and realism (this is what the Harry Potter series has achieved, making the magical seem real).

Without realism in your world, plot and characters, your story will come across as one-dimensional and flat. You’ll also lose the mood of the story due to a lack of credibility.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
– Carl Jung

Overall, believable characters are important because they increase empathy and engagement in the reader, drive the plot, make the story memorable and give the story credibility through realism.

So let’s get to the basics of creating a character’s emotional self.

Humans can differ a great deal emotionally. For example, some may be demonstrative and open, whilst others may be more reserved, uncomfortable in sharing their feelings.

Emotions can also vary in strength from person to person, so in view of this it’s important to do research on your characters, even if that means constructing a very basic character sketch.

Back story

Create a brief back story on your character, a history of what led them to be who they are. Decide on basic facts such as family, geography, education, money, social standing, social life and career.

Also include past traumas if relevant, as this will have a strong bearing on their emotions.

Include people who’ve been important to them, and experiences that have made an impact.

Do research and decide on their basic personality traits. For help on this, you may want to check out my previous blogs on the Myers-Briggs personality traits system and The Big Five personality model.

After deciding on traits, it’s helpful to imagine their emotions in real-life situations and conversations and imagine how they would react emotionally in each case.

Every day reactions

Imagine your character going about their daily life. How do they deal with minor irritations and setbacks on a day to day level? What’s their baseline emotional self like?

UGLY WORD OF THE DAY: Blateration. Meaning constant, idiotic chatter.

Determine their emotional range

Decide where they sit on the emotional expressiveness spectrum. Are they comfortable with sharing how they feel and showing their emotions or is the thought of revealing how they feel horrifying to them?

Are they uncomfortable with displays of emotion and keep their feelings under wraps? Or do they fall somewhere in the middle, between these two extremes?

Out there or reserved

How expressive is the character and how do they use their body language? For example, if they heard good news, would they be reserved and just smile, or would they be more animated, making excited hand gestures while hugging/squealing?

Comfort level

How comfortable are they in opening up? Are they naturally open, or are they open only with certain people? Or are they secretive and tight-lipped?

How do they react to stimulus

How do they react to various stimulus? For example, how would they react to seeing a large spider crawling towards them? Would they calmly kill the thing or would they scream in fear?

Emotional trauma

Is there a painful event in the past that your character hasn’t fully dealt with? Is there anything that makes them uncomfortable due to trauma? Emotional wounds have the potential to completely derail one’s life.

Insecurities

Does your character harbour any insecurities from childhood?

Remember once you’ve done your research on your subject and gotten a handle on their emotional self, keep their character consistent.

Don’t have them go off and do something completely out of character without any logical explanation.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.
– Carl Jung

How does your character react when under threat?

Decide how your character mostly reacts when under threat. They can only react in three ways: fight, flight, or freeze.

The fight reaction is when they confront the threat head-on, preparing to battle if necessary through fighting words or actions.

The flight reaction is when they want to run from the threat, quickly looking for the nearest exit to flee.

This could also be in the form of changing the subject in a conversation or using an excuse to leave.

The freeze reaction is when they neither fight nor flee, but freeze, unable to find the right words or actions to help themselves in the situation.

Decide what response your character tends towards.

YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE: Coraline by Neil Gaman. A dark fantasy horror children’s novella published in 2002. An 11-year-old girl called Coraline moves into a new apartment with her mum and dad and becomes interested in a strange door there. When she ventures through the door, she finds a parallel universe inhabited by alternate versions of her parents, who call themselves her “Other Mother” and “Other Father”. When Coraline returns to her apartment she finds her real parents have gone missing. She decides to journey back through the door to the parallel universe to go look for them, but the evil Other Mother awaits her.

How can emotions be shown in writing?

Emotions can be shown in various ways in writing, including dialogue, subtext in dialogue (hidden meaning behind the words), vocal cues, body language, thoughts, and internal body sensations.

Vocal cues can be powerful tools to show different emotional states. Volume can be turned up to a furious shout or turned down to a husky whisper.

Tone can be trembling due to terror, cracked due to oncoming tears or be a monotone due to repressed anger.

Emotions can distort reality and blind you to the truth – like when you’re first falling in love. Full of love chemicals, you fail to see the other’s flaws – they’re dimmed or non-existent, ‘cause there’s so much good stuff going on.

The scary and dangerous thing about emotions is that they’re like fires – if left untended, they can keep growing till they become very powerful.

Then before you know it, they become hard to reverse and/or control, so make sure you reach out for help as soon as you can if your emotions start to feel like they’re getting on top of you!

Here’s what Paul Ekman, a famous American psychologist, had to say about emotions:

“Emotions can override…the more powerful fundamental motives that drive our lives: hunger, sex, and the will to survive. People will not eat if they think the only food available is disgusting. They may even die, although other people might consider that same food palatable. Emotions triumphs over the hunger drive! A person may never attempt sexual contact because of the interference of fear or disgust, or may never be able to complete a sexual act. Emotion triumphs over the sex drive! And despair can overwhelm even the will to live, motivating a suicide. Emotions triumph over the will to live! (from Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life).

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