Tag Archives: ejecting reader

Getting close to your characters

One of my many (many) pet peeves in writing is being pushed out of a character’s head while I’m reading. We read to experience life from others’ eyes, and I’m very sensitive to being “ejected” from the story. Here are some of the main offenders that pull me out of the story.

Emotional reportage
Does it suddenly sound like the character is summarizing her feelings, like she would in talking about the experience later in a journal or letter or conversation? We’re reading to live vicariously through the characters, to experience these events alongside the characters. When a character starts telling us what she was feeling instead of describing her emotional reaction as she experienced it, it’s that much harder for us to live through her.

Think about it: which gives us a better experience: “I felt sad,” “I was devastated,” or “My heart felt like it had gone hollow, then caved in”? Writing emotions isn’t easy, but it can really bring your story and characters to life instead of leaving them flat.

Jumping to conclusions
When we’re in someone’s point of view, seeing their thoughts right alongside them, obviously we don’t need to see every piece of mental input they receive. But skipping too many logical steps, necessary processing information or even just observations and facts makes it harder for readers to follow.

“He’s great. I like him a lot,” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. But enumerating a love interest’s good qualities—including little details, and unique interpretations/spin on actions—shows us not only that a character is enamored, but how and why. Jumping to conclusions doesn’t let us follow along—it just tells us what to think.

Head words/ “scaffolding”: done all wrong
Head words” are the narration verbs that remind us that the narration we’re reading is the character’s thoughts. But while using these words might look like a great way to “ground” us in the character’s POV, it can often have the opposite effect by constantly reminding the reader that we are reading about a character instead of being fully immersed in them, putting up a scaffolding around the story instead of letting the story shine through.

Sometimes, however, these head words are absolutely necessary: they can add important shades of meaning. “She realized he was wrong” is different from “she knew he was wrong,” “she thought he was wrong” and “he was wrong.” Use head words when they add necessary shades of meaning, and take them out when they don’t. (One of my biggest pet peeves: “wonder.” I will almost always recommend writing “How would he survive?” instead of “She wondered how he would survive.”)

Not using deep POV
It’s been years, but once upon a time, I did a series on deep POV, focusing on some easy-to-apply tips including using the kind of language your character would use, seeing the world as he’d see it, and anchoring in a character’s POV and head early on in a scene and more.

Slavish adherence to “rules” without regard for readability
One example here: we’re told again and again to avoid the past progressive tense (which is NOT the same as the passive voice!!). In general, it’s a good idea: past progressive is wordier and does carry some aspects of passivity. However, those reasons aren’t enough to eliminate it entirely: sometimes past progressive is absolutely necessary for a sentence to make sense.

Reading is a linear kind of thing. We read one past tense verb, then another, and we think they’re sequential when they’re supposed to be overlapping. Compare “He walked in and she leaned against the wall” and “He walked in and she was leaning against the wall.” To me, the first sentence sounds like two sequential actions: he walks in and then she leans on the wall. The second is clear: she was already leaning when he walked in.

When I come across a sentence in a book where one of the actions may or may not be intended to be ongoing, I have to stop and think about the words, instead of continuing to enjoy the characters.

Response, stimulus
In our world, we drop something, and then it falls. Someone surprises us and then we jump. We see a picture of yummy food, we feel hungry, and then we go get something to eat. We have stimuli, and then responses.

The fictional world acts the same way. We have to see the stimulus first, not the response. When I read that someone ducks without seeing a low-hanging branch or something hurtling through the air first, it pulls me out of the story. (Unless, I guess, they have psychic powers.)

Authorial intrusion
There are also lots of ways more subtle ways we can unwittingly popup in our own stories. Roni Loren has a great list of 12 common authorial intrusion pitfalls. Several of them involve putting words in the character’s mouth (or head) that they wouldn’t say or think—“as you know, Bob,” dialogue, things they couldn’t or wouldn’t see, notice or know (yet),

Okay, I admit that as a writer, I’m a sensitive reader. How about you? What pulls you out of a story?

Photo credits: frown—Jacob Earl; scaffolding—James F. Clay

Using head words the right way

This entry is part 6 of 14 in the series Deep POV

Deep POV is popular—almost to the exclusion of any other kind of third-person POV. And as such, there have been a lot of rules promulgated about how to create and maintain deep POV.

But, in case you’re new here, I’m an iconoclast when it comes to arbitrary writing rules. Some of those arbitrary rules that help no one include “never use the character’s name in deep POV,” and “never use ‘head words’ including ‘he thought,’ ‘she assumed,’ or ‘he realized.'” Although head words can often distance our readers from our writing and should often be avoided, I’m with editor/author Alicia Rasley on this one:

I don’t know how to say it any better than this (and you know it anyway, so this is aimed at those others), but you cannot create deep POV by following a list of rules like “Never use the POV character’s name” or “never have the narrator report that she saw something; just say what she saw.” You can only do a good job with deep POV if you know your character so well you know how she thinks, and she will not think the same way another character does, and she might not think the same way in every situation!

Sometimes these verboten head words are actually useful: they can keep from ejecting your readers from the deep POV you’ve worked to hard to establish, and they can add nuances to the character’s thought processes. Both of these are examples of the technique of using detail, then drawing the conclusion.

Nuanced thought processes

Granted, in a lot of amateur writing, there are a lot of gratuitous head words: “His suit looked like a bad ’70s prom tux, Jenny thought to herself.” However, specific head words can add nuance to our characters’ thought processes—they can show how our characters came to their conclusions, rather than just . . . well, jumping to conclusions.

Would these sentences convey the same thing without the head words (and yeah, I’m being a little tricky in using a so-called “head word” as the main verb here, but whatever)?

  • She could never understand him.
  • She realized she could never understand him.
  • She thought she could never understand him.
  • She knew she could never understand him. (And is that different from “She just knew she could never understand him.”?)
  • She could never understand him, she reminded herself.
  • She decided she could never understand him.

Each of those head words adds something to the meaning, showing us how this character came to that knowledge—it’s something new, or something she should have learned by now, or something she’s trying to convince herself of. That’s an important role for head words—unless we just want our characters to have constant epiphanies.

Reading other characters’ minds to not eject readers

Another example of using detail and then showing the conclusion is how we show other character’s emotions and even movements through the eyes of our characters. If we fail to do this, it can frustrate our readers and push them out of our character’s POV.

Now, this is a time to avoid head words (and scaffolding). At the same time, however, we have to be careful to make it clear that we’re not hopping heads. One example of this is in observing other characters’ emotions. If we’re in Timmy’s POV and we just flat out state “Jane felt sad,” (aside from being telling instead of showing), it seems like we’re suddenly in Jane’s POV.

Other characters’ movements can also present this problem. Another example from Alicia Rasley, on the sentence “Joan walked in from the kitchen,” disrupting the deep POV from Tom’s viewpoint [emphasis added]:

Sometimes as I read a passage, I feel ejected, like suddenly I’m not in Tom’s mind, I’m in Joan’s mind, or dangling helplessly in between. When I go back and read to figure out why, it’s often actually a deep POV issue, where the writer has Tom interpreting something from the way Joan speaks or behaves… but because there’s no “Tom thought” in there, it sounds like JOAN.

Okay, let me backtrack. While Tom cannot know what Joan is thinking, he can definitely interpret. This is not weird for the reader, as of course, the reader also cannot read minds but can interpret body language, tone of voice, facial expression, etc. But of course, Tom might or might not be good at this. He might be really empathic and intuitive and see a twitch of her lips and know she’s lying, or he could be the clueless type who thinks he knows what that lip-twitch means (“Oh, she’s going to sneeze!”) but is wrong. But… the important thing is that if it’s significant, if you want the READER to interpret also, the POV character has to notice and narrate it.

As I said before, this is another example of detail-conclusion. Just like we interpret other people’s emotions from their tone and body language, our characters can note other characters’ expressions and then interpret how they’re feeling. Or maybe they don’t need to interpret at all—maybe leaving it to the readers is even better in some cases.

What do you think? Are there any other uses for “head words”? What makes these uses okay but so many other uses bad?

Photo credits: plunge—Konrad Mostert; frustrated—John De Boer