TO HOP OR NOT TO HOP:
Why POV matters in storytelling
by
Paula Graves 

POV is an important, overlooked part of writing, especially in romances. Romance is about exploring your characters and their feelings. Readers want to be immersed in a character, seeing things from her eyes, feeling what she feels, sensing what she senses, including her fears and uncertainties. One of the primary ways a good romance writer can accomplish this reader immersion is to stay in the character's POV for the length of a scene. No head-hopping. You see everything from the character's POV--including doubts, fears and confusion about what the other character may be thinking or feeling.

It helps build the tension between the characters if we can see the heroine's doubts about the hero without immediately seeing the hero's thoughts, which might diffuse the tension the heroine is feeling. 

But some scenes lend themselves to multiple points of view. So how do you do it right?

I have two rules for POV shifts within a scene, if you absolutely have to do it: make 'em matter and make 'em smooth.

1) Make 'em matter.

Here's an example. John and Mary. John, a high powered corporate attorney, has just taken a case defending a power company against a wrongful death suit. Mary, who is a private investigator, has just been hired by the team of lawyers representing the woman whose husband was killed by an accident with a live power line. John and Mary have just started seeing each other, and each of them has doubts going into the relationship. When they meet for lunch and discover that they're now on opposite sides of the same trial, they get into an argument about who is going to step down from the case.

Let's say you start with Mary's POV. She's horrified that John would even take the case to begin with--representing the powerful against the little guy. John's oh-so-reasoned explanations only serve to irritate her more. She's working herself up into a fine fury. Now, if we show this all from Mary's POV, we have sympathy for her. We understand why she's getting angry, why she feels hurt and disappointed.

But what if we stuck in some thoughts from John's POV? What if we learned that he's representing the power company because he truly believes that the lawsuit is frivolous? His investigators are following leads about the accident that may prove that the man who died was illegally tampering with the power lines for a criminal reason and that his death was as a result of his own stupidity and venality. He can't tell Mary about the investigation for legal reasons, but if we get a glimpse of his POV, we find out that the hero isn't some money-grubbing trial lawyer trying to protect big corporations from legitimate lawsuits.

Now, you could go either way with this scene: A) stay in Mary's head and subtly set up John's POV by what he says and what Mary observes of his body language or B) shift POVs to let us see both sides of the story within the scene. The choice you make depends on how important it is to convey the fact that John has good and honorable motives for doing something that Mary finds reprehensible on its face. If you do the head-hopping thing, you get that out in the open in one scene--but you also lose some of the suspense that comes with not knowing quite what's going on. If you stick to Mary's POV, you create tension, not only between the characters but also for the reader, who has liked John up to this point and finds herself disturbed by his decision to do something that Mary finds so disappointing. Only in a later scene does she learn that he has his own noble motives--the pay off to the set-up.

2) Make 'em smooth.

If you're going to have POV shifts, I suggest finding a way to back out of one person's head and slide smoothly into another's. Here's an example of a way to do it. Back to the John and Mary scene:


       Mary stared at John, unable to process his words. He was going to 
       stay on the Municipal Power case? He gazed back at her, his 
       expression betraying not even a hint of conflict or remorse.
       She turned to look out the picture window at the busy street, her 
       mind swirling. A bus passed by, ripples of heat radiating from beneath 
       its belly. An advertisement spanned its length. She curled her lips as 
       she read the big blue block letters: MUNICIPAL POWER: PARTNERS 
       IN PROGRESS.

       John followed her gaze out the window and noted the advertisement. 
       He wondered if Mary knew anything about Municipal Power that wasn't 
       contained in the advocacy group's brief. Did she know about the yearly 
       holiday drive Municipal sponsored to provide a year's worth of free 
       power to over a thousand needy families? Did she know about the
       expense and time the company had spent less than two years ago to 
       update the grid and double and triple-check safety measures in the 
       city's system of lines and transformers?


Do you see what I mean by a smooth transition? I backed out of Mary's POV, showed her something--the bus--that was significant enough to catch and hold the reader's attention. Then I shifted the reader over to John by having him see what the reader was seeing and take it from there.

Make 'em matter and make 'em smooth.  

© 2004 Paula Graves