An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Ten -- He was obviously breaking POV

Point of view, or POV, is a thing which vexes us authors. I'm not going to go into all the subtleties of it, because it's a thing which extends well beyond line editing. But I am going to talk about some little words that weaken your POV. Before that, though, let's remind ourselves about what it actually means to have a point of view.

The points of view are named for the types of pronoun they use to describe the main character. A first person POV uses 'I' and 'me'. In this POV, you're directly in the head of the protagonist. (I read a weird blog which claimed that using 'we' and 'us' is called 'fourth person'. I would call that 'first person plural' but what do I know?) We all know this POV. I've heard various passionate arguments for and against it, I have no opinions... But whatever, we're line editing now, so you made that decision when you wrote your first draft.

Second person is for when you write one of those game books that were cool in the eighties, like Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy (or if you want to be a real hipster about it, Lone Wolf, which was absolutely the best of the bunch). YOU are the hero. You walk into a room and fall down a pit, you are dead, go back to paragraph one. Mechanically these are somewhere between third and first, but I won't dwell on it too much, because I doubt you're writing such a thing (or a postmodernist classic like If on a winter's night a traveller, which also uses second person).

Third person is the workhorse of fiction. However, there are two main types here: third person limited, and third person omniscient. In limited, you're stuck to a particular character, hence the name. This is absolutely the norm for most commercial fiction. In omniscient, however, you are everywhere; you can see all. This isn't used so much. Stuff written in this mode tends to read like a fairy tale; you flit between events and people and places, without preferring anything.

Within third person limited, you can decide how close you are to the mind of the character you're following. A very close third person limited might not use 'thought' tags, or even italics for thoughts: the character's direct experiences will leak into the text, almost like first person. A more distant third limited might not show inner thoughts at all. (Remember how I said that 'thought' was complicated in the filtering chapter? Yeah, this is it.)

The convention is to maintain the same point of view until you get to a chapter or section break. This is a convention, but it's a very well-kept one. Even books with complicated POV setups respect this. When we don't, the term we use is 'breaking POV'. The classic way that we break POV is so-called 'head-hopping' which is when we accidentally jump into the thoughts of a character who isn't the focus of this section.

You knew all this though, right? What you might not know are the weird ways that we can micro-break POV. And they are fixed with our favourite tool... (holds laptop up in fantasy power pose, streams of red lighting flow into it, massive explosion, baddies are dispatched) ...LINE EDITING!

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So to the first rule: establish POV as soon as possible. For first and second that's pretty easy, you just have a sentence with 'I' or 'you' in it. For third limited, it's harder. In practical terms it means that one of the first sentences of a section should be in the POV of the focus character. I say 'one of'; you're fine sticking some omniscient description in there, but the first sentence dealing with a sentient being should be to do with your point of view character. It has been a long time since you last sampled my sparkling writing. Let's fix that with some examples!

The green clouds rolled down the brick mountain, stinking like rancid soup. Keller picked up his pogo stick, grimaced, and adjusted the fusion drive. It was go time.