I stumbled upon an interesting blog post at The Emperor’s Notepad. There, his imperial majesty addresses the subject of “deep point of view,” a technique of narration that is currently in vogue. His post is entitled, “Deep POV Is Shallow,” and I recommend perusing it.
I can’t recall if I’d heard the particular term before, but I recognize the technique: it means writing in third person, but sticking with a particular character’s point of view and remaining in that single point of view throughout a scene, with no “head-hopping.”
His majesty explains that he believes the technique is over-used because an omniscient third-person narrator can be more useful in many cases for setting scenes with less dreary dialogue and fewer awkward tags. He makes his case well.
As long as we’re coining phrases, I’m going to say that my own preferred technique when writing in third-person is “descending POV.” Readers familiar with my work may notice that I usually begin by setting a scene, and then move in to focus on an individual who becomes the consistent POV character for that particular scene.
But I’m not strict about it. Sometimes I cheat, of course: Jake and the Dynamo opens with an omniscient narrator and then descends into the POV of the Dark Queen for the first scene. In the second scene, it remains in omniscient POV throughout, but sneaks into Grease Pencil Marionette’s head near the end. Most of the rest of the book is from Jake’s POV, with occasional diversions to the Dark Queen, Chirops, and Marionette. A few characters are not allowed, for arbitrary reasons known to the author, to be POV characters at all, ever. Among them is Pretty Dynamo.
My preferred method is analogous to a film setting up with a location shot. The inability to do this is his imperial majesty’s primary complaint about so-called deep POV. So as an answer to both him and the writers he criticizes, I will claim it is actually possible to have one’s cake and eat it too on this matter. Although an admittedly new author, I have never yet received a complaint about the way I start with an omniscient narrator and then focus in, though I did just once receive a compliment for it.
