I slept late…..I’m on vaaaaacaaaaation!!! Hope to see Harry Potter today and Zorro tomorrow (hey, that rhymes!) Annnd, finished DLB, ready to mail. Now, onto Surface!

This isn’t a post about changing point of view, or staying in one point of view, it’s about becoming your character and looking through their eyes. Deep POV, I guess.

When I started writing Don’t Look Back, one of my cps told me to make sure my hero and heroine’s voice sounded different from each other. What a concept, right? But a lot of books don’t have this. You can read one paragraph and go to the next and though you KNOW it’s changed POV, you can’t TELL. The hero and heroine sound the same. I hadn’t thought about it. I think mine do, but I’m not sure – Trish, JoAnn?

I think the hero’s POV is usually the one with the most trouble. Men are not as wordy as women, they are more direct, and they don’t use words like “flaxen” and such to describe women’s hair. I think it’s word choice more than length of sentence that draws me out. I wanted this scene in Hot Shot where he sees her with a French pedicure, only I knew he wouldn’t call it a French pedicure. We had a speaker at school who had a pedicure, and I went to the men asking them how they would describe her nails. “Tiny,” “Sexy” and “Pink” were my answers. Sigh. I went with pink.

Then there are the sensibilities. Some characters have “old” ideas, or know things they shouldn’t at their age. Now, I was born to a young mother, but she was born to an old mother (Gigi was an old maid, had my mom when she was 35 – old in the 40s). So I know a lot of things my peers don’t know. Sometimes I read about a character and think, but how do they know about that? They’re 15 years younger than me! I even read part of a YA where the character sounded more like a kid from the 80s than a kid from today.

In Surface, I had to cut a bit about video games that I loved, but I couldn't use it. My heroine had grown up traveling the world with her parents, and my hero had grown up spending all his time studying to get out of his home situation. Neither of them were video game freaks. A way that I kind of avoid age gaffes is to look at my younger brother (not the baby, the one coming over today to fix my heater). Would he say or do it? Then neither would my characters.