On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [96]
Fragments of last night's dream floated back. The way Mom's beautiful face had turned yellow, her skin felt like tissue paper. The way her shiny dark hair had fallen out in tufts until she'd looked like an old, worn doll at a garage sale. ...
Lily stood up—too fast, because a wave of dizziness nearly sent her to the floor.
And then she prayed that she wasn't going to die.
The first choice when you need to share a secondary character's thoughts is to have the character speak them aloud, to have the character talk to the hero or heroine. Here, Rustand could have stayed in the heroine's POV by having Lily talk to the heroine, telling her about her fears. But in this case, Lily's scared out of her mind— unlikely to confide in anyone because voicing her fears would make them even more frightening—so a dialogue would be illogical. The most effective way to share what's going on inside her is to let the readers overhear her thoughts directly.
If you choose to use the viewpoint of a secondary character, make those scenes short and to the point. (Lily's entire scene—not all of it is quoted here— is less than three hundred words, just under a page long.) If the secondary character is important enough to have a POV at all, then she should appear with some regularity—perhaps in a half-dozen short scenes during the story.
But keep in mind that going into the head of a secondary character can pull the readers' attention from the main story. It can be a danger sign, indicating that your main story is dragging and you're trying to fill pages while waiting for the action to heat up again. Or your main characters may have bogged down, and the secondary ones have become more interesting. If the heroine's friend's thoughts are more interesting than the heroine's, perhaps the story is really hers—and she should be the main character instead.
HANDLING POINT OF VIEW
Choose a viewpoint character at the start of each scene. In the first paragraph or two of the scene, in addition to establishing where and when the action is taking place, be sure to tell the readers who the main character is in this part of the story—whose thoughts they will be getting.
That can be done in a variety of different ways:
• Through a thought. "Until that morning, Hannah had started to think it didn't matter what hour of the day or night she walked Mrs. Patterson's dog."
• Through a sensation. "Within two hours of arriving at work, Hannah was beginning to feel as if she'd been buried alive in the law library."
• Through an emotion. "Hannah was steaming, too agitated to sit still."
• Through an action. "Cooper tugged at his bow tie and impatiently straightened the pristine white cuffs of his formal shirt."
• Through a comment about another character. "Wherever Cooper had gone that morning, it wasn't far enough for Hannah's taste."
The Dreaded Wandering Point of View
Whether you intend to use just one POV or several, it's easy to let more than one character's thoughts creep into your scene. You have to know as you write what each character is thinking at that moment (even when you're not using her POV), because what the characters are thinking will affect what they say and do. Because you know what they're thinking, it's very natural to slip up and include those thoughts. Sometimes you aren't even aware that you've wandered from the head of the viewpoint character into that of another.
Drifting from one POV to another can happen so subtly that the lapse sneaks by even the most alert of authors. You don't need to write "Jane thought" in order to include Jane's thoughts. If you write "Jane met Gina as she strolled down the sidewalk. It was good to see Gina taking better care of herself these days," then you've included Jane's thoughts on the subject of Gina's grooming.
This classic example includes three points of view in a single sentence: "Greg looked genuinely horrified as his mind jumped to the same conclusion Cara