Making POV Work For You.

One of the things I see often in submissions is difficulty with Point of View (POV). Here are a few helps. Point of View refers to which character is experiencing the action. If you're having trouble, here are some tips.

•  One easy way to keep track of POV is to first write a scene in first person. This is particularly beneficial if you’ve ever had that tendency to slip in to omniscient POV. After your scene is finished, go back and put in your character’s name for the I’s, my's, etc..
  
•  After you write a scene (or if you don’t do a scene by scene check, after you’ve written a chapter) go back designate a font color for your hero, your heroine and perhaps a villain (each POV gets a different color). Omniscient gets its own color, too. 
  
• What you don’t want to see is it the color changing every other line.
• Basically, a good rule of thumb is no more than two view points per scene.
•  For romance, if your scene is omniscient, start over, write from one POV, you can always write in first person and then decide in whose viewpoint the scene should be.
• As a guideline, POV should be held by whoever has the most at risk, at stake because that’s where your emotion is going to be.

 These are just a few helps with point of view.

• Use font color to track POV, you can always change this back to all black easily.
• No omniscient point of view, and
• Write from the person who has the most at stake in the scene.

 Happy Writing,

 Eve, Cactus Rose