POV Pain

A friend and I fought yesterday over which movie to see, The Book Thief or Frozen. There were several levels to our argument, but the one that matters for what I’m writing today goes back to THE BOOK THIEF—the book, not the movie. When I read THE BOOK THIEF a couple of years ago, I loved it. On Goodreads, I gave it four of five possible stars. (This you should know about me: I’m really picky. I rarely rate anything five stars. It takes a damn good book for that, and most books that I’d say are damn good, I still only give four stars.)

One of the main reasons I loved The Book Thief? The narrator of the book is not the MC: the narrator is Death, an outside observer, with a mastery of imagery. I wouldn’t have thought THE BOOK THIEF was as wonderful as I did had it had a different narrator. I didn’t want to see The Book Thief because I was afraid the movie couldn’t live up to anywhere near the book without the narrator and those lovely words.

The narrator, the POV of a book, is very important to me.

Another example is Catching Fire and CATCHING FIRE. Before I saw this second The Hunger Games (THE HUNGER GAMES?) movie, I hadn’t read the books in over three years—I’d bought, read, finished the third book not long after its release. Though I really liked—loved may be taking it a little too far—the third book, I hadn’t liked the second as much. A friend asked if I’d go with her to the movie, so I went (otherwise, I may not have seen it). Truth? I LOVED Catching Fire.

I couldn’t figure out why I’d felt so differently about the book versus the movie. It wasn’t until I (post-Catching Fire) reread the third book that I realized why I loved Catching Fire so much. In the books Suzanne Collins tells the series in present tense through first person POV. While this POV draws in the reader and makes everything feel like it’s happening RIGHT NOW, Katniss can’t know what the other characters are thinking/feeling and therefore can’t convey them to the reader. My favorite things about Catching Fire? Seeing how Peeta and Gale feel about Katniss, seeing the reactions of the other tributes in the arena, seeing what Plutarch and Snow are doing behind the scenes. Katniss in the books just can’t get those across to the reader the way the movie does.

Right, so…why am I going on about POV?

Though I was querying one book, I was entering another into contests. I’d been getting a lot of feedback on the first few pages of my contest MS and most of it was pretty positive. Still, there was some hesitation in what these writers were saying that wasn’t adding up. What was wrong with my first pages? It was sometime after I submitted my materials to Pitch Wars and before Brenda Drake posted the results that I realized one BIG THING that might have been the issue. That BIG THING? I wrote my contest MS in third person. The black beasts stalked her from the shadows instead of The black beasts stalked me from the shadows. This sentence isn’t actually from my MS, but hopefully it gives you an idea of what I realized. I needed my MS to be told in first person. I needed the reader to be closer to my MC.

In theory, it sounds easy enough to change a novel from third to first POV. I sure thought so. Do a mass replacement of she to I. Change her to me. Done in a few minutes. Right? Wrong.

First, lots of girls run through my MS. Not every she is the MC, so every she can’t be changed to I. Also, not every her that refers to the MC can be changed to me; some of them are supposed to be my. (They looked at her compared to They looked at her arms.) Not only that, but I’ve discovered all kinds of them and their that contain my MC and therefore also have to be changed. AND—because those others weren’t enough—when I jumped into my MC’s first person head, more thoughts poured out. Though I’ve cut some words, I’ve added quite a few others. The result is that a project I thought would take a few minutes is taking me hours.

The moral of my little story? Decide your POV before you write the entire novel. It’s hell to change it all after. It’s such hell, in fact, that I’d like to give it up…but I can’t. I want to make my MS better. I want to sign with an agent and get a book deal and see my book on the shelves of bookstores. This quest means I do some tough things, like wade wearily through my MS to make the aforementioned changes. I hope it’ll be worth it. That’s what keeps me going.