Selecting the best Point of View for your scene

Finally, Southern California got some rain!  "It was the biggest storm to hit San Diego in several years," said the reporter on the street corner in his windbreaker.  Street gutters became flooded and people got their feet wet.  Actually, I have to admit, the wind was pretty strong.  Two very large branches tore off a couple of my trees in the back yard, but that was about it. 

  While I watched the rain come down, I did some editing on a novel for a friend of mine.  The particular scene I was working on was great, but something was missing. After a while I figured it out.  It was written from the wrong POV.The way she had it written, the words were passive, the action telling instead of showing.  I started to wonder if my own scenes I've been stumbling on were written the same way.  Something I'll have to check on.  Let me give an example.

 

Take the novel, Gone with the Wind.  In the scene where Melly is going to have her baby and Scarlett runs off to find Dr. Meade, the author Mitchell could have shifted POV to Dr. Meade, to show him exhausted, trying to save the lives of as many of the fallen Confederate soldier's as he could.  As a doctor, he was used to seeing death and dying- we would have felt his powerlessness, his exhaustion. We would have seen Scarlett coming toward him, stepping over bodies. we would have felt his annoyance at her selfishness. 

As it was, Margaret Mitchell wrote the novel all from the POV of Scarlett O'Hara.  From her POV it was far more powerful.  We felt her anger at having to stay with a woman she didn't like.  As a southern belle, she wasn't brought up to be around something so harsh as war.  We felt her shock, her dismay to see the south falling around her ears, her disgust of the dying and her horror and fright to think she would have to do it herself.  In that scene we still got Dr. Meade's side of things as he snapped at Scarlett that he didn't have any medicine to relieve their suffering.

Which held more power to a reader?

Novels now are usually written through several Points of Views changing sometimes every scene.  Try looking over your scenes to see if the drama or action or even romance could be better told their another characters eyes.

If you have any questions, send me an email.