3) Don’t use a reflexive point of view. Avoid these types of constructions: Mary saw he didn’t know Marcie was sarcastic. Better: He flinched at Marcie’s sarcastic words. If you are in a point of view, just state what happens. Avoid reflexive constructions: he noticed, saw, knew, wondered, thought, decided, and so forth.
4) Remember that point of view is not a box that the author must cram the story into. Point of view is a way of experiencing the story, and authors use whatever works for them to create the best story possible.
5) For tension in the story, are the differences between the narrator’s point of view and the character’s point of view clear to the reader?
E. Engage the Reader
Many readers never achieve the experience of immersion in a fictional story. Many stories don’t provide the clarity of telling or the inherent drama needed for the reader to be immersed. In fact, in the minds of many, the literary story contains excessive internal reflection—abstract, metaphoric, lyrical, static—that readers must work to follow. But the great literary story is vibrant with action, brimming with interesting characters, and can’t be put down. The literary story engages the reader, not just to solve an unknown or see how a known plot ending will work out, but with concern for the resolution and character change, as if the characters were real and worthy of sympathy. This reader immersion has been called the continuous fictional dream. Not a bad metaphor, like going below the surface of a fluid fiction environment—specific to each story but similar in its effect on a reader—where characters come to life and do their thing with the reader right there with them.
The author must keep readers in the story and prevent breaking their unwavering involvement while reading. A reader loses total concentration when something throws them out of the story—like breaking the tissue or fabric of the story. Although these disruptive missteps can occur easily, and are sometimes unavoidable (authors can’t please every personality), common problems can be prevented: missteps in characterization; illogical cause and effect; inaccurate, nonsupportive metaphors; wrong word choice; excessive narration when in-scene action is needed; authorial intrusion; obscure images; awkward syntax; and anything that causes the reader to pull back and wonder if that was right, or if it could be done better..
F. Distance
The narrator is narrating the story. The story is not the world. Yet a story has a defined space, and the position of the reader in the story varies depending on the reader’s relationship to the action. A reader can be given information close to the action, or far away.
Distance from the scene action can come into play when: (1) a narrator informs the reader of a distant or close perspective directly, and (2) a character who orients the reader to distance from action is used by the narrator to present story information. The reader’s distance from the action is created through word choice (particularly verbs and adverbs), type of images, character senses employed, and use of internal reflection. To erase reader discomfort caused by shifts in the distance from the action requires attention to transitions and the restructuring of scenes (see Example 9).
