Day 25: That Time At NaNo When You Change Your POV

NaNoWriMo Day 25

Okay, not changing it so much. Just removing one altogether. Don’t panic: I’m going to do the deletions AFTER Nov. 30, but I won’t strain myself to insert this POV into the narrative flow of my remaining 18k words.

A YA writer that I follow on Twitter, Dahlia Adler (give her a follow as she’s massively clever and wears a tiara in her photo – nuff said), threw out a question on her feed about POV today. It tweaked a thought that I’d had last night as I was writing from an alternate POV to that of my MC. That thought was: this sucks.

That’s harsh. More extraneous, unnecessary and distracting. I actually posed my doubts to Dahlia and she heartily affirmed that especially in a YA, bringing in a second POV, even more especially when the character is a really old guy (even a lovable curmudgeon like him), is a bad idea. 

So I spent some time today edumacating myself about POV in writing, and vowed to leave that alternate POV out of my remaining 6 days of NaNo writing. Fortunately, I’ve already thought of some effective ways to express this character’s story and internal world in the narrative without violating his curmudgeonly and succinct self.

Thanks to Dalia for her help.