The tip: “Broadly speaking, the more intimate the point of view, the better. One of the most vital and difficult tasks facing a writer is creating believable and engaging characters, and an intimate point of view is a terrific way to do this. When you use your characters’ language in your descriptions, you not only convey the sights and sounds around them, you also convey their history, their education, and the culture they live in, without any additional effort.” (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, p50)

Ross's take: This is a good piece of advice that I've seen taken in a lot of different directions, sometimes with great results and sometimes not so great. The core idea, I suppose, is that if you're relatively disciplined with POV to begin with and then allow the character's voice to have an impact on the narrative outside the quotes and not just the dialogue, your characters will be stronger. Their unique way of observing and thinking and phrasing things gets more of the spotlight and ultimately makes more of an impact.

In some cases, particularly in singular viewpoint first-person narrative, this approach works very very well. And I think most writers find it easy to let the voice of the character color the tone and spirit of the narrative without too much trouble at all. This kind of thing comes naturally to first person narration and is one reason it's so much easier to foster intimacy when writing in the first person.

But if you're writing in the third person, and particularly with multiple viewpoints, things get a little more challenging. Ideally each character will have their own distinctive and engaging voice and unique perspective on things, sure. But if the writer succeeds in bringing too much of the voice of that character to the narrative itself and what's happening outside the dialogue, the tone of that narrative over the course of the whole book is likely to feel seriously inconsistent, and that can ultimately undermine engagement. So this is a case where many writers will need to be more selective and careful about how this principle can be applied.

More on this in the next post on this tip.