When my saintly editor sent her first edits of Merciful Law to me, there had to be thousands of corrections. Bless her heart! (And I mean that sincerely, not the way Southerners use the phrase bless her heart… “Bless her heart, she’s just the worst cook within 100 miles.” Or, “Bless her heart, she isn’t as smart at a twig.”). My editor, bless her heart, was St. Patience, the patron saint of writers who forgot how to punctuate a sentence containing dialogue and who jump from past to present tense three of four times in one page. (Did you notice—I just jumped tenses!). St. Patience also corrected countless typos and some awkward wording, but in over 500 pages edited she only noted three times “POV shift.”
Remarkably, POV was something I successfully executed (mostly) without knowing what the heck a POV was. St. Patience answered my email asking her to explain POV. She said I changed my “point of view.” In a few scenes I inserted Emmet’s “point of view” when I had been speaking from Annie’s “point of view.”
“Point of view” refers to the source of the narrator’s voice in a novel. There are several options (amazingly, I stuck with just one—unlike my tense shifting). Novel Publishing does a great job explaining each. http://www.novelpublicity.com/2010/12/the-wordy-transition-selecting-a-point-of-view/
Merciful Law actually had three voices, Annie’s, Lawrence’s and I won’t tell you the third—you’ll have to read it to find out! So here’s the question of the day: In what POV was Merciful Law written? First Person POV, Limited Third Person POV or Multiple Third Person POV and why? The first correct answer wins a free download of Merciful Law!
