The Voice and The View
Part 7 of 8 on the revision process
The third draft
The Voice and The View?
No, we’re not talking about a TV show mashup with Blake Shelton and Whoopi Goldberg.
We’re talking about the narrative voice, point of view, and character voices (dialogue) of your story.
If you’ve finished your first draft and have now gone through and made all the revisions described in the first six articles in this series, you might have a solid second draft.
That means you’ve already got all this voice, POV, and dialogue nailed down perfectly, right?
Right?
When your second draft is complete, that’s a great time to run back through it line by line to make sure these elements are consistent.
The voice
Is your story in first person, third-limited, or omniscient?
Sounds like that would be pretty easy to stay consistent, but you might be surprised. Or not.
As an editor, I’ve seen numerous great manuscripts from superb writers slip up with the voice.
The story is moving forward at a great clip with an engaging first-person character when the narration goes off those first-person rails. Not just a point-of-view slip, but a third-person voice steps onto the page to describe the setting or provide some backstory.
A more frequent issue is when a third-person limited voice is overridden by an omniscient voice. This also can happen when the author wants to describe setting or give some backstory.
This occurs most frequently when the author wants to impart some information that the main character doesn’t know, so the story drifts into the omniscient voice.
That’s a problem if the author hasn’t established an omniscient voice from the beginning.
The revision process overall also provides writers with one more chance to make sure they’ve chosen the right voice. You probably have this secured by now, based on how the story came to you or developing it as you wrote your first draft.
But if you’re not sure, try this experiment.
Take one or two key scenes and rewrite it in another voice. If your story is in first person, rewrite a scene in third person. If you wrote in third person, rewrite an exciting or an emotional scene in first. Either way, see how it changes how the story is presented to your readers.
I’d guess that 99 percent of the time, you’re probably not going to rewrite the book in a different voice at this point. But if you do think you might have chosen the wrong voice, this may be the best time to tackle a rewrite.
For a more in-depth discussion of narrative voice, see this article.
Point of view
The other aspect to give a careful review during process is point of view.
Scour your point of view with a fine tooth comb as you review this second draft.
Whether writing in first or third-person limited, make sure nothing is “shown” to readers that your point of character cannot see, hear, think, feel, or know in some way.
Do you show any scenes or provide any information from a place where your character isn’t present or has no way of knowing?
Does your POV character describe his own facial expression or involuntary reaction? Why would she do that since she can’t see her own face? Does your narration describe what’s happening in another room, drop some line of dialogue outside her hearing?
Those are point-of-view slips.
If we’re seeing the scene through your POV character’s eyes, hearing her thoughts, feeling her emotions, then we’re suddenly privy to what her boyfriend is thinking, that’s not just a POV slip.
That’s head-hopping.
If you’re using more than one point-of-view character, are the scenes consistent with each POV and each character’s knowledge?
Review each scene, line by line, to ensure the entire scene is firmly entrenched in a single POV.
This often becomes a problem when there are two characters in a scene, one is clearly the POV character, but the internal thoughts and reactions, or even what someone sees, bounces back and forth between the two characters.
This can be confusing to readers, even jarring.
Your revision process to bring your novel from second-draft to third is often the best time to look at this issue in every single scene, paragraph, and sentence, after you’ve done any rearranging, deleting, revising, and writing new scenes during your second-draft phase.
For a deeper dive into point of view, see this article.
Dialogue
We’ve spent a lot of time on dialogue in A Writer’s Block over the past five years, and that’s not just because it’s one of my favorite topics (it is), but because it’s an absolutely critical element for the story, for characterization, for realism, and to engage readers.
You’ve probably been doing a lot of these steps as you wrote your first draft and revised your second draft, but here are some final checks to make sure you dialogue is coming across to readers the way you hear it in your head when your characters speak.
Your character do speak to you, right? Just me?
Okay, good. Glad to hear it.
The key to dialogue is that is drives your story forward. It is often the story driver. It has to further the plot, raise tension, and all those things. And it has to do it in natural, realistic-sounding voices and word choices.
How to make sure?
Read it out loud.
Enlist a friend to read it out loud to you while you follow along with the written text. Where does the reader stumble? Where does the reader inadvertently change the wording from what was written?
If you don’t have any friends, have your computer’s text-to-voice program read it to you. Then get out of the house and go make some friends.
For a deeper dive into crafting stellar dialogue, see this six-part series.
Next week
In our final installment in this long eight-part series on revising your first draft, we’ll wrap up the third draft: the final check for those little but important nitpickings that can really trip up a story.
LAUNCHED TODAY!
E-book available now
Print edition June 15
A homeless woman’s prophecies come true with increasingly dire consequences. A skeptical news reporter needs a sign before it’s too late.
More books by Robb
Thanks for the timely reminders. I'm easing into Draft 3 and appreciate your thoughts.