Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Points of View (POV)

I just finished a course called Romantica offered by House of Sensual Prose (HSP). The biggest thing I learned was the difference in a Mans and a Woman's POV. I had read some of the Book Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus and in a clinical or objective sense understood the difference. What I wasn't doing was applying that abstract understanding to my writing. Just because we understand something doesn't mean we are going to apply it to what we do. DUH!

One of the chief criticisms I have read about Shakespeare was that his children characters sounded like miniature adults. Well my female characters sometimes sound like men with a wig on. Not really (So I keep telling myself) but I think you get the idea. As the instructor would comment I found that what she was hoping to see was something sweeter and more feeling than my more masculine style of expression was portraying. Amazingly, when I amped up or toned down the vignette, it never failed to benefit from the effort.

It's something that every writer should think about when they find themselves in the out of body experience of writing in a POV that is not exclusively their own.