Does your narration fit your POV character?
There was nothing wrong with the car’s fender: nice, shiny, and black. I’d not have noticed except the rest of the car was ivory.
That was much the problem with the narration in a novel I just critiqued. While the words and the sentence structure were fine, they sometimes didn’t match how the POV character sounded.
A Texas native from a small ranching community, he’d just graduated with an Ag degree from Texas A&M. He was casual, spontaneous, able to fit everything he owned into a fifteen-year-old F150. When he spoke, he sounded like that kind of a guy.
But several times in the opening chapter when the author narrated what was happening to his POV character, that fictional illusion crumbled. To keep me seeing the situation through Tex’s eyes, the narration — its rhythm, structure, and vocabulary — should have reflected him.
In one instance, he remembers when he took off for a long weekend and missed work. Listen to the voice in this line of narration:
[He] would have lost his UPS job except he managed to call a colleague who agreed to switch shifts with him.
Managed to call a colleague? Maybe I’ve listened to too many Aggie jokes, but that sounds more like a twenty-year professor than a twenty-something whose life goal is to own a ranch.
As you review your novel, listen to your narrative voice. If it doesn’t match your POV character, then rewrite. When everything matches, readers will find it easier to immerse themselves in your story.
