Writer Wednesday: POV

One of the biggest challenges I faced while writing Taking The Gardener was maintaining the point of view (POV) throughout the book. During the planning stage, I decided that I would write from the POV of Eric, one of the principle characters and the 'dominant' of the story. I was unprepared for the difficulties faced in staying true to the single POV throughout.This may be stating the obvious to some, but once you've chosen a specific POV character, nothing can be allowed to happen which he/she does not know about. More than that, every action must take place in the presence of the POV character or with their full knowledge. Sometimes you can have things reported to them, but this has its limits. Also, every word of dialogue must be spoken in their presence or also be reported to them in full - you can't write out conversations that they aren't privy to.Even when written from a specific POV, the story is still told in the third person. Among other benefits, the third person allows for a character's thoughts and feelings to be exposed and considered. Of course, one of the challenges of third person writing is interactive dialogue - how to avoid endless he said/she said conversations. The writer needs to have a full toolbox of verbs and adverbs relating to dialogue. (Although these should also be used sparingly!)In my current work, at the moment called Nerd On Top, I started writing in third person, but by way of a challenge to my skills I chose to write from the POV of the 'sub' in this story. For several weeks I struggled with the narrative and wrote the opening of the book 3 times in all. Still unhappy with the outcome, I considered changing the POV to that of the 'Nerd', the dom in this tale. This, however, felt like admitting defeat, until a surprise solution presented itself. Rather than changing the POV I have in fact changed the 'tense' of the story. I rewrote the opening in first person, from the POV of the sub. All of a sudden the words flowed and after a long and difficult labour, the book was born.