Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Writing from a child's point of view

Today I'm working on a scene from the point of view of a kidnapped four-year-old girl. Other scenes in my crime novel contain adults' povs, which is relatively easy. But it feels like a challenge to depict what's going on through the child's eyes. She hears adults talk but doesn't understand them, nor does she quite understand what's happened to her. I want to write all of the characters in a close third-person, so in any given scene we only know what the pov character hears, sees, experiences or thinks.

Well, I've never been a little girl, so I'll have to read the scene to my writer's group, which consists mostly of women. They will set me straight on the blunders I will certainly make, and then my second draft will be on the right track.

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