In a post on Writers in the Storm, Lisa Hall-Wilson examines the difference between deep POV and first-person. “For many first person POV stories, a few deep POV tools are used to create intimacy and pull readers into the story (remove filter words, remove dialogue tags),” Hall-Wilson says. “But the use of the narrator voice, this assumption of a reader leaning in to listen and watch, adds narrative distance that deep POV aims to remove.”
In first-person central, the writer uses the “I, me, mine” perspective to narrate the story for the reader. The narrator tells the story as they experience it or remember it as something that already happened. In first-person peripheral, the writer still uses “I, me, mine” perspective, but the narrator is outside events, observing what’s happening to the main protagonists. Some examples of a peripheral narrator include To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.
“This construct allows the writer to keep information about the protagonist hidden from the reader, and can also add a built-in voice to summarize, explain, ask questions, etc.,” Hall-Wilson explains. There are also examples of omniscient first-person peripheral, where the narrator has a much wider perspective of the novel’s events, including knowledge of what may happen in the future or how it will change the other characters.
In Deep POV, the author/narrator voice is absent. “Every word on the page (and I mean, every word), comes from or from within the POV character,” Hall-Wilson says. “There’s no external voice to fill in gaps in time, summarize, explain, theorize, look ahead or back.” The goal of deep POV is to immerse the reader completely in the experience of the story, in real time. “It’s about how things FEEL, rather than narrating movement, what is seen or heard or wanted,” Hall-Wilson adds. “First Person POV is about who is telling the story, deep POV is about how you tell the story.”
Hall-Wilson examines selections from The Catcher in the Rye, Room, and The Hunger Games to show the difference between first-person and deep POV. “In deep POV, time and place setting details, the history/backstory, would need to be delivered without that author voice, and instead through context, subtext, dialogue, etc.,” she explains. “Deep POV aims for the reader to be immersed in the POV character’s experience. It’s a subtle difference, but once you learn to see the differences, deep POV offers a different level of intensity and intimacy.”
