# Point of view and filtering > The reader lives inside your point-of-view character. Every “she saw” and “he felt” reminds them they are outside, watching someone else have the experience. Craft area: Point of view. A lesson from Open Atelier. https://openatelier.co/lessons/pov-filtering ## Let the reader see it directly **In one line:** “She saw the door open” puts the character between the reader and the door. Show the door. Once the reader knows whose eyes they are behind, everything on the page is already what that character perceives. Saying so again (she saw, he heard, she noticed, he felt) adds a step between the reader and the thing itself. Remove the verb of perceiving and let the thing happen. The door opens. The floor is cold. The reader stands where the character stands. The check flags these only when a chapter has three or more. One now and then is natural; a habit of them keeps the reader at arm’s length. **Before** > She heard the gate creak. She saw a figure cross the yard. **After** > The gate creaked. Someone was crossing the yard. *Why it works.* The reader hears the gate and sees the figure at the same moment she does. The suspense is theirs now, not reported. **Before** > Tomas felt the boat tilt under him and noticed the water was over the gunwale. **After** > The boat tilted under him. Water was coming over the gunwale. *Why it works.* Two filters gone, and the sentences get shorter and faster, at the speed of the danger. **This one works** > Everyone else was laughing. Only Ines saw the knife. *Why it stays.* Who perceives is the point: one person notices what the room does not. The filter verb carries the story. **When to keep it:** Keep a verb of perceiving when the act of perceiving matters: one character sees what others miss, a sense is straining (she could just hear it), or the realising itself is the event. Keep it, too, when it makes clear whose senses we are in after a change of point of view. **Ask yourself:** Take the verb of perceiving out. Does the reader lose anything they need? ## Show the feeling, not its name **In one line:** “She felt afraid” tells the reader what to feel. What she does, notices or says lets them feel it. A named emotion is a summary. The reader is told the character is afraid and files the fact away. A body that reacts, a thought that runs away, an action taken too fast lets the reader feel the fear alongside her. Stock phrases are the same summary in costume: a wave of relief, a surge of anger. Readers have met them so often that they slide past. **Before** > Dana was nervous as she waited for the results. **After** > Dana read the same line of the waiting-room poster eleven times. *Why it works.* The reader sees the nerves at work and recognises them. No one has to name them. **Before** > A wave of relief washed over him when the car pulled in. **After** > When the car pulled in, he sat down on the step. He had not known his legs were shaking. *Why it works.* The body tells the reader how frightened he had been, at the moment the fear lets go. **This one works** > I was angry. Not the loud kind. The kind that makes lists. *Why it stays.* A first-person narrator who names her own feeling bluntly, then sharpens it, is voice. The name starts the thought rather than ending it. **When to keep it:** Naming works when a scene needs to move quickly past a feeling that is not the point, when a narrator’s plain self-knowledge is part of their voice, or when the name is a start that the next sentence makes specific. **Ask yourself:** Could a reader tell what the character feels if you removed the word that names it? ## How close the camera is **In one line:** Point of view is also distance: how far inside the character’s head the narration sits. Narration can stand far off (“It was the winter of the long strike.”), come closer (“Marta hated winter.”) or sit inside the character’s thoughts (“Winter again. Wonderful.”). Each is a choice, and each changes how much the reader feels. Filter verbs and named emotions pull the camera back a step. That is useful at the start of a scene or for a cool tone, and it costs intimacy in the moments that matter most. Move in close for the moments you want the reader to feel. **Before** > Marta thought that it was cold, and she wished she had brought her gloves. **After** > Cold. Of course she had left the gloves on the table. *Why it works.* The narration moves inside her head. Her irritation comes through in how the thought is phrased, without “thought” or “wished”. **Ask yourself:** In this scene’s most important moment, how close is the camera? Is that where you want it? ## One head at a time **In one line:** Within a scene, stay in one character’s head. A jump to another’s thoughts mid-scene unsettles the reader. In close third person or first person, the reader knows only what the point-of-view character knows. When the narration suddenly reports what someone else is thinking, the reader loses their footing: whose story is this? To show another character’s feelings, use what your point-of-view character can perceive: their face, their silence, what they do. To change point of view, use a scene break. **Before** > Lena handed over the letter, hoping he would not read it here. Paul took it and thought she looked tired. **After** > Lena handed over the letter, hoping he would not read it here. Paul took it, and looked at her a moment too long. *Why it works.* We stay with Lena. She cannot know what Paul thinks, but she can see him looking, and so can the reader. **Ask yourself:** In this scene, whose head is the reader in? Does the narration ever know something that person could not? --- The examples were written for this lesson. Try the check on a page of your own, in the browser, with no account: https://openatelier.co/#try