Hello! I started writing about a month ago, so I'm an absolute beginner. Also, english is not my first language. I'm using a third person POV in my story, jumping heads and switching the focus between characters. Yesterday I read about "deep POV" and I think that's what I would like to use, but I'm not sure how it "works". -If I'm not using dialog tags, how can I make clear who's speaking? Should I still use the characters' names? -Should I use it for the whole story, or only when I focus on the main character? -I read there's no narrator. Does it only apply to first person POV? How can I keep the third person if there's no narrator? -Should I still use quotations for dialogs? These are my main doubts. I'll probably come up with more. Thanks in advance to whoever can help!
My advice would be to ignore the technicalities of what it is or isn't. Just write it however it feels best to you. A reader is not going to think "oh, this has dialogue tags, it's not deep-POV". The reader is going to either think "this is really immersive" or not. https://www.well-storied.com/blog/how-to-write-in-deep-pov
1) Well, you can still use dialogue tags in Deep 3rd Person. You just might not want to use them as often as you might in other POVs. As for how to make it clear who's speaking, you can: Use action beats. Something like: He shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me." This makes it pretty clear who's speaking without the direct attribution of a dialogue tag. Give your characters such distinctive voices the reader can immediately tell who is speaking. This mostly hinges on word choice. Maybe one character uses profanity all the time. Maybe another always uses fancy words. Maybe another has an accent/speaks in a particular regional dialect--let's say Texan English--so the way they speak reflects this; words like reckon or y'all or y'all'd've, constructions like "done gone" or "fixin' to" or "might could", and loan words from Spanish and/or German. Sit all three of these characters down and write out a conversation without tags or beats and you'd probably be able to tell who's speaking throughout. You absolutely should use character names, but you might want to do so sparingly. Especially for the POV character. How often do you think of yourself by name, you know? 2) For consistency's sake, I would say use it for the entire story. Shifting the type of POV you use can be jarring even when done well. 3) No, you can absolutely use Deep POV in 3rd Person. In this case, the POV characters themselves are more or less the narrators. Imagine a historical fiction novel set during World War 2 with two POV characters: an SS officer and a partisan leader in the Soviet Union. Their worldviews and personalities are going to color everything in their respective POV chapters/scenes. Often, the only difference between a Deep 3rd Person POV and a 1st Person one is which pronouns are used. 4) I've never read a Deep 3rd Person story which didn't use quotation marks. They're pretty standard, though some authors--mostly literary ones--do use other punctuation marks to indicate dialogue.
Thank you for your replies, I really appreciate them! I'll try editing what I wrote and see if I got it.
Oklahoma sits on this weird intersection of accents, so I sometimes find myself alternating between Texan, the 'typical' Southern American English, and 'standard' American Broadcast English. Code switching is...interesting.
Honestly, I know nothing about accents and I should research that as well. My main character is italian and was brought to the UK as a child. Even being italian myself, I couldn't replicate our accent when writing in english.
I live in a mid-size city where the accents are thinner and Texasisms are more sparse, but I worked for years in a small town about 45 minutes from here. The differences were drastic. Hearing and understanding both dialects every day was almost like being bilingual. "When yer fixin'a git ta work, gitcha one'a them lik'at righch'ere (Read: lye cat rye chair), an' it ain't a prob'm wirth sneezin' 'bout." I was also frequently accused of using $10 words with 5 cent meanings. Other words are universal, big city or no. How the world has yet to adopt "y'all" is beyond me. There was no second person plural pronoun in English, so we provided a perfectly valid contraction to fill the void.
I personally wouldn't try to replicate the accent so much as the word choice. For example, many Russian English-speakers struggle to use articles properly because words like a, an, or the don't have a Russian equivalent. So if you have a character who isn't a fluent English speaker--maybe one of the main character's parents--researching the quirks that come up when an Italian speaks English might be helpful in creating distinct dialogue.
