How to describe a kiss between the protagonists in third person?
I'm writing in third person because I want to express the standpoint of both of my characters. Everything's running smoothly except for the part where I want to describe their kiss. I'm in conflict with the idea that in whose POV should I describe the emotion they have during the kiss.
These are the possible options I have and also that the problem that I face with those:
Option 1: I should stick to describing only one person's emotion.
Problem: I want to describe both of their emotions. Period.
Option 2: I should write both of their feelings.
Problem: How do I do that?
- Simutaneously describing? I feel like I'm flitting from 'he' to 'she', 'him' to 'her'. I feel disconnected and so will the reader.
- One passage each? First 'her' feeling and then 'his' feeling? It reads way too long than the time taken to actually kiss. Also it might seem to look like it's being repeated. Shortening it would make it way too small for each.
So can you help me in solving my conflict and problems? Can you help me suggest a better way of carrying this out?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27009. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
Apparently, your third person point of view is not omniscient, or you would not face this problem, and if you tried to describe your character's feeling simultaneously, having the previous narration written in third limited/objective, you would have to either switch to omniscient, or head-hop, which would certainly sound unnatural.
The first thing that comes to my mind is to write two adjacent scenes, where one ends with one character initiating the kiss (describing all the feelings) and the next starts with the second participant responding to it (all the emotions from a new point of view). I am sure there are other ways to handle this situation, but this is what I would do.
It might come through as a repetition but only if their feelings are identical, which is likely not the case, else you would not want to show the kiss from two different points of view.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27014. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I suspect that you don't really want to describe their emotions in the clinical sense. Rather, you want the reader to know how they feel, and to feel how they feel, or at least to feel sympathy for how they feel, at the moment of the kiss.
If so, the way you do that is not through what you say in the moment of the kiss. It is how you set it up. Think about how a great romantic kiss is handled in a movie. It does not come out of the blue. It is meticulously set up as the characters go from bickering to flirting to longing so that long before the kiss comes the audience is aching for it, is shouting "shut up and kiss her you fool" at the screen as the hero bumbles through his courtship. Once all that setup work is done, there is no need to describe anybody's emotions. The audience knows exactly what the emotions are, and they feel those emotions too. This kiss is just the trigger, the moment of release, the moment of fulfillment for all the work that has gone before.
As a writer, therefore, you never describe important emotions. You create them. You only describe an emotion if it is secondary, if it is not something that you expect the reader to participate in or empathize with -- some piece of business that is necessary to drive the plot but is not of the essence of the story arc.
So many of the POV question here really come down to the same thing. A struggle to describe in the moment emotions that should have been set up by careful preparation. They are not really POV problems at all. They are setup problems. Create emotions, don't describe them.
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