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odd_buttons) wrote2004-12-05 09:48 am
odd_buttons) wrote2004-12-05 09:48 am
Point of View
Yow, a long entry. If pressed for time, the last two paragraphs sum it all up nicely.
I apologize in advance for typos -- haven't had coffee yet, argh.
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Point of View
This refers to the central consciousness that narrates the tale. The usual classification is pronominal -- point of view is first, second, or third person. But that's just the beginning.
◦ ◦ First-person point of view ◦ ◦
First person allows you to engage in one of the most natural of human social activities. "Last night," you begin, "the strangest thing happened to me as I was walking by the pond." First person is immediate, engaging, and instantly convincing. You create a distinctive voice, a character, a personality, with the first words of the story. Your readers want to know what happens next. And first person itself has a range of possibilities.
The most immediate first-person voice creates a story that seems to be happening as the voice tells it:
Not only can you choose how long ago the story might have happened to the narrator, but you can also choose how accurate or how distorted the narrator's version of events is going to be. On the one hand, there is the I readers are invited to accept as the voice of true perceptions, accurate observations, sound judgments, and admirable feelings. Way out on the other hand, there is the I who is insane, unaware that his vision of the world and of other people is drastically warped. In between are the I's who are fallible or mendacious in different ways and to various degrees -- and I who doesn't realize he is stubborn or naïve or self-absorbed or an I we can see is lying to himself or the readers.
How central should the first-person narrator be to the story? There are many possibilities. The simplest form is the I telling a story about himself:
The difficulties of first-person narration are directly related to its advantages. The first-person narrator, so convincing because of that confiding voice, needs to stay within character. The voice -- the vocabulary, speech rhythms, imagery, and insights -- must add up to a person we believe in. If readers believe, they will believe in the world that person describes.
But if the voice sometimes sounds like a character,
The I is the only voice your readers can hear directly in first-person narration. Everything and everybody must be filtered through this voice. Other characters are known only through the first-person point of view. So if you want to give intimate knowledge of other characters' thoughts and emotions, you have to find another way. The first-person narrator can have insights appropriate to the point of view, but it may be necessary for your other characters to reveal themselves, either in their own words or in what they say about each other.
A first-person narrative has to find a way of letting its readers see the narrator. I tells us nothing about name, age, sex, shape, or color. People actually do think a lot about what they look like, not only when they stare in a mirror (a device that has become a cliché) or when they look at photographs or pictures in magazines, but also when they compare themselves, for better or worse, to people they know or meet. You need to bring in people for the I to interact with and to create vivid physical actions or the story becomes internal and static as the I thinks and thinks, and readers feel as if everything is taking place in the I's head.
Writers can have problems in getting information to their first-person narrator. They're driven to improbable eavesdropping or inadvertent private-letter reading. Coincidences are contrived. Coincidences, however, are a tricky business. When set up carefully, there can be a psychological inevitability that readers accept. Set up carelessly, they seem a cheap way of handling plot. The difference between success and failure lies not in the coincidence, but in the preparation.
If the I is unreliable, you must find ways of making that evident in the story. You have to embed such things as contradictions, exaggerations, other voices, or different versions of reality so that the I's distortions can be discerned and understood by your readers. The classics of the demented I come from Edgar Allen Poe -- "Berenice" or "The Cask of Amontillado." The narrators' feverish voices signal their emotional disturbance. In For Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, the narrator is so pedantically precise that we rightly suspect there's something seriously wrong with him.
A minor consequence of first-person narration ought to be mentioned. Except for rather odd stories, we know that the first person survived long enough to write (or think about or tell) this narrative. So suspense is moderated by certainty.
Memorable fiction has been written in first person. Ishmael in Melville's Moby-Dick, Huck in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Holden Caulfield in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye are among the important first-person characters in American literature.
Many first-person narrations are in the form of a memoir or diary or series of letters. But in the United States, the spoken voice has become the predominant medium by which the story is told. There's a naturalness to the spoken first-person narration that expresses the freshness and vitality of American speech. First person is your most subtle, supple, and valuable literary resource.
◦ ◦ Second-person point of view ◦ ◦
Writers like to experiment with second person. There's an appealing quality to addressing your readers and overtly making them part of your story:
Second person also helps you achieve a relatively disembodies tone -- a creation o a You that implies every person and addresses a widely shared condition or feeling:
Second-person narration is striking and powerful, but it can feel insistent and aggressive. It demands that your readers be someone instead of merely observing someone. It can feel fresh, or it can seem tiresome, affected, or mearly modish.
Its possibilities are perhaps just beginning to be explored.
◦ ◦ Third-person point of view ◦ ◦
Third-person storytelling is an ancient literary strategy. It's the natural mode when telling about someone else's adventures. So if you are speaking of the life of a hero of the tribe or of the misfortunes of a friend or what befell an aunt, it seems but part of our language to use that person's names and to refer to her in the third person.
The use of the third person presents you with a number of decisions. First, should the story be told as if it's through the eyes and the mind of only one person? This method, in which the point of view is limited to one person and one consciousness, is close to the feeling of first-person point of view. To compare:
The concentrated energy of a short story makes third-person limited consciousness as effective point of view. Henry James is credited with seeing its possibilities for creating complicated psychological portraits and for dramatizing how variously characters perceive reality. But you don’t' have to adhere to a single consciousness (or limit yourself to consciousness serial monogamy). It's possible to have a teller of a story who says what various characters, major and minor, are thinking, without line breaks, section breaks, or separate chapters. Such a narrator is somewhat more visible than our first variety. For example: Scooper and Jane stared at the toaster. This was the morning toast fight. If Scooper could just get Jane to leave it alone, it would get properly crunchy. Jane pretended there was something out the window. Scooper turned his head with hers. She reached out and popped the slide up. Jane knew he couldn’t say anything now. It was perfect -- a lovely light yellow. She smiled. "Hey Scooper, want me to butter one for you?"Once you establish that you will have access to the thoughts of more than one character, you can move into other points of view even in casual encounters:
Writers who limit themselves to a single third-person point of view can create a character whose understanding of the world may be the very subject of the story. Your readers live through the character's mind and feel as the character does. And yet, since the narrative is in third person, you can draw on an authorial voice not strictly limited to the vocabulary or the perceptions of the character. The advantages are the creation of immediacy, intimacy, and psychological depth, while retaining the freedom to continue to be a narrator outside of the central character. This is a mode particularly suited to the short story because of its intensity, its concentration, and its possibility for plunging readers very quickly into a character's situation.
Its problems are that readers basically get one character's version of reality. Sometimes you, as writer, identify more closely with the character than your readers are willing to. You may believe your character is sympathetic and sensitive, but readers find him self-centered and stupid. Another problem is making the other characters vivid. Since the narrative point of view is also the main character, that voice and presence have center stage. You have to have enough stories within your story, including talk and action from other characters, in order for those characters to have real presence too.
When you have several points of view some problems are solved. You have the intimacy of individual points of view, and the narrative is freed from the limitations of the single character. At the same time other problems are created. You must bring to life a variety of people, convincingly and interestingly, who reveal either your uncanny imagination or, on a bad day, your inadequate empathy. Unless you develop a distinctive voice for each point of view, your characters will all sound alike.
The omniscient narrator has the opportunity to comment in his own voice, to introduce historical information, to philosophize about human behavior, and to make insightful remarks about his characters' behavior. This is a burden that some gladly bear, and others find oppressive. It is a claim to authority that must be managed with grace and wit.
◦ ◦ Choosing points of view ◦ ◦
Selecting the best point of view from which to tell a story can be puzzling. Because you originally conceive a story in first or third person doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Often it's good to rewrite the story in another person to see how it changes. Sometimes writers, after a number of drafts, have realized that the real story lies elsewhere -- in the mother's view of the daughter, not the daughter's view of the mother. Such changes in perspective have resulted in breakthroughs that have astonished their own authors.
To sum up, first person is tricky, because it seems easy at the beginning but presents all sorts of traps as you go on. Second person is dramatic but strained. Third person focused through a single character combines intimacy and flexibility, but the relationship between narrator and character can be troublesome. Third person with a different viewpoint in each section allows a richness of characterization, but the separate parts must create a unified work. Third person through a variably omniscient narrator means that the voice has to be charming or witty or intelligently strong enough to command respect.
Find the point of view that seems comfortable for you. If your strength lies in your gift for "doing voices" -- you feel natural thinking as a grandmother, a small child, or an irritated mechanic -- then it makes sense to write from those points of view. If you tend toward quirky imagery and a distinctive style that results in your characters sounding like each other, let one voice unify the story and create your world.
See Character, Flashback, Interior Monologue, Narrator, Psychic Distance, Stream of Consciousness.
I apologize in advance for typos -- haven't had coffee yet, argh.
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Point of View
This refers to the central consciousness that narrates the tale. The usual classification is pronominal -- point of view is first, second, or third person. But that's just the beginning.
First person allows you to engage in one of the most natural of human social activities. "Last night," you begin, "the strangest thing happened to me as I was walking by the pond." First person is immediate, engaging, and instantly convincing. You create a distinctive voice, a character, a personality, with the first words of the story. Your readers want to know what happens next. And first person itself has a range of possibilities.
The most immediate first-person voice creates a story that seems to be happening as the voice tells it:
I unscrewed the lid. I looked inside. It looked green and gooey. I stuck my finger in it. Yucch!Present tense emphasizes immediacy even more:
I open the door. The room is black. I feel something hot and wet pushing into my ear.But first person can also achieve great distance.
It was almost sixty years ago. My four grandparents were still alive, and they would pass me around to comment on my inadequacies. My nose was the chief offense.The time spectrum has infinite gradations. The story that is told as if it is happening at that moment is told by a first-person -- an I -- that is a single character. The story that is told at some remove from the event implies two I's: the person who experienced the anecdote when it happened some time ago and the person who now tells the story. That second I can be relatively transparent. Though readers are aware that the events took place in the past, there is no particular emphasis on the situation of the present I who is telling the story. Or the first-person narrator might call attention to herself, point out how time and experience have made her who she is, who she was, and reflect on the relationship between past and present. The story might even be as much about the difficulties of recalling the past, or the way of feelings and understanding change, as it is about the long-ago even itself.
Not only can you choose how long ago the story might have happened to the narrator, but you can also choose how accurate or how distorted the narrator's version of events is going to be. On the one hand, there is the I readers are invited to accept as the voice of true perceptions, accurate observations, sound judgments, and admirable feelings. Way out on the other hand, there is the I who is insane, unaware that his vision of the world and of other people is drastically warped. In between are the I's who are fallible or mendacious in different ways and to various degrees -- and I who doesn't realize he is stubborn or naïve or self-absorbed or an I we can see is lying to himself or the readers.
How central should the first-person narrator be to the story? There are many possibilities. The simplest form is the I telling a story about himself:
I looked directly into the catamount's eyes. I knew it was him or me.Then there is the story whose apparent subject is another person or other people:
Who I most remember from those days was John Trespas and his crowd -- wild, doomed, and coruscating with an energy that the community hated.In between are the I's who tell about themselves and others with varying degrees of intimacy:
I'd walk home with Ozzie after a den meeting and we'd plan weird stuff to do to the other Cubs. I think there was something wrong with the both of us.Remember that the first-person narrator, as the voice of the story, is necessarily part of the story. The I must be as important as any other major character. Otherwise the I is an extra person. Your readers will wonder why he is hanging around if he has nothing to do but narrate -- they'll think, why don't you tell the story and let the I go home?
The difficulties of first-person narration are directly related to its advantages. The first-person narrator, so convincing because of that confiding voice, needs to stay within character. The voice -- the vocabulary, speech rhythms, imagery, and insights -- must add up to a person we believe in. If readers believe, they will believe in the world that person describes.
But if the voice sometimes sounds like a character,
--So I look in the window and there's this fat guy with a cigar bent over one of those hot-dog-type dogs, and, it looks like he's trying to get it to smoke his damned cheroot --and sometimes sound like an author,
--It was a strange scene. Human and canine wreathed in gray smoke, the man offering his beloved tobacco, for what reason? love? loneliness? a joke born of despair? --and sometimes sound like no one in particular,
--I left and walked down the street because it was getting dark and I still had a few errands to run before dinner.the story falls apart.
The I is the only voice your readers can hear directly in first-person narration. Everything and everybody must be filtered through this voice. Other characters are known only through the first-person point of view. So if you want to give intimate knowledge of other characters' thoughts and emotions, you have to find another way. The first-person narrator can have insights appropriate to the point of view, but it may be necessary for your other characters to reveal themselves, either in their own words or in what they say about each other.
A first-person narrative has to find a way of letting its readers see the narrator. I tells us nothing about name, age, sex, shape, or color. People actually do think a lot about what they look like, not only when they stare in a mirror (a device that has become a cliché) or when they look at photographs or pictures in magazines, but also when they compare themselves, for better or worse, to people they know or meet. You need to bring in people for the I to interact with and to create vivid physical actions or the story becomes internal and static as the I thinks and thinks, and readers feel as if everything is taking place in the I's head.
Writers can have problems in getting information to their first-person narrator. They're driven to improbable eavesdropping or inadvertent private-letter reading. Coincidences are contrived. Coincidences, however, are a tricky business. When set up carefully, there can be a psychological inevitability that readers accept. Set up carelessly, they seem a cheap way of handling plot. The difference between success and failure lies not in the coincidence, but in the preparation.
If the I is unreliable, you must find ways of making that evident in the story. You have to embed such things as contradictions, exaggerations, other voices, or different versions of reality so that the I's distortions can be discerned and understood by your readers. The classics of the demented I come from Edgar Allen Poe -- "Berenice" or "The Cask of Amontillado." The narrators' feverish voices signal their emotional disturbance. In For Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, the narrator is so pedantically precise that we rightly suspect there's something seriously wrong with him.
A minor consequence of first-person narration ought to be mentioned. Except for rather odd stories, we know that the first person survived long enough to write (or think about or tell) this narrative. So suspense is moderated by certainty.
Memorable fiction has been written in first person. Ishmael in Melville's Moby-Dick, Huck in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Holden Caulfield in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye are among the important first-person characters in American literature.
Many first-person narrations are in the form of a memoir or diary or series of letters. But in the United States, the spoken voice has become the predominant medium by which the story is told. There's a naturalness to the spoken first-person narration that expresses the freshness and vitality of American speech. First person is your most subtle, supple, and valuable literary resource.
Writers like to experiment with second person. There's an appealing quality to addressing your readers and overtly making them part of your story:
You stood over the bed. You looked sorrowfully at the sleeping cat, the sleeping dog, the sleeping man.There are a variety of second-person possibilities. One is really a displacement for first person. You might feel that I sounds too egotistical or too confining. When a lyric poet says I -- as in "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" -- readers take that to mean the poet, not a character created by the poet. You can have intimacy as I does, but also be somewhat disassociated from I. With You, the ego of the story moves off center a bit:
You can't think, can't write, can't call her up. You do anyway. "How's it going?" you say. She says, "Well, well, well, what have we here?"Another sort of second person is in fact a more egotistical form of I, actually an intensification of the I -- this is the detective story I:
You go down the street. You smell the city. You can't stand the stench, the lies, the reek of corruption. But you have to. It's your job. You're a cop.The I here is so big it can't contain itself in one person and demands that it be You too.
Second person also helps you achieve a relatively disembodies tone -- a creation o a You that implies every person and addresses a widely shared condition or feeling:
It's two days before Christmas and you still haven't bought the right gifts and you're frantic. What can you find now?Or second person can be used in quite a different way. You invite your readers to be somebody they clearly are not. You puts them inside a character and asks the to experience the world through that character:
You feel the stick in your back. "Move on buddy." You move on, keeping your face down. Looking up means you're looking for trouble.The use of present tense often seems right for second person, but past or future is just as possible.
Second-person narration is striking and powerful, but it can feel insistent and aggressive. It demands that your readers be someone instead of merely observing someone. It can feel fresh, or it can seem tiresome, affected, or mearly modish.
Its possibilities are perhaps just beginning to be explored.
Third-person storytelling is an ancient literary strategy. It's the natural mode when telling about someone else's adventures. So if you are speaking of the life of a hero of the tribe or of the misfortunes of a friend or what befell an aunt, it seems but part of our language to use that person's names and to refer to her in the third person.
The use of the third person presents you with a number of decisions. First, should the story be told as if it's through the eyes and the mind of only one person? This method, in which the point of view is limited to one person and one consciousness, is close to the feeling of first-person point of view. To compare:
I just jammed clothes in the suitcase without looking. It was crazy. I was cramming in shirts I never wore and fistfuls of ties and dress handkerchiefs. I hated Jack. I hated Sis. I wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible.In the second example, the narrator is almost invisible. Readers experience the story through Scooper's mind. Third person used in this way allows the immediacy of first person, but the separate voice of the narrator allows some flexibility. You aren't entirely limited to the perceptions, knowledge, and vocabulary of the character:
Scooper jammed his clothes in the suitcase without looking. He felt crazy. He crammed in shirts he never wore and fistfuls of ties and dress handkerchiefs. He hated Jack. He hated Sis. He wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible.
Scooper drove down Druidic Drive and on to Whispering Way, not thinking about where he was going or what he was going to do. He didn't want to think about whether he had money in his wallet or to see if he had gas in the tank. What he wanted to do was drive, recklessly, endlessly, and somehow, simultaneously, have everyone around him admit to their misperceptions, their callousness, their insensitivity, to say stop, we're sorry, it's our fault, we understand you.Third person does not have to be limited to one person. Individual sections of stories and novels can be told from other points of view -- from inside the heads of different characters. So the next section might start:
Jane stared out of the picture window. Just like Scooper, she thought. Just like him not to understand what he did to me, to Jack, or what he's doing to himself. She rubbed her thumb against the wet window until it squeaked.One thing remains constant here: Whichever character's point of view is being used, that's how the readers must see the world for that section. The narrator remains for the most part invisible. The writer wants us to stay within the characters' minds as much as possible.
The concentrated energy of a short story makes third-person limited consciousness as effective point of view. Henry James is credited with seeing its possibilities for creating complicated psychological portraits and for dramatizing how variously characters perceive reality. But you don’t' have to adhere to a single consciousness (or limit yourself to consciousness serial monogamy). It's possible to have a teller of a story who says what various characters, major and minor, are thinking, without line breaks, section breaks, or separate chapters. Such a narrator is somewhat more visible than our first variety. For example: Scooper and Jane stared at the toaster. This was the morning toast fight. If Scooper could just get Jane to leave it alone, it would get properly crunchy. Jane pretended there was something out the window. Scooper turned his head with hers. She reached out and popped the slide up. Jane knew he couldn’t say anything now. It was perfect -- a lovely light yellow. She smiled. "Hey Scooper, want me to butter one for you?"Once you establish that you will have access to the thoughts of more than one character, you can move into other points of view even in casual encounters:
Jane asked sweetly, "Mr. Berbard, how much are the pork chops today?"Or you can be more overt, giving access to the thoughts and feelings of a number of your characters in a single story, taking on the responsibility of the psychologist, sociologist, historian, and storyteller. Magically, you know the characters better than they know themselves. You might comment on the social customs of the period, make generalizations about behavior in the culture, and speculate on causes. Readers may come to understand the lives of those within the fiction better than they know the lives of those they live with:
For you, $4.50 apiece." The man had learned years ago that the price didn't really matter -- these were well-to-do people. The for you mattered, as if they had an insatiable hunger to be connected, even to the butcher they barely saw.
"Wrap up eight," Jane said. "Nice ones."
Cranger Nearfoy was a respected man. His neighbors came to him with their cracked harrows, their problems with tomatoes, and, late at night, their broken hearts. Tossich, who grew strawberries, came one evening. In the manner of the time, they never looked each other in the eye. For serious discussion men stared at the fire, the words could hang in the darkness, and they could keep their dignity while revealing their deepest failures. Granger had heard many things, and often the things he heard had no solution -- they only meant more sorry. He gave Tossich a tumbler of brandy. Tossich turned the tumbler in his hand. He was not accustomed to asking for help, and this was shameful to him -- he was still young, he was strong. He thought about telling of some lesser problem. . .You might even emphasize your God-like power as a creator and manipulator of your characters and explicitly refer to them as creations, toys, puppets, or actors. When books make reference to the omniscient narrator, they usually mean something of this sort:
So perhaps you have heard enough of our friend Tossich and his problems, so grand to him and so minuscule (pardon me) to the reader. And so let us send him home in his Dodge Min-van. Let us perhaps take a gander (pardon me again) at Tossich's rosy wife, Anna, who is now in close conversation with a person who has not yet been introduced. Robert Smythe is charming and energetic. He speaks movingly of his sad childhood and eloquently of his hopes for a little happiness. He is one o fthe most beguiling sociopaths one could ever hope to meet -- as hollow and dead inside as he is sympathetic and warm outside -- and Tossich's wife has falling for him like a bale of hay.The word omniscient, however, is not totally accurate, for even here you can vary your degree of omniscience, apparently having access to certain characters' motivations but not to others, warning readers of some dangers but remaining unaware of others, and making other disclaimers revealing your lack of total knowledge.
It is said that Granger sent Smythe a letter. No one knew what it said, but soon after, Smyth mysteriously disappeared. Since then, every summer Tossich sends Granger a tray of red strawberries.These various possibilities within third-person point of view lead to different types of stories.
Writers who limit themselves to a single third-person point of view can create a character whose understanding of the world may be the very subject of the story. Your readers live through the character's mind and feel as the character does. And yet, since the narrative is in third person, you can draw on an authorial voice not strictly limited to the vocabulary or the perceptions of the character. The advantages are the creation of immediacy, intimacy, and psychological depth, while retaining the freedom to continue to be a narrator outside of the central character. This is a mode particularly suited to the short story because of its intensity, its concentration, and its possibility for plunging readers very quickly into a character's situation.
Its problems are that readers basically get one character's version of reality. Sometimes you, as writer, identify more closely with the character than your readers are willing to. You may believe your character is sympathetic and sensitive, but readers find him self-centered and stupid. Another problem is making the other characters vivid. Since the narrative point of view is also the main character, that voice and presence have center stage. You have to have enough stories within your story, including talk and action from other characters, in order for those characters to have real presence too.
When you have several points of view some problems are solved. You have the intimacy of individual points of view, and the narrative is freed from the limitations of the single character. At the same time other problems are created. You must bring to life a variety of people, convincingly and interestingly, who reveal either your uncanny imagination or, on a bad day, your inadequate empathy. Unless you develop a distinctive voice for each point of view, your characters will all sound alike.
The omniscient narrator has the opportunity to comment in his own voice, to introduce historical information, to philosophize about human behavior, and to make insightful remarks about his characters' behavior. This is a burden that some gladly bear, and others find oppressive. It is a claim to authority that must be managed with grace and wit.
Selecting the best point of view from which to tell a story can be puzzling. Because you originally conceive a story in first or third person doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Often it's good to rewrite the story in another person to see how it changes. Sometimes writers, after a number of drafts, have realized that the real story lies elsewhere -- in the mother's view of the daughter, not the daughter's view of the mother. Such changes in perspective have resulted in breakthroughs that have astonished their own authors.
To sum up, first person is tricky, because it seems easy at the beginning but presents all sorts of traps as you go on. Second person is dramatic but strained. Third person focused through a single character combines intimacy and flexibility, but the relationship between narrator and character can be troublesome. Third person with a different viewpoint in each section allows a richness of characterization, but the separate parts must create a unified work. Third person through a variably omniscient narrator means that the voice has to be charming or witty or intelligently strong enough to command respect.
Find the point of view that seems comfortable for you. If your strength lies in your gift for "doing voices" -- you feel natural thinking as a grandmother, a small child, or an irritated mechanic -- then it makes sense to write from those points of view. If you tend toward quirky imagery and a distinctive style that results in your characters sounding like each other, let one voice unify the story and create your world.
See Character, Flashback, Interior Monologue, Narrator, Psychic Distance, Stream of Consciousness.