Part 8 (1/2)

Each point of view has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of first-person POV (writers usually refer to point of view as POV, so let's call it that) is that it establishes the greatest immediate intimacy with the reader. It is an eyewitness account, highly subjective, and highly credible. When a character speaks directly to us, it's easier to believe what the character is saying. If you are good at impersonating your characters, you will be comfortable with the first-person POV. Better still, once you know the character, you will become expert in talking with that character's voice.

For each plus there is, alas, a minus. The author of a first-person story must constantly be on guard against telling the reader something that will sound like the author rather than the character. Furthermore, many writers see a severe limitation in that the first-person POV can convey to the reader only what that character sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes, and thinks. You can't have scenes your first-person character isn't a witness to. He doesn't know what's going on beyond his ken, although there are ways of circ.u.mventing that liability, which I'll demonstrate in a moment.

Another liability of first person is that it's difficult for a character to describe himself without seeming foolishly egotistical. Hundreds of writers, including me, have used a mirror to get around that. Forget it. A character seeing himself in a mirror is a cliche. However, a first-person character can think about his looks, or changes in his looks. Or another character can say something like: ”Are you dyeing your hair?”

This could lead to an exchange about the character's hair. Or: ”Are you getting taller?”

”I'm just stooping less these days.”

Dealing with the ”I” character's ego is more difficult. If he sees himself as weak, the reader won't have much interest in him as a protagonist. If he sees himself as strong, the reader will think him a braggart. Therefore, in the first-person POV the author relies on action and the speech of other characters to reveal things-particularly good things- about the ”I” character. An unreliable or villainous first-person narrator can lend credibility. A first-person commentary by a not terribly intelligent character can provide an experienced writer with opportunities. In any event, first-person POV can be exceptionally rich.

There's something you'll want to watch out for using the first person. If the character takes the reader into his confidence, the character can't ”forget” to provide the reader with an essential secret or other important piece of information. When the reader learns that something was withheld, he will feel cheated. The most dramatic way of handling information that the character is reluctant to convey is for another character to strip the secret from him in heated conversation: I have been wedded to the truth my entire life. What would I be doing at a young person's bachelor party? I told Jonathan flat out, ”I didn't go.”

”Bulls.h.i.+t, Maurice, you were there.”

”On my conscience, I swear I didn't go.”

”You don't have a twin brother, do you?”

I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. Jonathan pursued me across the room.

”Was it your twin brother who came out of the John in his suspenders? Maurice, you left your jacket hanging in the stall you were so drunk. You're lucky somebody didn't rifle your pockets before Adam steered you back in for it.”

I was barely able to speak. ”You were there?”

Jonathan nodded. ”I was there.”

A point sometimes overlooked by beginners is that if a story centers on the narrator's ability to survive life-threatening dangers, some suspense will be lost in the first person because the character will have to survive to finish the story!

If you examine an anthology of short stories that have been selected for their excellence, you may be surprised by the number that are written from the first-person point of view. Despite the seeming limitations of a single character's perspective, first person well done is immensely rewarding to both experienced writers and experienced readers. The first-person point of view is valuable, for instance, if you've drawn a character who is highly intelligent or perceptive. His or her complex thoughts can be conveyed much more directly and intimately to the reader.

Another advantage of first person is that it can involve the reader's emotions-even empathy-with a protagonist who does horrible things. The New York Times Book Review carried an interesting interview with Scott Smith, a first novelist, that accompanied a review of his novel A Simple Plan: Scott Smith's protagonist Hank commits b.l.o.o.d.y acts. The reader would find it hard to empathize with Hank if the story were told in the third person. In fact, Smith's choice of first person was ”vital to overcoming the reader's natural distaste for Hank's b.l.o.o.d.y acts.” Said Smith, ”I think there's something very seductive about a first-person voice, you sort of fall into it, no matter what horrible things the character does, and I wanted to keep that up until the very end, at which point the reader would have to sort of pull back. But no matter what he did, I was sympathetic to him. What's seductive to the reader is even more so to the writer.”

Sometimes using the first-person point of view is a necessity. Jerzy Kosinski's first and best novel, The Painted Bird, is a story of tremendous power. I once loaned a copy to a man I'll call Michael, a hugely successful businessman who was expert in cla.s.sical music, a collector of first-rate art, and an avid reader who ”never reads fiction.” We were vacationing in adjacent cottages and after he'd read only a few pages, Michael rushed over to ask, ”Is this true?” I strung him along with ”Do you think it's true?” and he kept coming back after several chapters, asking again, ”Is this true?” That book converted Michael to reading fiction from that time on.

The amazing fact about The Painted Bird is that its language is full of imaginative images and some of the events depicted are bizarre or aberrant, yet because the use of first person is handled so skillfully the emotional experience for the reader is ”This is true.”

The Painted Bird begins with a preface in third person of less than two pages that sets the period and the locale. (In general I advise against the use of prefaces in fiction. Some readers skip them, and in doing so, miss essential information. I have found that the essential material of prefaces can almost always be skillfully developed in the story itself.) Kosinski's novel, unlike the third-person preface, is in the first person. The narrator is presumably a ten-year-old boy: I lived in Marta's hut, expecting my parents to come for me any day, any hour. Crying did not help, and Marta paid no attention to my sniveling.

She was old and always bent over, as though she wanted to break herself in half but could not. Her long hair, never combed, had knotted itself into innumerable thick braids impossible to unravel. These she calls elflocks. Evil forces nested in the elflocks, twisting them and slowly inducing senility.

She hobbled around, leaning on a gnarled stick, muttering to herself in a language I could not quite understand. Her small withered face was covered with a net of wrinkles, and her skin was reddish like that of an overbaked apple. Her withered body constantly trembled as though shaken by some inner wind, and the fingers of her bony hands with joints twisted by disease never stopped quivering as her head on its long scraggy neck nodded in every direction.

Her sight was poor. She peered at the light through tiny slits embedded under thick eyebrows. Her lids were like furrows in deeply plowed soil. Tears were always spilling from the corners of her eyes, coursing down her face in well-worn channels to join glutinous threads hanging from her nose and the bubbly saliva dripping from her lips. She sometimes looked like an old green-gray puff-ball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to blow out the black dry dust from inside.

At first I was afraid of her and closed my eyes whenever she approached me. ...

This story is seen through the eyes of the narrator. If it were told in the third person, it wouldn't be credible. The fantastic old lady would have seemed ”made up.” In my judgment, the author didn't have a choice. First person was inevitable. Kosinski chose it and wrote a novel that is now an established twentieth-century cla.s.sic.

Third person is the most frequent choice of so-called commercial novelists. A majority of the books on the fiction bestseller list at any given time are likely to be written in the third person. It is a popular form for action/adventure and mainstream stories. There is strong precedent for today's third-person stories. Before stories were written, the man who told stories around a fire undoubtedly spoke of the adventures or experiences of others. When man invents myths, he is using the third person. Third person works best when the story is seen consistently from the point of view of one character at a time, though the author is free to report what any of the characters hear, smell, touch, and taste. Bottom-line editors and publishers favor third person. Here's an example: Peter Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and surveyed his domain. The two children were lying a.s.s-up on the carpet, watching television, and didn't turn to greet him.

Were they ignoring him, or had they simply not heard him come in?

He opened the door again and this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she hadn't heard me the first time.

Jonathan, a blase thirteen, turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over her father, taking his hat, holding on to his arm as it were the limb of a backyard tree.

There are many variations within the third-person mode, which is often confusing to less experienced writers. Third person can be close to first person, telling only the experiences of a single character as that character would know those experiences, but always referring to him as ”he.” As the author takes advantage of the third-person form, he can move into a scene from which the protagonist is absent, and show that scene from a different character's POV. But be warned: POV has to be consistent within a scene, otherwise you'll be crossing the line into the omniscient point of view, which gives you license to go into any character's head at will but involves the danger of confusing the reader or losing him along the way.

Plausibility is a major concern of third person. In the first person, a character can say, ”I ate six bananas” and perhaps we believe him. In the third person, when a character says ”Mary ate six bananas,” we are inclined to think, ”Oh yeah?” We accept things from a first-person speaker that we would question in a third-person speaker, who has the same distance from the reader as a stranger does in life. The first-person speaker becomes an intimate. We are inclined to accept his word.

Once the author establishes the limitation of the third-person point of view, he must stick to it and the limitation becomes an advantage, a restraint, a discipline. If you adopt a loose form of third person in which, say, each chapter is seen from a different character's POV, be sure to choose for each scene the character who is most affected by the events of that scene.

Though I have written in third person (The Magician, Living Room, The Childkeeper, The Resort), I love writing in the first person and am partial to it (Other People, The Touch of Treason, A Deniable Man, The Best Revenge).

In the ”know-it-all” omniscient POV, the writer can go anywhere, especially into the heads of more than one character even within a scene. Hemingway in ”The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” skillfully gets into the mind of a wounded lion. Look it up.

The omniscient POV allows the author to speak in his own voice, to say things that would be inappropriate for any of his characters to say. The author's voice, however, should have personality, authority, some wisdom, and ideally a fresh sense of humor. The author, in other words, needs to be quite a character to manage the omniscient point of view interestingly. One of my most talented students, Anne James Valadez, whose work sparkles with originality, prefers the omniscient point of view; her voice is unusually distinctive and exudes the authority of myth.

The danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking instead of experiencing the story. The omniscient POV lacks discipline. Because the author can stray into anybody's head, it is hard to maintain credibility and even harder to gain a close emotional rapport with the reader. Total freedom can be as upsetting to the writer as to the reader.

Even authors with several published novels to their credit can make errors in point of view. In a novel called Talent, the looseness of an uncontrolled omniscient point of view results in pa.s.sages like this: ”Driving up here always makes me feel like Paul Newman at the wheel,” joked Allison.

She and Diana climbed quickly to Mulholland, which twisted for miles along the spine of the ridge like a carelessly abandoned garden hose.

The point of view at that moment is presumably Allison's. From the driver's point of view, would a twisting road ever look ”like a carelessly abandoned garden hose”? The image is forced. But more important is the fact that it mixes point of view within the same paragraph. A twisting road might look like a garden hose from a helicopter or a low-flying airplane, but from a car?

Readers don't notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.

Clifford Irving handles the omniscient point of view skillfully. His novel Trial begins with an objective view: In Houston, Texas, in the early winter of 1985, a petty thief named Virgil Freer devised a scheme to bilk the chain of Kmart stores.

Virgil's scheme is outlined, but by the end of the first paragraph he was arrested and in jail. Virgil hires a young criminal defense attorney named Warren Blackburn. We get glimpses of what Virgil is thinking. He says to Blackburn, ”You got to help me.”

And immediately we are inside Blackburn's head.

I've met a lot worse than Virgil, Warren decided.

In the first few pages, we've heard the author, and we've been inside the head of Virgil and the lawyer he picks. Clifford Irving is using a controlled omniscient point of view- with good results.

Let's take a moment to examine the comparative subjectivity of each point of view. In first person, the POV is entirely subjective. Think of it this way: the character talking to the reader is not only conveying everything the reader gets to know, the character is making a case for himself. It's his view of himself, the others, the world.

In third person, the choice is greater. If the story can be told as if from a single character's POV, the reader will have some sense of subjectivity. The writer can even choose to s.h.i.+ft the subjectivity to another character, but has to be careful not to s.h.i.+ft about carelessly. Back in 1973, John G.o.dey, a thriller writer, published a book called The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about the hijacking of a New York City subway train. G.o.dey wrote in the third person, s.h.i.+fting from character to character every few pages. Every short section was headed with the name of the person from whose point of view he was writing. The problem was that in the first twenty-eight pages, I counted seven characters into whose point of view the reader was admitted for a short period. It was a dizzying experience.

If you use the third-person point of view, you can be a partisan of all the characters or some. You can be entirely neutral or objective, conveying nothing of the characters' thoughts or aims. Complete objectivity tends to be sterile of emotion, particularly the kind of intimacy that readers enjoy in literary novels, but it is useful in stories that are mainly action. Whatever genre you write in, my recommendation is that you focus on the POV of one character at a time, and sustain it, or you're likely to get into trouble. If you've got to let your readers know what everybody thinks, you'd probably be better off using the omniscient point of view, the loosest of forms. You can more readily let the reader know what each character thinks than you can in the third person, as Norman Mailer did in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The novel starts with: n.o.body could sleep. When morning came, a.s.sault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ash.o.r.e on the beach at Anopopei. All over the s.h.i.+p, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours, some of them were going to be dead.

That is clearly an omniscient point of view. The next long paragraph begins with: A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully.

The reader experiences everything in that paragraph and the next long paragraph from the point of view of an anonymous soldier. That paragraph ends with the soldier coming back from the latrine: And as he returns, he is thinking of an early morning in his childhood when he had lain awake because it was to be his birthday and his mother had promised him a party.