a #8 What’s the point . . .of view?
I truly admire a writer who chooses first person for her novels, not so much because of the difficulty of the constraints it imposes on the writer, but because it means she must invent a character in whose company her reader will want to spend a couple of hundred pages without once closing the book and tossing it across the room. It’s also interesting to me how some of the most memorable of these novels are narrated by children, by Huck and Holden and Scout, for instance. Second person is the least popular choice possibly because of its tendency to make the reader feel like someone has grabbed them by the lapels (remember when lapels weren’t only metaphorical?) and is subjecting them to a lecture, a sermon, or a scolding, instead of the gripping story they were hoping to hear. Lorrie Moore is one notable exception. Read her stories in Self-Help, “How to Be the Other Woman,” “How to Become a Writer,” “How to Talk to Your Mother.” Also try My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys by Pam Houston. See how it should be done while trying not to hurt yourself laughing. You’ll thank me. Close third person was what I chose for my novel. Or rather it chose me. Characters kept showing up telling me their stories, complaining, explaining bad choices, telling tales (often lies) about other characters. It was pretty straightforward; I just wrote down what they said. Some, a few, showed up and wouldn’t talk to me at all, though their actions were important to the story. I never figured out what motivated some to share their thoughts and others to give me the fishy eye and turn their backs. That last group, by the way, did not include the dogs. Although they did not talk, they nevertheless were easily able to make clear to me their opinions, proclivities and motives. (I do love that about dogs – real and fictional.) One problem that deviled me as I wrote was how to indicate the switch from one character’s consciousness to another’s. First, I used spacing but that was not very helpful. Then I tried three dots to indicate a change in POV. If I found this ploy annoying, and I did, I could only imagine how much it would eventually piss off my reader. Then I read Elsa Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. (Full disclosure: I am the only reader I know who did not love this book, something I can only ascribe to serious character defect). She used numerals within her chapters. You’d think this would be distracting but it isn’t. And it solved the problem of how to break up a couple very long chapters – I don’t know about you, but if I see a hundred solid pages of chapter ahead of me, I don’t care how stellar the writing, I groan, often aloud.) So, though more about POV here than you might have wanted to read, please don’t close your laptop and throw it across the room.
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We tend to write about what we know. I am a writer, thus this blog: Why write? What, when, where to write? Stay tuned. Archives
April 2024
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