Authors of popular fiction are primarily storytellers, building on the tradition established by early oral narrators back to Homer. This ancient Greek forebear worked before the invention of writing, and was a poet, a singer perhaps – blind according to legend. Homer memorised those fantastic tales of ancient heroism and derring-do and recounted them for anyone willing to pay his fee.
There are two conflicting theories about why human beings started to write things down. According to one, it was to enable the development of trade, so that individuals could produce lists of goods, invoices and sales receipts. Another claims we invented writing because we found the stories of poets such as Homer so entrancing we didn’t want to lose them, to leave them to such a fragile and temporary thing as one man’s memory. I know which theory I prefer.
One way we recognise our position as Homer’s heirs is through something most readers never consciously notice: point of view – or POV, as it’s commonly known.
Every scene of every book is defined and in some ways shaped by the position of the voice narrating it. Sometimes this is obvious. In a first-person book the voice of the tale comes directly from the character relating what happens. But sometimes POV is far more subtle. Popular fiction is usually divided between first-person and third-person stories, and third-person fiction sub-divided into three distinct sub-categories. Before embarking on any book you need to think about the POV you intend to use.
This decision is far from irrevocable. Sometimes it’s worth rewriting an opening scene from different points of view in order to work out which is best. What matters is that you’re aware of the POV as a writer, even if this technical concept goes over the reader’s head entirely. Without a defined POV your narrative is likely to flounder around the place, meandering into byways where the story will become confused and lost.
The best way to envisage POV is to think of it as something Homer could never have imagined: a camera. In every chapter there’s a lens through which the reader experiences the narrative. It’s a very clever camera too, one that doesn’t simply pass on an image of what’s happening but also the words of those speaking and even at times what’s going on in their minds.
This distinction between speech and thought gives you a clue to one of the trickiest aspects of POV. In order to function, that camera must understand its limitations and never range beyond them without good reason.
Let’s look at some of the principal POV options open to you, how they might be used in a story like Charlie and the Mermaid, and some of their strong points and their failings.
She wasn’t around at first. At least I don’t think so. It was as if she just appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost. Or a mermaid. One minute the beach was empty. The next she stood there, waist deep in the lazy waves of an ebbing tide, a little unsteady as if sinking into the soft sand beneath. Her long black hair was soaking wet. She wore a T-shirt that clung to her skinny body. I looked at her and shivered. For some reason I thought I recognised her, but that was impossible and soon I’d know it. Didn’t matter either. Sally looked as miserable as anyone I’d ever seen.
From the outset we’re inside Charlie’s head, seeing what he sees, hearing his thoughts as they happen. This is a very direct and personal way to engage our audience. Readers hear the voice of the protagonist and are immediately introduced into both the plot and its key character.
Many novice writers begin their first attempt at a book writing in the first person. You only have to scan the bookshelves to see that first-person tales are very popular with readers too. For someone starting out it’s an approach with many attractions. It’s usually much the easiest voice when it comes to getting words on the page. You can imagine yourself into your character and describe what he or she sees through the progress of the narrative. If you’re desperate to see whether you have the stamina to finish a full-length book, first person will probably help get you there more quickly than any other voice. But it’s not without some serious drawbacks.
First, there’s the question of character. There’s another clue to the limitations of first person in that opening paragraph. We hear Charlie’s thoughts as he looks at the girl in the water. We don’t – and shouldn’t – hear hers. Novices very often make key mistakes when it comes to point of view, errors that can get you marked down badly by any agent or publisher who reads your manuscript. One of them in the first person is the questionable use of interior thoughts. It’s fine for Charlie to think he recognised her. It’s perfectly reasonable for him to think she looks miserable too, since this is his observation. But what about this?
I’d seen her before somewhere. Her name was Sally. She looked back and thought to herself: he’s a funny-looking kid.
No. At least not within the accepted conventions of popular fiction (though there are always writers who will – and should – break these from time to time). We’re in Charlie’s head. He can’t know what Sally is thinking, and you mustn’t, in general popular fiction, pretend that he can. It’s fine to say ‘I watched her. She seemed to be thinking about what to do next.’ That’s his observation. But in ‘I watched her. She was thinking about what to do next,’ the omission of ‘seemed’ drags us out of Charlie’s first-person narrative and puts us into Sally’s head. And that’s plain wrong. No reader will scream, ‘Inconsistent point of view!’ Or at least not many. But you’re diluting the tightly fixed dimensions of the narrative – shifting the camera, albeit briefly, from Charlie’s head to Sally’s. Editors may shriek and for good reason. This is bad practice and, unless you’re doing it deliberately for a reason, it will reveal you as someone who doesn’t understand such a basic tenet of writing craft.
This example points to a broader problem with first-person narratives. They are, by their very nature, restricted in what they can describe. Unless you use some sly techniques the reader can only see what happens within the immediate experience of your narrator. In third-person stories you can flit from character to character, location to location. You can see inside the heads of different people, on all sides in the tale. You have a much broader field of possibilities to play with. With standard first person you’re locked inside one character.
Most popular fiction is based on a conventional linear narrative, going forward from one point in time to another. In the simplest kind of first-person story your protagonist can usually only witness what is happening in scenes where he’s physically present.
This is tricky. Is some bad guy sneaking up on Sally when she leaves Charlie and goes home? In the pure first person, Charlie can be scared about that possibility. But if it happens when he’s not present he – and by implication the reader – can only learn about it afterwards, through some reported event. In the third person you can be there, with the bad guy, with Sally, with someone else altogether. First person denies you that flexibility and immediacy. It’s a narrow, restricted, two-dimensional canvas, one that needs to be worked with special skill. In short … it may be the easiest way to achieve a finished story, but it can be the hardest POV through which to produce something compelling and original.
Unless you get sneaky. Here are a couple of common tricks.
The diary
First-person stories don’t have to be linear narratives moving forward from a starting point to a conclusion, hour by hour, week by week, year by year depending on the timescale you’ve chosen. They can be more free-ranging if you play with the first-person system a little. The most common way is through a diary or letter-writing – epistolary to be precise – format.
Two of my favourite classics are I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. These manage to tell complex, panoramic stories of life in the Imperial Rome of two thousand years ago through the first-person voice of a single narrator, Claudius, a crippled member of the ruling family who goes on to become emperor himself. Graves achieves this through a very simple trick. The books are ‘false documents’ pretending to be the diaries of Claudius himself, written in old age, looking back on his life and the history of the empire, ranging from era to era, location to location.
This epistolary approach circumvents many of the problems of linear first-person narrative. Since Claudius is an amateur historian he can relate events in the furthest parts of the Roman empire with a distanced yet individual voice. It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t there and didn’t witness what went on. Claudius knows these facts because he’s now an old man telling the story of his life and times. The diary format allows him to tell stories, comment on characters, make observations of a series of historical occurrences and famous people even when he isn’t personally acquainted with them.
Books written as letters or diaries bring much more flexibility and range to the first-person viewpoint. They allow the writer a considerable degree of perspective and the chance to take a panoramic view of an unfolding story. The catch can be easily seen in the nature of I, Claudius. Books of this nature are, of necessity, reflective, more leisurely in pace than a simple story hooked to the linear passage of time. Claudius is looking back at his life. If it’s thriller-style speed you’re after this is going to be a tough place to find it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Here’s another take on the first-person voice:
The unreliable narrator
One of the great epistolary novels is Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, often acclaimed as an early precursor to the modern detective tale. Written in 1868 and first published as a serial story in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, this is an adventurous and highly gripping mystery about the theft of a precious Indian gem from an English country house. Collins performs an extraordinary feat in telling his tale in the first person through the recollections of several different characters, many of whom contradict each other, gradually revealing the truth behind the crime. In most first-person books we assume we can believe the voice of the person whose personality we have almost come to share as the story progresses. In works such as The Moonstone we’ve no idea whether they’re telling the truth or not.
The storyteller in works such as these is known as an ‘unreliable narrator’, someone whose word we simply cannot trust. Children often make unreliable narrators, and may not even know it. Teenagers, such as J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, know full well what they’re up to, and don’t mind letting on to the reader either. If you want to experience an unreliable narrator so unexpected that his revelation provoked outrage in some readers at the time, try another detective classic, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. These are all works told in the first person, but with much more surprise and richness than one might expect. An unreliable narrator may be simply economical with the truth, a villain, someone who hides something for a good reason, or plain mad. Even a combination of all three. There’s a lot of room to play with and, unlike in the epistolary approach, the unreliable narrator is quite happy to play a part in a conventional, linear narrative.
One caveat though: the narrator here is unreliable only in terms of what he or she shares with the reader. Internally the character needs to be working to a strict and accurate set of values which will usually only be shared with the world at the end. In order for this to work you will need to know very clearly what those values are as you go along. If in doubt read Roger Ackroyd and ask yourself: how did Agatha Christie handle that as a writer? At what stage do you think she managed to come up with that unexpected twist at the end? Certainly a long time before it reaches the reader.
It’s the middle of July, a hot afternoon, and you’re bunking off school again, kicking pebbles on the beach near the old, fire-blasted pier, wondering when you dare go home and face the music. You look into the cool dark space below the walkway. Next to a rusting iron pylon that looks like some severed stork’s leg you see her standing waist-deep in the water by a concrete stanchion green with seaweed. She’s a little older than you, but she’s crying uncontrollably, tears running down her shiny pale cheeks, and she’s holding something in her arms, cradling it like a baby. But it isn’t. You can see it’s a doll, an old and battered one, with a pale face that’s cracked, skull open to the sea air as if someone’s smashed it. You think: she looks like a lost mermaid. You tell yourself: walk away. There’s trouble down here sometimes. Gangs and louts and all the people your father says to steer clear of.
But there’s a girl too. She’s pretty and she’s in trouble. You can’t walk away. You can’t.
Very few full-length books are written entirely in the second person. The voice is usually employed in short stories or to add some variety to a work in another voice by introducing short passages, perhaps prefacing a chapter, told in a semi-interior second-person mode. This is, I imagine, how one would proceed with the passage here. One could move from this dreamlike image into a first-person account told by Charlie himself, indicating that this was a memory perhaps or a dream. Or segue into a third-person version that leaves the reader wondering who the ‘you’ referred to in the first few paragraphs actually represents.
Brief changes of voice – and as we shall discuss later, of tense – can add a slightly surreal and creepy nature to your story, beguiling the reader who knows he’s being drawn into something unknown and perhaps a little unreal. Note that this opening is set in the present tense, not the customary past. That adds to the idea that this is some kind of vision or dream. Placing the second person in the past tense changes the effect substantially.
It was the middle of July, a hot afternoon, and you’d bunked off school again, kicking pebbles on the beach near the old, fire-blasted pier, wondering when you’d dare go home and face the music. You looked into the cool dark space below the walkway …
We can imagine the first would lead to a narrator thinking inwardly, wondering about the reality of the memory. In the past tense all this has happened. So perhaps you’d use that to lead into something a little less loose and strange. The narrator is distanced from this event. He might even be recalling it decades later in his old age.
The possibilities are there, but the second-person past can all too easily sound a touch flat and prosaic, the report of some event, not the tantalising glimpse of the coming story that we’re looking for.
Only the very brave and experimental should attempt to write a complete novel in the second person, especially if you hope it will fit into some category of popular fiction. As a voice it has all the drawbacks of the first person and none of the plus points. Best to stick to first or one of the flavours of third.
Most books are written in the third person. In other words the reader’s ‘camera’ lies outside the head of the principal character we’re following. Third-person books are popular for a reason. They give the author far more freedom and scope than a first-person book. Readers can follow different people, go to different places at the same time, float around the author’s imaginary world and examine it and its inhabitants from a variety of perspectives. This point of view is incredibly powerful if you choose to play with it. Or it can be used in a very straightforward way as a popular storytelling device that readers come to understand immediately.
There are different flavours of third-person writing. You should choose the one that best suits your own story. Rewriting chapters to see how they work in different voices is good practice and will let you see some of the possibilities such changes can open up.
Here are the principal third-person options open to you.
Third-person subjective
This is the probably the most common variation and in a way it’s much like the first person transferred to a different but linked perspective. In the third-person subjective the reader’s ‘camera’ is perched on the shoulder of the scene protagonist, so close that the reader can hear what he hears, see what he sees, even follow his thoughts. Like this …
Charlie asked the girl her name.
‘Sally,’ she said.
Perhaps she was lying. Not doing it very well either. There was something in her expression that seemed decidedly shifty.
He knew he ought to feel scared here in the chill darkness beneath the rusting pier. There were bad people around at this time of night. He wanted to go home. It was beans on toast tonight and he was hungry. Maybe the girl – Sally, if that was her name – would come too. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
We’re on Charlie’s shoulder. We see the girl through his eyes, share his suspicion that she’s not telling the truth. When Charlie feels hungry we know it without being told because we’re privy to his inner thoughts. We’ve no idea whether ‘Sally’ is hungry or not because Charlie can’t know that either. In the third-person subjective the camera stays on the shoulder throughout, listening, watching, monitoring the scene character’s thoughts, no one else’s.
How would this work through the girl’s eyes?
The boy looked too old to be wearing tatty grey shorts a size too small for him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Sally,’ she said, trying to sound as English as she could.
He thinks I’m making this up, she thought. She’d never been a good liar. Something crept into her face, she guessed, and it probably looked a little shifty.
He didn’t seem scared by being alone in the chill darkness beneath the rusting pier with a stranger waist deep in the sea.
‘You hungry?’ he asked. ‘We got beans on toast tonight. I reckon you could use some.’
‘What’re you called, kid?’ she said, nodding at him, the way a grown-up would.
‘Charlie,’ he said, then rubbed his hands on his grey shorts and stuck out a hand. ‘And by the way … I’m not a kid.’
Think about what that means for a moment. The reader and your point-of-view character are linked, tied together in a bond. It’s important, then, that the two get along somehow. All popular fiction demands that readers care about the characters in the story. In a first-person story the closeness of that relationship is obvious. It’s still there in the third subjective too, no less forceful but sometimes ignored. You’re pushing the two together like passengers in a very small train carriage. They have to forge some kind of relationship pretty quickly otherwise the reader will soon get bored and think: why should I care?
Usually that’s a connection based on some kind of affection. Charlie’s a young kid, out of his depth perhaps. If this were his scene we’d be expected to like him and worry what he’s about to get himself into – this is a story, after all, so we know something is going to happen.
The girl seems to be older, colder, more mysterious. Making her the point-of-view character is going to be more problematic unless she begins to reveal some inner warmth.
There is one other third-person reader-bond that can work wonderfully, of course. That’s when you put the camera on the shoulder of someone utterly appalling, so bad, so nasty, so vicious you have to follow and watch, even if you’re peeking through your fingers at times. Sally could easily be stringing poor Charlie along here. You choose.
Third-person objective
The camera’s moved now. It’s hovering somewhere around Charlie’s back, following him, watching everything. This isn’t the same lens at all. It can see things Charlie can’t. If there was a bad guy hidden in the shadows this camera might have caught his presence. This is still Charlie’s scene, but we’re now attached to him very loosely. We can’t see through his eyes any more or monitor any of his internal feelings. What we are aware of, more broadly than Charlie can possibly be, is the scene around him. This can have a lot of potential. One example: we can turn the reader into the audience at the pantomime screaming, ‘Look behind you!’ all for the benefit of an actor who simply can’t hear.
The boy called Charlie Harrison walked a little closer and asked her name.
‘S-s-sally,’ she stuttered. ‘Why do you want to know anyway?’
‘Don’t sound very sure.’
‘You calling me a liar?’
‘No. Are you foreign or something?’
He shuffled on his feet, staring at the sand, and added, ‘Not that I’m fussed.’
‘It is Sally,’ she insisted. ‘Honest.’
‘Shouldn’t be doing this, Sally. Not standing in freezing mucky water. Like some daft person. There’s bad people round here.’
Beyond the rickety iron legs of the pier something moved in the pitch-black darkness, sliding slowly, silently through the water, working its way towards them.
‘Maybe I’m bad too,’ the girl said. ‘You thought of that?’
He wiped his fingers on his shorts and stuck out his right hand.
‘Charlie,’ he said. ‘Charlie Harrison. We’re having supper soon. Beans. Want some?’
Neither has any idea there’s something sloshing slowly towards them. It’s silent isn’t it? We understand that. They can’t. Nor can the author pass on the information that the girl has a foreign language directly. We let Charlie bring that out of her instead.
Do you have to be absolutely rigid about this? Not at all. Think of them as conventions, not strict rules that must never be disobeyed, though some editors may crack the whip if you don’t stay within the accepted norm. Readers don’t sit there thinking about point of view. If you wanted to write ‘“Sally,” she replied in a foreign accent,’ most wouldn’t shriek, and nor would I. In the objective viewpoint the reader is still there, inside that camera, listening. You could argue it’s the reader’s observation that the accent is foreign. What will break this perspective is writing ‘“Sally,” she replied in what sounded to him like a foreign accent.’ Do that and you’ve put the camera in Charlie’s head for a few seconds only to remove it soon after. These may seem small points but you need to remember them and not just because a publishing professional might regard them as ‘errors’. Readers may not know about point of view, but it does subtly guide them through the story. If your grasp of perspective is confused and shifting, theirs will be too and most of them won’t like it.
The third-person objective is a more challenging voice, and one best avoided unless you have very specific reasons for using it. One good reason would be if you want to keep your readers out of the head of the characters, to let them observe the narrative developing without being able to guess, from interior thoughts and dialogue, exactly what’s going on in their minds. This can be a very useful tool if you need it. If not, this mode of writing can make for a story that is somewhat disconnected. Readers will have to work harder to get close to the key characters. This is problematic; you want to bring down the barriers between them and your audience, not erect them.
The third-person objective can very easily become a manifesto for a particular intellectual approach to writing, a literary equivalent of the Dogme 95 school of film-making, not a storytelling tool in its own right. But feel free to try it and see if you feel differently. Getting over that eternal difficulty – how do you tell the reader what your characters feel when you can’t put them directly inside their heads? – is a good test of your skills and ingenuity. People are still writing many great books in this viewpoint today, though the third-person subjective remains far more popular.
Third-person omniscient
If we go back to the classics we find this variant of the third person everywhere. In the omniscient the camera has hovered up somewhere into the sky of our world and from there it will watch everything with a cold, remote and observational eye.
You can’t look for better examples of this style of writing than in Charles Dickens, in particular his opening for A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …
Nothing there prepares you for a panoramic work of historical fiction, flitting between London and Paris around the time of the French Revolution. Dickens establishes from the outset the kind of point of view he will use – his customary one. In the third-person omniscient the narrator possesses – as the term suggests – an all-seeing, all-knowing eye, and the reader merely has to wait for this storyteller to decide which part of the tale to reveal next. Imagine a narrative retold by God and you have it. And God, naturally, has all the time in the world.
Most of the classic novels of the nineteenth century follow the third-person omniscient model. Tolkien used it for The Lord of the Rings trilogy too. Modern epic writers will reach for its scope. Stephen King rarely writes using anything else. This is a voice that knows its place. When you need it, little else will do.
Unless you aspire to the epic mould it’s a tough prospect. The reader of the twenty-first century is more pressed for time, more anxious for that elusive and occasionally destructive quality ‘pace’ than ever. The omniscient is tailored for the blockbuster tale spanning continents and centuries, with the kind of sprawling cast that a Cecil B. DeMille would find attractive. If that’s the kind of magnum opus you’re planning, go for it. If it’s something a little more down-to-earth you could find yourself fighting a rearguard battle against both editors and readers frowning in puzzlement and asking, with good reason: but why couldn’t he just write this straight? Outside the epic field the omniscient is a curiosity, occasionally seen in popular fiction but hard to pull off.
And remember … even epics can be written in the more standard third-person subjective. Just pick a handful of ordinary mortals and make them witnesses to history. What ensues may be more vivid seen through their eyes than through the remote viewpoint of that literally superhuman camera in the sky.
How might this mode work with Charlie and the Mermaid? For the sake of brevity I’ll have to compress things here somewhat, since it’s a hallmark of the omniscient that those different sweeps over the world below rarely happen in the space of a few paragraphs. Bear this in mind and try to fill in the gaps for yourself.
It would be the hottest evening of the summer. In the narrow, winding lanes the night people lurked sweating, breathless. Gang kids in tight jeans and black T-shirts, wads of skunk and crack in their pockets. Teenage lovers desperate for some sharp stab of passion. Drunks and deadbeats, a lone cop, a solitary hooker too tired to push for trade.
The boy of fourteen, Charlie Harrison, skirted the alleys, brought his rusty old bike to a halt by the shuttered doors of the old pier. The place had been burned out by one of the dope gangs the year before, half tumbled into the sea like the fiery embers of some gigantic bonfire. Still this stranded wreck drew him, not that he remembered why any more.
No place for a girl just a year older either. She stood waist deep in the icy water beneath the moonlit pier, watching the gentle waves of the ebbing tide ripple against the crooked iron limbs of the pier ahead of her.
A memory. Back home, in the east, a place she’d fled for reasons she’d never understood, the storks flew away at this time of the year. Great white shapes rising into the sky, long, fragile-looking legs lifting beneath them. Spindly legs, too weak to support that big strong body above. Or so she thought. The rickety black supports of the pier looked much like them. She remembered how the birds left the shore so easily, rising from the ground with a single effortless flap of their wings.
It was easy for them, she thought. Easy for most people. Not her.
She looked at the water ahead, took a deep breath, and lifted her arms in front of her, out towards the sea.
‘Oi!’ yelled a voice from the shoreline.
She turned and their eyes locked on one another: lanky fourteen-year-old in tatty shorts too small for him, skinny girl shivering as the freezing waves lapped hungrily around her waist.
‘What are you doing?’ the kid screamed. ‘What …’
She didn’t get the rest of it. She was falling beneath the water, letting the cold, dead waves embrace her.
Ahead of them beneath the pier a dark shape moved. Behind the boy with his bike, there was another shape stomping down the alley head down, throwing a cigarette into the gutter, swearing, nodding, chanting to himself, getting madder all the time.
There was a time, a time, a time … this second one sang.
And then was silent, looking ahead, seeing the strange black silhouette rise from the flat moonlit water by the crooked stanchions, feeling the fear seep into his fury, wondering which of them might win.
The giveaway’s in the first sentence. It ‘would’ be the hottest day of the summer. Only a god could know that.
Since we’re omniscient now we know how the weather will turn out. We understand what people are doing in the back alleys of the town. We can see inside Charlie’s head and that of the girl simultaneously. We hear what this new character is chanting as he stamps angrily towards the beach and see before any of them that dark shape rising from the water.
The third-person omniscient is a wonderful voice provided you can bring the reader sufficiently close to those mere mortals your narrator is watching from on high. No one wants to spend a whole book in the company of a god.
There’s no rule that says you can only use one POV in a book. It’s perfectly acceptable to switch voices between scenes, from first to third, if you want. This is most common in books that flit between two eras. In my own The Cemetery of Secrets (in the US, Lucifer’s Shadow) I wrote a contemporary story in the third person, mirrored by a companion tale set in the Venice of 1733 written in the first.
But this kind of approach is quite complex, and anything complex mitigates the speed of the narrative. If you’re after the ‘read-in-one-sitting’ effect, stick to something simple. Most first-person books are written in the voice of the same character throughout. Just make sure that character grips the reader sufficiently from the start in a positive and riveting fashion. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to like the person, though that will usually be the case. We’re fascinated by bad people too, so a first-person tale recounted by a monster can work just as well as a story told by a saint.
But here’s a confession: I wrote three books without knowing that point of view even existed. As soon as this very important aspect of fiction writing was explained to me my approach to writing scenes changed to conform with the established norm – one point of view per scene usually.
It doesn’t have to be like this. There are no rules of writing, except for the most elementary one: never bore your reader. In my very first book, a Spanish thriller first published then filmed as Semana Santa and now back in circulation as Death in Seville I occasionally committed one of the cardinal sins of point of view. I switched back and forth from character to character within the same scene.
You’re not supposed to do this. It can confuse the reader and is generally viewed as bad practice. Unless you want and expect to engage in a technical editorial argument with an editor, stick to one point of view throughout. There is one conventional exception: when your next scene is going to shift POV to a character who’s actively involved in the present one. Then it can become very effective to move that camera from one shoulder to another towards the end.
Think of it like this … Charlie takes Sally home to his house where she eats baked beans with him and his father. We find out a little more about the greater mystery that lies at the heart of the book. Towards the end of the scene Sally hears something from Charlie or his father that rings a bell, something she doesn’t want to discuss with them, a fact or possibility that will fire her into taking some action in the very next scene which we will see through her point of view. We see the present scene through Charlie’s eyes, then something happens.
Charlie’s dad finished his plate then popped open his second can of beer. He looked at Sally and said, ‘You don’t seem bad for one of them.’
‘Dad,’ Charlie said, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Don’t be so rude!’
‘Rude? Rude?’ He’d been down the pub before coming home. Did that most nights now since Mum had left. ‘You tell me I’m being rude when you grow up and there’s no damned jobs left. Not if you’re English and want a working wage.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Harrison,’ Sally said. ‘I know it’s not easy here. I didn’t choose it. My family brought me. If I could go back …’
‘Fat chance of that,’ he mumbled.
‘Dad!’ Charlie whispered. ‘How could you?’
He got up from the table and cast them both a filthy look.
‘She’s too old for you lad. Spoilt rotten probably. Like most of ’em. I know what goes on.’
‘What’s that, Mr Harrison?’ she asked.
‘Down that place you all go. You lot and the men who run this bloody town. Have fun, do you?’
‘I don’t know what place you’re talking about,’ Sally told him.
‘Dad …’ Charlie pleaded.
‘That creepy Masonic hall down Bridge Street. They won’t let the likes of me in there, will they? Only you. And them. I wonder why.’
Sally Gulik closed her eyes and tried to quell her troubled thoughts. There was a picture in her mind: a girl two years older than her, much loved, a sister lost in their travels since leaving the old country. Gone.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,’ Sally said, getting up from the table. ‘Thank you for the food. Thanks, Charlie, for your help.’
‘You don’t have to go!’ he cried, glaring at his father. ‘Ignore him. He’s been on the beer. Always has by this time of night.’
She watched the two of them. This was courageous on the boy’s part, she thought. Perhaps the furthest he’d ever gone.
His father just looked at the two of them and began to laugh, strong shoulders heaving, making a sound she didn’t like.
‘Spoiled goods,’ he said again. ‘They all are.’
She walked outside. Charlie followed and started to apologise.
‘No need,’ she insisted and briefly touched his arm.
‘Will I see you again?’ he asked.
‘Here.’
She wrote her mobile number on the back of his hand. He was very still as she held his fingers and worked the pen across his skin.
‘Where’s Bridge Street, Charlie?’ she asked him.
Shifting point of view at the end of a scene this way is a bit like passing the baton in a relay race. If you’re going to attempt it you need to make the exchange obvious. Here the change happens with the sentence, ‘Sally Gulik closed her eyes and tried to quell her troubled thoughts.’ We now know the reader is inside Sally’s head. The sentence that follows contains some significant information, not that we understand why it’s significant yet. Just to enforce the point I would make this the first stage at which we reveal Sally’s surname. She withholds it from Charlie. But the reader is told and this enforces the shift in point of view, leading to the following scene which is Sally’s as she goes to Bridge Street.
That is a conventional way to shift viewpoints in the same scene. But there are writers who will do more than this, changing back and forth mid-scene and getting away with it. I turned out to be one myself. When I came to revise Semana Santa for its republication as Death in Seville I rewrote the book from beginning to end. I was quite shocked to come across scenes where the point of view shifted in a way I’d no longer contemplate. It was always obvious, and usually between just two characters, often the only ones in the scene. I was entirely prepared to rewrite these scenes to conform to the ‘one POV’ format with a handover at the end now and again. When I asked my editor about this she thought for a moment then said, ‘I think you should leave it as it is. It works.’
So you can do it, just as you can break any so-called writing rule you encounter. When? You have the answer above. ‘When it works.’ This is writing, not algebra. Sometimes there is no easy, pat solution. What succeeds for one writer fails for another. You can say the same for readers and for books too. What you’re after is the tone, voice and approach that work for you and the book in question.
I once got an email from a reader who said one of the things he liked about my books was the way I told the story through different pairs of eyes – multiple points of view, in other words, across scenes, not within them. It’s always nice to have hit the mark but I wondered then, and I wonder even more today: what has happened to the world of writing that we find this convention so unusual it’s worthy of remark?
Tales that are told through multiple points of view are simply those in which different scenes are seen through the eyes of different people. That email came just after I’d proofed my book The Blue Demon (in the US, City of Fear). Like most of my work, that book uses the third-person subjective point of view throughout, but shifts this very personal ‘camera’ from character to character throughout the story. The tale begins through the eyes of an assassin stalking the president of Italy in the gardens of Rome’s Quirinale Palace. The second scene shifts back in time three days and is seen from the viewpoint of a kidnapped politician. After that we settle into several sections where the viewpoints move backwards and forwards between two of my cops, Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni, as they begin to unravel a terrorist plot in Rome.
I don’t think that book is any more or less multiple-viewpoint than much of my work. Sometimes I will focus largely on a single third-person viewpoint – normally Costa’s, as in the first book in the series, A Season for the Dead, and the sixth, The Garden of Evil. But usually we switch from character to character.
Why do I do this? Two reasons really. I feel it gives me more flexibility to tell a tale with depth and resonance than would a story seen through a single viewpoint. When I gave Costa the dominant point of view there was a reason: these were very much stories about him. Mostly, though, these books are ensemble pieces in which Nic is a key character but by no means the only one with a viewpoint that matters.
The second reason is much simpler. This method reflects the style of writing I grew up with, the approach taken by the majority of the novelists I’ve admired since I began to read. Most authors writing in the third person over the last two centuries have switched viewpoints as needed. Dickens wrote like this all the time, as did most Victorian and Edwardian authors. Stephen King was happily doing it from his earliest work and continues to do so today. To me it’s the natural way to write.
But popular fiction has changed somewhat over the last twenty years. A new audience no longer finds its definition of story from books, but from TV and the cinema – media which, ironically, use multiple viewpoints all the time. But they do so alongside a compression of narrative and characterisation which is usually categorised as ‘pace’. The casual reader often wants that kind of kick from a book too, and as a result simpler viewpoints, either first-person or third-person subjective confined to a single character, have become popular to the extent that the older technique of multiple-character perspectives is sometimes seen as almost an innovation. Odd really …
But none of this means you need to follow the mainstream. Multiple viewpoints are still popular, just no longer dominant as they once were. They can provide the reader with a perspective on a world that is richer and more full of mystery than one which is seen through a single pair of eyes. They also allow you more play with readers’ expectations.
Theatre doesn’t have points of view in the same sense as fiction. But there are similarities. Shakespeare is a master at varying the rhythm and tone of his work, switching from the main drama to a short, humorous piece of gallows humour before some bloody, climactic scene, for example. Shifting from the head of one character to another gives the author the chance to perform exactly the same trick, taking the reader to the brink of some exciting and revelatory moment, then extending the tension by taking them somewhere else briefly, for an unexpected diversion. It’s a tease in other words, and like all teases needs to be brief.
In some ways this use of POV is an attempt to achieve a scene structure similar to the narrative flow of cinema. The movie camera defines absolutely the perspective from which we see a scene. It also tells us very clearly when we’ve gone somewhere else.
Does that make books like this a little harder to read? Possibly. Or put it another way, they will appeal to people who like to get stuck deeply into a book instead of being able to skim-read the main plot points. But literature is a broad church. No one wants to go into a library that contains nothing but the same kind of story. Reading is a two-way deal too. The more all of us put in – writers and readers alike – the more we’re going to get out in the end.
The amazing thing is that for some modern readers multiple viewpoints in popular fiction are seen as something unusual. Something new even, as that reader’s email confirmed, not as old as the hills.
Here’s one reason why you might wish to consider this technique.
How do you persuade the reader to adopt an opinion about the actors in your tale? In very simple fiction it’s easy. Good people wear white hats, bad people black ones. Good people are handsome, athletic, have nice smiles and pat any dog that passes. Bad guys have scars, crooked teeth, greasy hair, swarthy skin and pull the wings off butterflies.
Outside stories for infants, that doesn’t work for a moment. Nor can I accept either that you disclose the personality of individuals by attaching a simple label to them. ‘Renowned scientist Roger Frick’ … ‘Courageous Captain Hearty’ … Sorry. I need more subtle tricks.
Here’s one to do with characterisation that comes directly from the use of multiple characters in the third-person subjective viewpoint.
When I was starting out as a writer I thought that you established character openly through the individual concerned. You showed him being kind or cruel. You revealed him as a hypocrite or liar by showing how his inner thoughts conflicted with his outward actions and what he said out loud. You painted him directly on the page.
This is fine, and something that all writers can and will do. But if you adopt the third-person subjective fully you can approach this problem another way. Remember, if you get this right the reader is inside the head of your POV character, seeing everything through his or her eyes. When your character, and through him your reader, views other people a subtle and potentially powerful chain reaction kicks in. The response of the reader is refined and enhanced by the very fact they are discovering this person indirectly, through the eyes of another character in the book.
Think of it like this for a scene in which Nic Costa – a good guy, something already established – is the POV character.
Nic is dealing with two of his colleagues.
He clearly likes one and appreciates his opinion.
Nic does not like the other guy.
Because we know Nic, like him and trust him already, his opinion comes to colour ours. Through his eyes we understand that the one he likes should turn out to be trustworthy and decent, unless Nic’s a bad judge of character (which is rare). And we suspect the other guy, even if Nic doesn’t go that far, precisely because Nic is normally right about people. So we’ve established some personality traits without ever having to state them baldly, and they are reinforced by the relationship the reader already has with Nic.
It gets even more interesting if the POV character is less reliable. Supposing he’s not a good judge of character and the reader knows this. If he then starts trusting someone, we’re going to think, uh-oh, this may not be such a good idea.
In real life we judge people both directly and through the eyes of others. Books are no different. Of course you can and should use this technique with a third-person subjective story that never shifts POV. But if you apply it to a multiple-viewpoint narrative, the possibilities for building real, resonant relationships between your characters implicitly, without ever having to state something as blunt, tedious fact, become much more interesting.
Point of view is one of the most powerful implements in the writer’s toolbox and worthy of a book in its own right. But it’s not this one. The best way to begin to master this immensely potent technique is to play with it yourself. Try writing scenes from different viewpoints and see how they change. Ask yourself which best fits in with your ambitions for the story. Experiment at the edge of the envelope if you like, mixing first, second and third person to see how they work. I’d avoid using the variations of third person in the same book. This would confuse me. But you may have a way round that. And finally, if you are heading for a third-person story, try to evaluate the various pros and cons of approaching it through a single character or an ensemble.
These are important decisions, ones that, after a little experimentation, you need to stick to. It’s no fun finding halfway through a book that you picked the wrong person for the single third-person subjective. There’s nothing to do in those circumstances but to go back to the very beginning and rewrite the whole thing (and I speak from experience).
On the other hand, I should also point out that perhaps you should discount all the above. There’s still a hard core of writers ignoring these rules out there, and some of them do pretty well. A century ago popular writers knew none of this and no one seemed to mind. If you want proof and the opportunity for a little creative exercise, pop over to somewhere like Feedbooks.com or Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) and pick up a free copy of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. Turn to the second chapter, ‘Mr Teddy Henfrey’s First Impressions’. Then try to work out whose point of view is being used throughout. Clue: it’s not Mr Teddy Henfrey’s for a fair bit of the time. The POV hops about like a moth trapped in a room full of light bulbs. If you want to test your understanding of modern POV conventions try to work out the changes and see how a writer today would ‘correct’ them. Wells clearly wasn’t bothered by such things when he wrote this very successful book in 1897. So should we be now? I think so. It’s a great story but for me it flounders in this chapter precisely because the modern reader, short on time and patience, can’t work out the perspective.
We now need to pass just two more hurdles before we get down to writing: a decision on the simple matter of tense; and, much more fundamentally, a way to monitor the content, tone and progress of our book as it begins to grow beneath our attentions, fighting to find a life of its own and, if we’re not careful, squeeze out of our control.