Amy Hassinger

WALKING A MILE IN THEIR SHOES:
DEVELOPING CHARACTER THROUGH
ALTERNATE POINTS OF VIEW

LET ME GIVE YOU THE BAD NEWS FIRST: YOU'RE GOING TO have to choose. Anytime you begin a new story, you will have to confront the sobering fact of limitation. When the page is blank, the options are wide open: your protagonist could be a worker laying the limestone bricks of a medieval tower in twelfth-century Provence, or she could be a quirky artist who builds medieval towers out of paper clips in twenty-first-century America. You could introduce a full-fledged villain, with blue-gray bags under his eyes and tracks on his arms, who seduces your protagonist and knocks down her medieval paper-clip tower, or, hang on a minute, you could write your villain's story—where did those baggy eyes come from and what spawned his addiction? The dreaming that happens before you actually set any words down on paper can be intoxicating: a new story is a fledgling utopia, full of the promise of perfection.

But, regrettably, there are the words. And the sentences. Each word you write forces a new boundary, each sentence an indelible line on the paper. You must make choices about your characters, and the choices you make will determine the trajectory of your story, which will be one trajectory, period. Likewise, your characters will have to develop qualities that make them one sort of person and not another. This is the tragic reality about writing and about life.

Now for the good news: you get to write more than one story. (Not true, you will notice, about life.) Not only that, but you can even write the same story from alternate points of view. You can do this not just because you have a pathological phobia of decisions but because it's actually a good idea, craft-wise. Writing a story— or even just a scene—from an alternate point of view encourages you to more fully imagine all of your characters' desires and motivations. Just why is your villain so destructive, anyway? And what is it with your protagonist and her obsession with building towers?

Whether or not the writing you do in your alternate point of view actually makes it to your final draft, it can be an effective way of helping you to understand your characters better. A new point of view reveals new details—some radically new, some just slightly altered—and teaches you compassion and broadness of mind, qualities that might just show up in your writing, if you're lucky.

THE EXERCISE

Start with a scene from a draft of a story. Rewrite it, transferring the scene's central intelligence to a different character. If your scene uses an omniscient point of view, limit it to one character and go deeper into that character's consciousness. The change should provide you with a substantially new vision of the scene. You may find that the exercise gives you one or two good insights into your characters that you can graft onto your original scene, or that you come away from the exercise with an entirely new story.

Alternatively, try retelling a scene from a classic story you know well using a new point of view. Jean Rhys did this to great effect when she retold Jane Eyre through the eyes of Bertha Rochester, the madwoman in the attic, in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, as did John Gardner with Grendel, which retells Beowulf from the monster's point of view. The objective is the same: to come to a greater understanding of each of the story's characters by allowing the more peripheral ones to direct the action for a while.