KENNETH WISHNIA

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone: Writing from Different Points of View

KENNETH WISHNIA’s first novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for the Edgar and the Anthony awards. His other novels include Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year, and Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Queens Noir, and elsewhere. His latest novel is The Fifth Servant. He teaches writing, literature, and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island.

 

 

Crime writers are often told to spend as much time on their bad guy as they do on their good guy, because you want the opponents to be more or less evenly matched, you want a villain who is compelling because he or she gives free rein to some of our own darkest desires and impulses (which are normally suppressed), and because, well, you want all your characters to be believable, not simply two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, don’t you?

Another reason to write from more than one perspective is that it allows you to employ Alfred Hitchcock’s formula for suspense: Tell the audience something the main character doesn’t know. (Think of the scene in PSYCHO when Vera Miles tells John Gavin, “I can handle a sick old woman.”)

My own series, featuring Ecuadorian-American detective Filomena Buscarsela, is written in the first-person present tense. One advantage of this style is that it lends tremendous immediacy to the narrative: Filomena is speaking directly to you, the reader, and she tells you everything that she is experiencing. What is lost, or at least weakened, is the ability to generate the classic Hitchcockian edge-of-the-seat, nail-biting suspense described above.

So I took a different approach in my latest novel, The Fifth Servant, a Jewish-themed historical thriller set in Prague in the late sixteenth century. The central character, an assistant shammes to the great Rabbi Loew (of the Golem legends), addresses the reader in the first person (past tense), but there are five other characters in the story whose points of view are presented in the third person (past tense). This approach helped me produce a narrative with a great deal of depth and complexity, as well as that crucial sense of ambiguity and ambivalence that makes for compelling drama.

In other words, if you take the time to show that an evil person is acting in a way that he or she somehow believes is completely justified ; or, as opposed to most simplistic, big-budget action-adventure narratives, if there is no single, clear-cut choice that your protagonist must make, but a tangled web of conflicting, equally bad choices, then you will have created a much more meaningful and emotionally engaging drama.

Moreover, most beginning writers typically project some version of themselves onto the protagonist’s persona, so it’s always a good exercise to write from the perspective of someone else.

To that end, I employ the following exercise in my writing classes:

EXERCISE

Choose a newspaper or magazine article about a controversial topic and write a reaction to it in the voice of someone who is not you.

You can do this by opening the newspaper at random (or clicking on your preferred news source), but it’s often best to choose political or celebrity scandals, since most people generally have strong opinions about such big media events.

The challenge is to create a monologue, with no descriptive passages or other external clues to the speaker’s identity, which somehow gets across as much information as possible about the speaker’s age, gender, social class, outlook on life, and so on.

The whole point is to get away from autobiographical self-projection. You have to create a person outside of yourself who reacts in a way that is appropriate for that person. You can’t tell us right out who you are (e.g., “I’m a fifty-four-year-old bus driver . . .”). We have to be able to tell just from what you say and how you would say it if your character is old, young, rich, poor, or somewhere in between.

The results of this exercise are usually quite creative and fun. I’ve brought in articles about Hillary Clinton addressing the Democratic National Convention (which produced a monologue in the voice of a Latina janitor in the auditorium, watching from behind the scenes, who didn’t know enough English to understand what Mrs. Clinton was saying, but who was still impressed with her obvious power, confidence, and authority); one about Miley Cyrus pole-dancing on TV (which produced a response in the voice of a five-year-old girl watching Miley on TV and who couldn’t wait to imitate her idol’s moves); and most recently, a story about a certain celebrity’s latest release from rehab (which gave us a mom who couldn’t believe that she had actually once thought the actress might serve as a role model for her own daughter; a disgruntled Vietnam veteran disgusted by the preferential treatment that spoiled celebrities get; and the voice of that celebrity’s fictitious roommate in rehab, who resented all the attention her ex-roommate was getting).

It’s not hard to take this further, into darker territory, and imagine the voice of a child who innocently tries to reenact a dangerous stunt seen on TV, or the parent who plots revenge on the offending celebrity for having been a bad influence on his or her child, or just where the jealousy expressed by that ex-roommate might lead. See what you can come up with.