Perspectives

The choices a writer makes about viewpoint are crucial. This truth isn’t immediately obvious, as Aline Templeton explains, but it’s inescapable. The first significant analysis of viewpoint in a crime novel came in Dorothy L. Sayers’ groundbreaking and highly influential introduction to her first anthology of crime short stories, mentioned earlier by James Runcie.

Sayers pointed out that Agatha Christie’s early books borrowed the ‘Watson viewpoint’ method (with the feats of a great detective narrated by an admiring and much less brilliant friend) introduced by Edgar Allan Poe and refined by Arthur Conan Doyle. An early bestseller of the 1920s was The Red House Mystery, written by A. A. Milne, best remembered as creator of Winnie-the-Pooh but also a founder member of the Detection Club. Sayers described Milne’s approach as ‘a mixed method. Mr Milne begins by telling his tale from the position of a detached spectator; later on, we found that he has shifted round’: he makes use of a ‘Watson’ figure before allowing the reader to see events through the eyes of his amateur detective.

Sayers applauded the ingenuity with which Agatha Christie used the first person viewpoint for purposes of the plot of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and examined in detail the subtle shifts in viewpoint employed in Trent’s Last Case, by E. C. Bentley, who became the second President of the Detection Club. Trent’s Last Case was in effect the catalyst for the Golden Age of detective fiction, with its focus on ‘playing fair’ with the reader. Sayers regarded this as a ‘revolution’, but also a turning back to Wilkie Collins’ method in The Moonstone, in which the events are recounted by multiple narrators, a device which in capable hands can enrich the quality of a novel as well as its plot. Sayers herself experimented with this ‘casebook’ method in The Documents in the Case, a novel whose construction is explored later in this book.

A comparable approach is often used today. Paula Hawkins’ follow-up to her global bestseller The Girl on the Train (in which we see events from the perspective of three women) was Into the Water, a novel which boasts no fewer than eleven different viewpoints. However, such an ambitious approach is not for the beginner or the faint-hearted. As Val McDermid said when reviewing Into the Water for the Guardian: ‘To differentiate 11 separate voices within a single story is a fiendishly difficult thing.’

Patricia Highsmith usually opted to use two viewpoints, to allow for changes of mood and pace, as in her first novel, Strangers on a Train. In another of her masterpieces, The Talented Mr Ripley, she opted for a single viewpoint, seeing everything from the perspective of the eponymous killer. This can help to increase the story’s emotional intensity. An inexperienced novelist may find it easier to adopt the viewpoint of a character whom, in emotional terms at least, he or she resembles. But this isn’t essential, and may not even be desirable. The key to success when writing about detectives, suspects, and murderers unlocks the door to a richly imagined world.

Aline Templeton suggests that to tell a story from the viewpoint of a wholly credible character, it’s vital to understand him or her. As Liza Cody puts it, the writer’s aim is to know what it is like to be that person. Achieving that calls for curiosity, experience, imagination, and humanity.

Getting a Perspective

Aline Templeton

When I started writing, there was no such thing as the internet, with its 5,180,000,000 results to answer the question, ‘How to Write a Book’. There was no such thing as Writing for Dummies, either. The only rules I had come across were Monsignor Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments, and since I didn’t envisage using identical twins or Chinamen, they didn’t seem terribly relevant.

I had the naive idea that when you wanted to write a book, you just sat down – with, of course, a typewriter, carbon paper and Tippex – and wrote on until the story was finished. And as a matter of fact, it worked, sort of. Eventually. Sadly I didn’t keep the rejection slips before the blessed acceptance came in, which would have let me paper the smallest room.

I had never heard of flow, three-act structure and the narrative arc. When, after the first book had been published, I did and realized that actually those were features of what I had written, I was as astonished and gratified as Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme who discovered to his delight and surprise that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.

In fact, I’m still not entirely convinced about these special rules for structure. Perhaps they do provide the scaffolding for the building, but how do you know where to erect it before you know what the house is going to be like?

So I blundered along happily, a child of nature. And then I went to a workshop. These were not as popular then as they are now and the idea was something of a novelty. I think I probably went along in a sceptical mood, expecting that it would have the same sort of effect as buying an issue of one of the new writers’ magazines: I would be briefly buoyed up, convinced that big success was just around the corner if I followed some clever piece of advice, only for the confidence to wear off when I tried it.

I certainly didn’t realize that this workshop would change my writing life. The subject was points of view and here I pay tribute to the lecturer: Dianne Doubtfire – genuinely her married name, she assured us.

One image she used has always stuck with me. Someone reading a scene between two people where the author has not worked out the point-of-view technique, she said, was like a spectator sitting at the side watching a tennis match, turning his head first this way then that as the ball bounces from one player to the other. Trying to occupy the heads of two characters simultaneously had a similar effect. When I reread my own work, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed how distracting, how amateurish this was. (This is the book I refuse to let anyone reprint.)

With that perspective, I started looking closely at everything I read and it began to leap out at me. All the good writers were operating a point-of-view system, but confusingly, they were applying it in several different ways. I found out later these are usually categorised as: First Person, the story told as if by the protagonist; Second Person, the reader being involved directly as ‘you’; Third Person Omniscient, the author has access to the thoughts and actions of all the characters; Third Person Limited, the author confines the viewpoint to one character; Third Person Multiple, the author sees the story through the eyes of several different characters.

Or, since I’m not a great believer in laid-down rules, it can even be a mixture of all or any. There are, they say, no rules in a knife fight; and writing’s a bit like that. You do whatever you think it takes to get the result you want.

I had to make some decisions before I started again. Second Person was the first to be eliminated. Yes, I know that both Jay McEnery and William Faulkner had used it with great success, but I know my limitations.

First Person? Though I did rather like the idea of choosing an unreliable narrator, like Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, or breaking through the fourth wall like Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre (‘Reader, I married him.’) I felt it would be like being a horse in blinkers. What discouraged me too was the contortions that have to be imposed on the plot when there is no way to explain what is happening outside that personal experience. One book I read had the narrator saying, ‘I don’t know what they did but I imagine it was like this. He took her by the shoulders, then his hands tightened round her neck …’ The writer lost me at that point.

Third Person Limited, where the action is seen through the eyes of only one character, has some of the same practical drawbacks.

With options narrowed, I was looking at Omniscient, with full access to all the thoughts and experiences of all the characters; or Multiple, where there are a number of perspective characters.

Omniscient is probably the most straightforward and one that we are familiar with from classical writers, but somehow it didn’t appeal to me. All-knowing felt a bit too head-prefectish for my style of writing, and it has the risk too of being categorised as what Ogden Nash memorably described as the HIBK school – when the veil is lifted to give the reader a sneaky peek at the future: ‘Had I (or he) But Known what grim secret lurked …’ He ends the poem, ‘I wouldn’t have bought it had I but known it was impregnated with Had I But Knowns.’ After reading that, Omniscient was out.

I like getting involved, feeling I’m right there with my characters. When I write a major scene, there will be one character whose eyes I look through. I then can’t know what another character is thinking or feeling unless there is visible evidence. I could write, ‘She gasped and put a hand over her mouth,’ but I couldn’t say, ‘gasped in horror’ because my point of view character couldn’t know that.

Conversely, there can be no external description of the point-of-view character since he can’t see outside himself – ‘He was very scared and he looked as if he’d seen a ghost.’

Language comes into it too. If my point-of-view character is young, I would have to make sure that the style of the scene reflects that, even when it isn’t direct speech. For instance, ‘she would have to keep the home fires burning’ isn’t something a teenager would think. If the point-of-view character is elderly, the expression ‘getting down with the kids’ wouldn’t be in his head.

One thing I have discovered is that when a scene isn’t working, when it all grinds to a halt and you can’t think how to move it on, it’s nearly always because you’ve chosen the wrong point of view. Change it round and it often just falls into place.

You do need to be a bit choosy, though, I think. If there are too many point-of-view characters, it’s easy to dilute the impact of the main characters who you want the reader to identify with, and it can become confusing. It’s certainly vital that you make it clear when the point of view changes and the action has moved into another scene, with a clear space or even a marker like ******.

There’s a sort of hierarchy too. By and large, I would say it doesn’t work very well to have a main character viewed through the eyes of a subordinate character. Generally if my detective is interviewing a suspect, I’ll be recording his thoughts and observations rather than the other way round because I think he is of more interest to the reader.

Sometimes I break this though; rules are made to be broken and for a rounded picture, I need to have him viewed by other people, otherwise I couldn’t show what he looked like at all. (I always smile at the ‘mirror scene’ in First Person/Third Person Limited narratives; ‘I/She looked in the looking-glass on her dressing-table and saw a round, dimpled face with big blue eyes.’)

It’s not always easy to get the tone right with new viewpoint characters. It can take time to get to know them and, as many authors will tell you, characters can develop a will of their own and defy you. It probably comes about when the conscious mind and the subconscious are out of sync and I’ve always found it pays not to try to overrule the subconscious.

In a series you can come to understand your regular viewpoint characters so well that they more or less do the job for you. I have a character called Tam MacNee, a wee Glaswegian DS, and when I sit down to write a scene looking through his eyes, I find myself looking forward to finding out what he’s going to say.

Multiple points of view can add greatly to the texture and depth of the writing. They draw readers into intimacy with the main protagonists and ideally will sweep them along so they barely notice how the scenery of the plot changes as it is viewed through different eyes, leaving an impression of a richly characterized novel. It’s worth all the effort when readers say they feel they actually know your characters as if they were real people.

I’m still have a certain ambivalence about rules, even these. Yes, some techniques do seem to work better than others to achieve the sort of book a publisher will want, but for every rule there’s a brilliant writer who’s written a brilliant book that determinedly pays no attention to it. I cherish Raymond Chandler’s roar of rage when an editor corrected his solecism in splitting an infinitive: ‘When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it stays split!’

So if you like, pay no attention to what I’ve said. Just write what you believe you need to write and if you want to break the rules, don’t do it apologetically. Do it with panache, and your reader will be right there cheering you on from the side-lines.

What On Earth Is It Like to Be You?

Liza Cody

When you read a book, you need to have interest, curiosity or excitement enough to turn the page and find out what happens next. If you don’t have them, the book will be put aside. Simple as that.

Writing a book is very similar. If the writer isn’t as curious as a reader to find out what happens next, he or she might as well stop and start something else. Or donate the laptop to the nearest charity shop.

Everyone has an interest or obsession – it might be rococo plots, history, love of place, the law, cops or private investigators. For me, what gets my brain ticking and my blood running faster is character. Whether I’m a reader or a writer I can’t become truly engaged in what’s happening until I begin to engage with who it’s happening to.

I started writing in the late Seventies and I picked genre writing because the giants in the US hardboiled field, like Chandler, Hammett, and Cain, were such good writers and so funny and exciting. So good in fact that I was almost tempted to let the extraordinary misogyny and sexism slide. But not quite. I’d always reach a point where I’d address the author in silent fury saying, ‘Do you actually know any women? Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a woman? Have you even tried to understand the women you see around you? Probably not, because if you had you wouldn’t be writing (beautifully, to be sure) this trash about, for instance, Carmen Sternwood (my favourite bête noire, from The Big Sleep.)’

Eventually, I came to write my own first book, but before I started I knew that if I was going to redress the balance somewhat I would have to write about a female private eye. So I had to ask myself what sort of woman would end up doing a job like that.

It seems obvious now, of course, but back then I didn’t have any role models. I had to ask and answer my own questions. Then, one day at a bus stop, I found myself watching a woman police constable trying to look after two lost, screaming toddlers while her male colleague went off to locate the responsible adults. There was just a flick of her eyes as she watched him walk away, hands free, to search for the parents that made me wonder if she was thinking, ‘And here I am – left holding the babies again. Why?’ A question which can be just as relevant today as it was then. She was young, obviously had no children of her own, was daunted by the responsibility for calming the toddlers’ distress and trying her best to stop them running off again.

Ironic, I thought, she probably joined the force looking for adventure and independence. I wonder what on earth it’s like to be her. I wonder what her family life’s like, that she needs adventure. Or, does she come from a police family? Does she actually like the uniform and those ugly shoes? Does she have to be a team person? How does she cope with on-the-job sexism? Why, yes, why is she the one left holding the babies?

Questions like these, which occurred to me while watching a very ordinary young woman, led to the way I wrote my first book, Dupe, about an ex-police officer, now a junior member of a firm of PIs. Her name was Anna Lee. She wasn’t particularly tough. She couldn’t have any cleverer powers of deduction than I do. When she got beaten up she passed out and lost a tooth. Men did not fall over themselves trying to attract her attention. Being noticeable was not part of her job. What she had was the edge a woman acquires when she has to pull her weight and try to excel in a man’s world.

She interested me. And if I can’t interest myself in a character, how can I hope to interest a reader?

It’s true, though, that I wrote Anna partially as an antidote to Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and, especially, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. I wanted readers to find an ordinary woman in difficult circumstances as interesting as I found her. I wanted to be able to describe small, banal violences as having the enormous impact they have on ordinary people in real life. I did not want to indulge in the escalating pornography of violence that I’d read in books or seen on TV or in the movies. In order to do that, I needed a reader to care about Anna Lee. Which meant I had to care about her. And I did.

Partly, I suppose, that approach was engendered by the times I’d been brought up in. It wasn’t just male writers I was infuriated by, it was the expectations and constraints my culture had made so suffocating while I was growing up. Even as an adult, in the Sixties I was not allowed to obtain a mortgage or be prescribed birth control without a man to co-sign or give permission.

Culture changes, slowly, and so do women’s problems – well, certainly some of them. And so must I and my characters.

After a series of six books about Anna, I found my character stereotyped as a ‘good deed in a naughty world.’ Which she isn’t. And I found that whenever anyone wanted a story from me, they insisted on ‘a strong female protagonist’.

It was around then that I saw a poster advertising wrestling. Along with the usual display pictures of men-mountains was a photograph of a snarling, feral-looking woman. She was no oil painting and obviously not eager to please – not the sort of woman, visible for her beauty and placatory qualities, who I was used to seeing on posters. In fact, right next to the wrestling poster was one for Revlon which showed a flawless blonde displaying utterly ravishing cosmetics. ‘Love me, admire me, buy what makes me look so lovely,’ her expression said.

That was how I first saw Klondyke Kate. Quite unlike the cosmetic model, KK’s expression said, ‘Fuck with me and I’ll suck your eyes right out of your face.’

Well, I thought, no one in his right mind could call her ‘a good deed in a naughty world.’ But from the look of those shoulders, she’s definitely a strong woman.

There she was, advertising herself in a culture where it’s only women of beauty who show their faces on posters while the imperfect ones are supposed to make themselves invisible. Expectations are such that even minor faults are corrected by cosmetic surgery, mousy hair is coloured, and even young women routinely expect a boob job for their eighteenth birthdays.

Yet Klondyke Kate was making a living because her defects allowed her to play the villain in a pantomime world of heroes, villains and (not always) faux violence.

What on earth can it be like to be you? I thought, staring at her unlovely face. Surely she has the same need for love and approval that we all do.

So of course I had to go to the wrestling and discovered the upside-down world of the wrestling villain. KK measured her success and approval by the number of people who booed, spat at, and hated her. If people behaved to her in a way that would make the rest of us want to cry and hide in a cupboard, she’d had a good night.

And I thought long and hard about someone who is, by reason of genetics, born outside the oppressive, fascistic cultural expectation of what a woman is supposed to look like. In wrestling, as well as other showbiz contexts, what is left to her is to be the brutal, cheating bully who beats up the blonde, pretty-in-pink heroine. That gave me Eva Wylie and the Bucket Nut trilogy.

But in thinking about someone who, through no fault of her own, lives well below the cultural norm in the way of looks, I began thinking about the pressure exerted on the women who occupy the stratosphere above it. This gave me what I think of as MTV’s Guide to Gorgeousness and the media exposure it subjects them to. Every young girl’s dream, you think? Well no – not if you know the first thing about it.

So I thought about the most beautiful women of my youth – the ones I’d wanted to be like. And, you’ve guessed it, what was it like to be Marianne Faithfull then? What was it like to be her thirty years later? Of course Faithfull was just the example I began with before finding my own ex-rock-chick, musician and conwoman Birdie Walker in Gimme More.

Because whoever you, as a writer, might use as a paradigm, you are not painting a portrait of an existing woman. That would make you a biographer, or just plain lazy. You have to use your own imagination and experience. You have to breathe your own breath into her lungs to bring her alive.

Lately my curiosity has centred on a rough sleeper called Lady Bag, and her dog, Electra. Lady Bag has shown me once more how much someone who is a reject of society can teach you about your own culture and your own humanity

So if I were to be rash or brash enough to give anyone advice about writing a character – woman or man – I’d say curiosity is your first tool. After that comes your own experience, imagination and humanity. A long hard look at your own culture and what you would like to change about it is a big help too. And lastly I’d say that once you’ve found your character, be true to her. Don’t squeeze her out of shape to suit your plot. Change your plot plans to accommodate her. Writing is way more interesting if, instead of trying to control her, you let your character take the lead and show you what a weird country you might end up in.