I read the first prologue to my students last night, and as I read I could tell it wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on why. It seemed too glitzy and commercial, which is what I said when I was done. But Mimsie put her finger on what was wrong, and she did it in her usual incisive fashion. She pointed out that Virginia Elliott was one-dimensional. And I had to confess that, although she’s the POV character in the scene, I’d violated my first rule of writing out of sheer laziness and I’d not done a character analysis on her although I’d done analyses for the two other characters in the scene.
Journal of a Novel,
August 14, 1997
For some reason, these two concepts tend to be the most difficult for neophyte writers to grasp. I had a student once at the Maui Writers Retreat whom I finally had to refer in despair to another instructor because no matter how many ways I came up with to explain point of view and voice to him, he simply couldn’t understand them.
Let me see if I can do a little better with you. I’ll start with point of view.
To put this most simply, point of view is merely a decision the writer makes that will determine through whose eyes the story is going to be told. Bernays and Painter use the example of an automobile accident to illustrate point of view,1 and I’ll expand on that. If an accident occurs and the police show up to take reports on it, the telling of the accident will differ slightly depending on whose point of view is being expressed. The person behind the steering wheel of the car that’s demolished by the drunk driver will have a different “take” on the story than his passenger who wasn’t wearing her seat belt and who went through the windshield as a result. The drunk driver will have yet another point of view. Those people on the street who witnessed the wreck will have another point of view. So will the paramedics who come upon the woman who went through the windshield. So will the firefighters who have to use the Jaws of Life to get the innocent driver out of his car.
In other words, as James Frey points out, point of view just refers to where the narrator stands in relation to the other characters and to the events in the story.2 Is this person an unseen eyewitness who acts just like a journalist, giving “just the facts, ma’am”? Is this person an all-knowing power who can reveal the thoughts and feelings of the characters as the action plays out? Or is this person another character in the story? Come to think of it, does the point of view come from a person at all?
You have to have a point of view in the novel, and wise is the writer who makes her decision about point of view early in the process. This one element of the craft is crucial because it’s part of how a writer dramatizes events.3 It also is critical to how the story is structured (as you will see, I hope), and often it’s part of the entire artistic idea behind the novel. Point of view will allow your readers to suspend their disbelief if it’s used with consistency throughout the book. It also will establish something of an authority figure so that the story can become more believable, even if it’s the most imaginative and outlandish piece of fiction ever written.
Since I’m suggesting that you choose your viewpoint early in the process, it would probably help you to know how to go about this. But first, you need to know what your choices actually are.
The first is the objective viewpoint. When a writer chooses this, she decides to remain outside the characters at all times. She’s making a decision to write journalistically, like a reporter. Using this viewpoint, the writer gives us only the facts. What she doesn’t give us are the thoughts and feelings of the characters. She doesn’t give us their attitudes, their concerns, their obsessions, their desires, or their plans. Indeed, anything that’s part of a character’s internal working is removed from the narration altogether.
This viewpoint is a tough one to carry off well. First of all, it’s difficult to pare stories down to their essentials because in doing this, the writer has to trust the reader absolutely. She also has to trust her ability to affect the reader solely through an often terse depiction of events. She has to rely on the reader’s imagination and on the reader’s ability to empathize. She has to give up a portion of control over the reader as well as all attempts to manipulate him.
Consider these opening paragraphs from Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.”
AT the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.
Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.
The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.
“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.
They walked up from the beach through a meadow that was soaking wet with dew, following the young Indian who carried a lantern. Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides. The young Indian stopped and blew out his lantern and they all walked on along the road.
They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark-peelers lived. More dogs rushed out at them. The two Indians sent them back to the shanties. In the shanty nearest the road there was a light in the window. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a lamp.
Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.
Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.
“This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” he said.
“I know,” said Nick.
“You don’t know,” said his father. “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”
“I see,” Nick said.
Just then the woman cried out.
“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.
“No. I haven’t any anæsthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”
The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.4
We are closest to Nick, true. But we are not in his head. Instead, we remain at a distance from him while the objective narrator reports on the events as they occur. There is no editorializing. There is no delving into a character’s psyche. There is just what happens. Because what happens in the story is ultimately so dreadful, the horror of it ends up being intensified by the very lack of internal reaction on the part of the characters. That, obviously, was Hemingway’s point. These were, after all, “only Indians.”
When the writer wishes to create an aura of intrigue about a character or a situation, she also can make a choice to use objective narration. Stephen King does just that in The Dead Zone with the mysterious Mr. Smith.
At 2:30 P.M. on December 26, 1978, Bud Prescott waited on a tall and rather haggard-looking young man with graying hair and badly bloodshot eyes. Bud was one of three clerks working in the 4th Street Phoenix Sporting Goods Store on the day after Christmas, and most of the business was exchanges—but this fellow was a paying customer.
He said he wanted to buy a good rifle, light-weight, bolt-action. Bud showed him several. The day after Christmas was a slow one on the gun-counter; when men got guns for Christmas, very few of them wanted to exchange them for something else.
This fellow looked them all over carefully and finally settled on a Remington 700, .243 caliber, a very nice gun with a light kick and a flat trajectory. He signed the gunbook John Smith and Bud thought, If I never saw me an alias before in my life, there’s one there. “John Smith” paid cash—took the twenties right out of a wallet that was bulging with them. Took the rifle right over the counter. Bud, thinking to poke him a little, told him he could have his initials burned into the stock, no extra charge. “John Smith” merely shook his head.
When “Smith” left the store, Bud noticed that he was limping noticeably. Would never be any problem identifying that guy again, he thought, not with that limp and those scars running up and down his neck.
At 10:30 A.M. on December 27, a thin man who walked with a limp came into Phoenix Office Supply, Inc., and approached Dean Clay, a salesman there. Clay said later that he noticed what his mother had always called a “fire-spot” in one of the man’s eyes. The customer said he wanted to buy a large attaché case, and eventually picked out a handsome cowhide item, top of the line, priced at $149.95. And the man with the limp qualified for the cash discount by paying with new twenties. The whole transaction, from looking to paying, took no more than ten minutes. The fellow walked out of the store, and turned right toward the downtown area, and Dean Clay never saw him again until he saw his picture in the Phoenix Sun.
Late that same afternoon a tall man with graying hair approached Bonita Alvarez’s window in the Phoenix Amtrak terminal and inquired about traveling from Phoenix to New York by train. Bonita showed him the connections. He followed them with his finger and then carefully jotted them all down. He asked Bonnie Alvarez if she could ticket him to depart on January 3. Bonnie danced her fingers over her computer console and said that she could.
“Then why don’t you…” the tall man began, and then faltered. He put one hand up to his head.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Fireworks,” the tall man said. She told the police later on that she was quite sure that was what he said. Fireworks.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
“Headache,” he said. “Excuse me.” He tried to smile, but the effort did not improve his drawn, young-old face much.
“Would you like some aspirin? I have some.”
“No, thanks. It’ll pass.”
She wrote the tickets and told him he would arrive at New York’s Grand Central Station on January 6, at midafternoon.
“How much is that?”
She told him and added: “Will that be cash or charge, Mr. Smith?”
“Cash,” he said, and pulled it right out of his wallet—a whole handful of twenties and tens.
She counted it, gave him his change, his receipt, his tickets. “Your train leaves at 10:30 A.M., Mr. Smith,” she said. “Please be here and ready to entrain at 10:10.”
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Bonnie gave him the big professional smile, but Mr. Smith was already turning away. His face was very pale, and to Bonnie he looked like a man who was in a great deal of pain.
She was very sure that he had said fireworks.5
You’re quite correct if you noticed that King veers slightly out of objective narration in the first section when he goes briefly into Bud’s head for his thoughts. But that’s the only moment in an otherwise objectively observed group of scenes.
What’s important to keep in mind about this viewpoint is that it’s going to offer the reader the least degree of intimacy. Its purpose is to keep readers at a distance from the story, to make them critical observers of events. If you want to hook them into the hearts and souls of your characters, this obviously would not be the viewpoint to use.
Omniscient viewpoint might work to do this, but of all the viewpoints this requires the most adept hand to keep the viewpoint truly omniscient and not just an excuse for an undisciplined sliding in and out of different characters’ points of view. If you select this viewpoint, your narrator is a kind of god who speaks with godlike authority. The narrator knows, sees, and hears all. Doing this, the narrator enters into the mind of every character. The narrator has the freedom to explore everything and anything that supports the novel’s theme, furthers the plot, or reveals character. If the writer has a strong literary style and—more important—something to say about characters, theme, setting, plot, period of time, etc., then omniscient might be just the ticket.
However, omniscient contains a little something that makes it extremely challenging. Done skillfully and done correctly, the omniscient narrator is not necessarily the viewpoint of the author. It’s the viewpoint of an all-knowing narrator who is brought on board by the author to relate or to render the events of the story. Hence, that omniscient narrator has to possess the single most important quality that the other viewpoints—save objective—possess. Voice. Along with that go tone and attitude. But we will get to that.
First let’s take a look at a fine example of omniscient narration from the opening of Alice Hoffman’s book Second Nature.
BY APRIL most people had already forgotten about him, except for some of the nurses on the floor, who crossed themselves when they walked past his room. The guard stationed outside his door, who had little to do but read magazines and drink coffee for more than three months, bragged to his friends that on nights when there was a full moon he needed a whip and a chair just to set a dinner tray on the other side of the door. But in fact, the guard had never even dared to look around the room, where the metal bed was made up with clean white sheets every week, though it had not once been slept in.
The man who occupied the room had no name. He refused to look anyone in the eye or, even after months of work with the speech therapists, to make any sound whatsoever, at least not in the presence of others. Officially he was listed as patient 3119, but among themselves the staff called him the Wolf Man, although they were expressly forbidden to do so. He was underweight and had a long scar along the inside of one thigh that had healed years before but still turned purple on cold or rainy days. For two months he’d needed to wear a cast on his reconstructed foot; otherwise he was in surprisingly good health. Since he had no birthday, the staff at Kelvin Medical Center had assigned him one. They’d chipped in to buy him a sweater, blue wool, on sale at Bloomingdale’s, and one of the cooks had baked and frosted an angel food cake. But that was back in January, after he learned to use a fork and dress himself, and they’d still had hope for him. Now, they left him alone, and when he sat motionless, and sunlight came through the bars on his window, some of the nurses swore that his eyes turned yellow.
The evening before his transfer upstate, the barber was sent to his room. There would be no need to sweep the floor after his shave and haircut; the raven that had been perching on the window ledge was waiting to dart through the bars and gather up the hair to wind into its nest. One lab technician, who had been brave enough to look through the glass window in the door, had once seen the raven eating right out of his plate while the Wolf Man calmly continued with his dinner. Now, the raven watched as the attendants strapped the Wolf Man into a metal chair and held his head back. The barber wanted no chances taken; a human bite was the most dangerous of all. In the interest of speed, he used a razor rather than scissors, and while he worked he quickly recited a blessing.
The following morning, two attendants helped the Wolf Man into a black overcoat, which would be taken away once he settled into the State Hospital, since he’d never need it again and another patient could make use of it. The cook who had baked the angel food cake for his birthday wept. She insisted he had smiled when she lit the candles on the cake, but no one believed her, except the guard stationed at his door, who had been made so anxious by this bit of news that he took to biting his fingernails, close enough to the skin to draw blood.
The cook had discovered that the Wolf Man would not eat meat unless it was raw. He liked his potatoes unbaked as well, and would not touch a salad or a pudding. For his last meal, an early breakfast, she had simply passed a hamburger patty over a flame for a moment. So what if uncooked meat was bad for you, and most of the patients liked cereal and toast, she wanted him to have what he liked. She had an impulse to hide a knife or a screwdriver inside the folded napkin, because she knew that as soon as he’d eaten his breakfast, he would be handcuffed, then released into the custody of a social worker from the State Hospital for the ride along the Hudson. By afternoon he would be signed into a ward from which no one was ever released. But she didn’t follow her impulse, and after the Wolf Man had his meal, the attendants dressed him and helped him into the black overcoat, then clasped the handcuffs on him, quickly, from behind, before he could fight back.
Outside the door, the guard turned his Walkman up to the highest volume, and he slipped his sunglasses on, though the April sky threatened to storm. His friends liked to hear stories about the Wolf Man—how he crouched and circled three times before he curled up to sleep with his back against the wall, that five strong men were needed to hold him down each time they drew blood or inoculated him against measles and tetanus—and the guard was always happy to oblige. But what he never mentioned, as he drank cold beer with his friends, was that on nights when there was thunder he often heard a whimpering behind the door, a sound so pitiful it turned his bones cold and his heart inside out.6
What you should notice is that the omniscient narrator sounds like a storyteller. He or she relates events in a fashion similar to the objective narrator. But unlike the objective narrator, the omniscient gives us a sense of the history behind these characters at the same time as she reveals something of their hearts and minds. As you read, you have a definite sense of sinking into a story, of the tale enfolding you just as it might have done had you heard it while sitting around a campfire. A lot is explored in just a few pages because the omniscient narrator is not confined to the time or the place of an individual scene that’s in the process of being rendered by a strong viewpoint character.
And that’s the next group of viewpoints: the character viewpoints.
What this term means is that you’re deciding to tell the story through the eyes of one or more characters who are generally taking an active part in it. When you use this point of view, then you make a promise to the reader that you will limit yourself to revealing only what your chosen viewpoint character would see, know, think, or feel in each scene in which that character is participating.
When it comes down to the character viewpoints, there are a gaggle of them, and they all stem from two sources: the single-character viewpoints and the multiple-character viewpoints. We’ll take the single-character viewpoints first.
Most people are familiar with first person. Using this viewpoint, the writer creates a novel whose story is told by the main character. The operative word is I. Quite a few beginning writers employ this viewpoint because superficially it appears to be the easiest. That’s not the reality, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page in our understanding of first person.
When a writer uses this, she stays with one narrator throughout the novel. She’s in that character’s head and no one else’s, and that is the character who tells the reader the story. Doing this, she gives the reader a fine opportunity to identify strongly with the character.
The advantage here is that putting the reader in the skin and the psyche of someone intimately involved with the events that will unfold creates a terrific sense of intimacy and adds to the authenticity of the work. The lead character can explain his motives and his actions. He can make both credible. Consequently, he can make the entire story credible.
However, this viewpoint has its disadvantages, the most notable of which is the difficulty that can arise with plotting. A first-person narrator is on the stage at all times. This being the case, the step outline needs to indicate loudly, clearly, and in advance what the causal relationships are between scenes. Additionally, the reader can only see, hear, and know, what the narrator sees, hears, and knows. And finally, unless you’re writing an autobiography, the first-person narrator’s voice is not your voice. How could it be unless you’re a character in your own novel?
If you love first person, definitely use it. Just remember that each time you write another novel in first person, you must develop a new voice for your narrator, providing you aren’t writing a series in which the first-person narrator is always the same, like Kinsey Milhone in Sue Grafton’s novels.
Look at the strong first-person viewpoint in the following by Susan Isaacs, from her novel Shining Through.
In 1940, when I was thirty-one and an old maid, while the whole world waited for war, I fell in love with John Berringer.
An office crush. Big deal. Since the invention of the steno pad, a day hasn’t gone by without some secretary glancing up from her Pitman squiggles and suddenly realizing that the man who was mumbling “…and therefore, pursuant to the above…” was the one man in her life who could ever bring her joy.
So there I was, a cliché with a number 2 yellow pencil: a working girl from Queens who’d lost her heart to the pride of the Ivy League.
And to make matters worse, John Berringer bore absolutely no resemblance to the typical Wall Street international lawyer, the kind whose gray face was two shades paler than his suit. Sure, a girl could wind up losing her heart to one of those dreary men. There’s nothing quieter than an old maid’s bedroom, and in that black stillness it’s so easy to create magic: A lawyer with the profile of a toad—Abracadabra!—is transformed into an Adonis, pulsating with passion under his pinstripes.7
Do you see how her narrator has a distinct personality? Do you see how she has a tone? Remember that. We’ll be looking more closely at it when we turn to the topic of voice.
The other single-character viewpoint is third person. When you make the decision to use this narrative style, you tell the story through the eyes of a single character in the third person—he or she—and all the events in the novel are filtered through this single character’s consciousness. You write about the character. Other than capturing his tone, you do not adopt his persona or walk in his skin.
The advantages to using this viewpoint are fairly similar to the advantages of first person. You are inviting your reader to become intimate with one character whose motivations can be thoroughly explored. You can render his individual experiences vividly for the reader. You need develop only one narrative voice.
The disadvantages are also the same, however. Once again, you submit yourself to the challenges of plotting since this one character will be in every scene, even if he isn’t central to every scene. He has to emerge strongly in your work because he is your main if not your only chance to create a bond with the reader. If the reader is going to identify with any of the characters, it’s likely to be the viewpoint character.
In the opening of Havana Bay, Martin Cruz Smith puts us firmly into the viewpoint of Arkady Renko.
A police boat directed a light toward tar-covered pilings and water, turning a black scene white. Havana was invisible across the bay, except for a single line of lamps along the seawall. Stars rode high, anchor lights rode low, otherwise the harbor was a still pool in the night.
Soda cans, crab pots, fishing floats, mattresses, Styrofoam bearded with algae shifted as an investigation team of the Policía Nacional de la Revolución took flash shots. Arkady waited in a cashmere overcoat with a Captain Arcos, a barrel-chested little man who looked ironed into military fatigues, and his Sergeant Luna, large, black and angular. Detective Osorio was a small brown woman in PNR blue; she gave Arkady a studied glare.
A Cuban named Rufo was the interpreter from the Russian embassy. “It’s very simple,” he translated the captain’s words. “You see the body, identify the body and then go home.”
“Sounds simple.” Arkady tried to be agreeable, although Arcos walked off as if any contact with Russians was contamination.
Osorio combined the sharp features of an ingenue with the grave expression of a hangman. She spoke and Rufo explained, “The detective says this is the Cuban method, not the Russian method or the German method. The Cuban method. You will see.”
Arkady had seen little so far. He had just arrived at the airport in the dark when he was whisked away by Rufo. They were headed by taxi to the city when Rufo received a call on a cellular phone that diverted them to the bay. Already Arkady had a sense that he was unwelcome and unpopular.
Rufo wore a loose Hawaiian shirt and a faint resemblance to the older, softer Muhammad Ali. “The detective says she hopes you don’t mind learning the Cuban method.”
“I’m looking forward to it.” Arkady was nothing if not a good guest. “Could you ask her when the body was discovered?”
“Two hours ago by the boat.”
“The embassy sent me a message yesterday that Pribluda was in trouble. Why did they say that before you found a body?”
“She says ask the embassy. She was certainly not expecting an investigator.”
Professional honor seemed to be at stake and Arkady felt badly outclassed on that score. Like Columbus on deck, Captain Arcos scanned the dark impatiently, Luna his hulking shadow. Osorio had sawhorses erected and stretched a tape that read NO PASEO. When a motorcycle policeman in a white helmet and spurs on his boots arrived, she chased him with a shout that could have scored steel. Somehow men in T-shirts appeared along the tape as soon as it was unrolled—what was it about violent death that was better than dreams? Arkady wondered. Most of the onlookers were black; Havana was far more African than Arkady had expected, although the logos on their shirts were American.
Someone along the tape carried a radio that sang, “La fiesta no es para los feos. Qué feo es, señor. Super feo, amigo mío. No puedes pasar aquí, amigo. La fiesta no es para los feos.”
“What does that mean?” Arkady asked Rufo.
“The song? It says, ‘This party is not for ugly people. Sorry, my friend, you can’t come.’”
Yet here I am, Arkady thought.8
Note that we experience Havana, Cuba, as Arkady himself experiences it. Because it’s new and exotic to the character, Martin Cruz Smith has the freedom to paint the place intimately and even flamboyantly for us, seeing it as a stranger would see it, as he himself no doubt saw it when he went there to do his research.
For some writers, however, a single-character viewpoint is too limiting. They want the luxury of dwelling in many minds, so they choose one of the multiple character viewpoints, the first of which is shifting first person.
This sounds like someone with multiple personality disorder. In reality it’s a style of narrative in which each section of a novel or alternating chapters of a novel are told by a different first-person narrator. Some of the same events may be seen through different eyes as the story moves forward; frequently with this style of narration, a lot of time is covered in the course of the book.
The main challenge in choosing this style of narrative viewpoint comes from the fact that each I must be utterly distinct from the I that preceded it. Additionally, every time that I appears in the narrative, it must be consistent with its previous appearances in the novel. It must have a distinct tone, a distinct style, and a distinct syntax, and you must depend on your skill as a creator of character to make each I someone for whom the reader has some feeling.
Barbara Kingsolver does just that in The Poisonwood Bible. Here are three of her main narrators: Leah, Ruth May, and Rachel Price, sisters who are taken off to Africa on their father’s mission to convert the natives.
First we hear from Leah.
WE CAME FROM BETHLEHEM, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. “And heaven knows,” our mother predicted, “they won’t have Betty Crocker in the Congo.”
“Where we are headed, there will be no buyers and sellers at all,” my father corrected. His tone implied that Mother failed to grasp our mission, and that her concern with Betty Crocker confederated her with the coin-jingling sinners who vexed Jesus till he pitched a fit and threw them out of church. “Where we are headed,” he said, to make things perfectly clear, “not so much as a Piggly Wiggly.” Evidently Father saw this as a point in the Congo’s favor. I got the most spectacular chills, just from trying to imagine.9
Her section is rich with both details and tone. We get a sense of a young girl fully aware of the irony of what she’s telling us. We see her intelligence, and we get a feeling for her wit and her liveliness.
Then we hear from Ruth May.
GOD SAYS THE AFRICANS are the Tribes of Ham. Ham was the worst one of Noah’s three boys: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Everybody comes down on their family tree from just those three, because God made a big flood and drowneded out the sinners. But Shem, Ham, and Japheth got on the boat so they were A-okay.
Ham was the youngest one, like me, and he was bad. Sometimes I am bad, too. After they all got off the ark and let the animals go is when it happened. Ham found his father Noah laying around pig-naked drunk one day and he thought that was funny as all get-out. The other two brothers covered Noah up with a blanket, but Ham busted his britches laughing. When Noah woke up he got to hear the whole story from the tattletale brothers. So Noah cursed all Ham’s children to be slaves for ever and ever. That’s how come them to turn out dark.10
This narrator emerges as a completely different person from the other. Her tale is filled with indications of her innocence. She is exuberant and completely unprepared for what is to befall the family when they get to the Congo.
Then we hear from Rachel.
MAN OH MAN, are we in for it now, was my thinking about the Congo from the instant we first set foot. We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it doesn’t look to me like we’re in charge of a thing, not even our own selves. Father had planned a big old prayer meeting as a welcome ceremony, to prove that God had ensued us here and aimed to settle in. But when we stepped off the airplane and staggered out into the field with our bags, the Congolese people surrounded us—Lordy!—in a chanting broil. Charmed, I’m sure. We got fumigated with the odor of perspirating bodies. What I should have stuffed in my purse was those five-day deodorant pads.
I looked around for my sisters to tell them, “Hey, Ade, Leah, aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?” I couldn’t find either one of the twins but did catch sight of Ruth May fixing to executrate her second swoon of the day. Her eyes were rolled back with mostly the whites showing. Whatever was pulling her under, I knew she was opposing it with all her might. Ruth May is surprisingly stubborn for a child of five and unwilling to miss out on any kind of a spree.11
If you notice Kingsolver’s choice of language in the first paragraph alone, you can see how she creates in Rachel a character completely unlike Leah: “Man oh man” and “are we in for it now” and “big old prayer meeting” and “in a chanting broil.” Leah’s use of language is formal; Rachel’s is casual. Add to this her occasional malapropism—“God had ensued us here” (italics are mine)—and the reader can visualize Rachel popping her chewing gum as she relates her story.
Kingsolver’s challenge was to maintain the voices of the different narrators throughout the novel. She succeeded.
Shifting third person is the other multiple-character viewpoint. When a writer uses this, she is telling the story in the third person from the point of view of several characters: either scene by scene, chapter by chapter, or section by section. There is no viewpoint shift within a scene unless the writer can manage it seamlessly.
I love this viewpoint. It’s the one I’ve so far used in all of my novels save two (in those I combined this viewpoint with first person). What I like about it is that I can show my readers what everyone is up to whenever it suits my purpose. Because I can go anywhere I like and into the head of any character at any time, I can build up the suspense, add to the tension, and heighten interest and excitement by leaving a character hanging at the end of a scene or a chapter and switching in the next scene or chapter to another character entirely.
The down side of using shifting third person, however, is that every time I create a different point of view, I have to create a slightly different tone and voice. And it has to be a subtle difference, rather than one that is broadly drawn. The difference between Leah, Rachel, and Ruth May, for example, are less subtle than you have to be when you’re creating shifting third person.
Additionally, I have to be careful about how I pace the novel because too many narrators will slow it down. I also have to decide in advance which character is going to be the point-of-view character for every scene. But these are small disadvantages as far as I’m concerned. The sheer fun and freedom afforded by shifting third person make them insignificant by comparison.
Here are a couple of examples of shifting third person from my novel A Traitor to Memory. The first is from the point of view of Ted Wiley, a retired military man who has just spied upon the woman he loves.
IT WAS THE knowledge of a touch—reserved for him but given to another—that drove Ted Wiley out into the night. He’d seen it from his window, not intending to spy but spying all the same. The time: just past one in the morning. The place: Friday Street, Henley-on-Thames, a mere sixty yards from the river, and in front of her house from which they’d departed only moments before, both of them having to duck their heads to avoid a lintel put into a building in centuries past when men and women were shorter and when their lives were more clearly defined.
Ted Wiley liked that: the definition of roles. She did not. And if he hadn’t understood before now that Eugenie would not be easily identified as his woman and placed into a convenient category in his life, Ted had certainly reached that conclusion when he saw the two of them—Eugenie and that broomstick stranger—out on the pavement and in each other’s arms.
Flagrant, he’d thought. She wants me to see this. She wants me to see the way she’s embracing him, then curving her palm to describe the shape of his cheek as he steps away. God damn the woman. She wants me to see this.12
Contrast that narration with the one that follows, told from the point of view of J. W. Pitchley, another character in the same novel.
J. W. PITCHLEY, AKA TongueMan, had experienced an excellent evening. He’d broken Rule One—never suggest meeting anyone with whom one has engaged in cybersex—but it had all worked out, proving to him yet again that his instincts for picking fruit past its prime but all the juicier for having hung disregarded on the tree so long were as finely honed as a surgical tool.
Humility and honesty forced him to admit that it hadn’t been that much of a risk, however. Any woman who called herself CreamPants was as good as advertising what she wanted, and if he’d had any doubts about that, five meetings on-line that had had him coming into his Calvin Klein jockeys without the slightest handshake of the organ on his part should have set his mind at rest. Unlike his four other current cyber-lovers—whose spelling skill was, alas, often as limited as their imaginations—CreamPants had a capacity for fantasy that cooked his brain and a natural ability to express that fantasy that stiffened his cock like a divining rod the moment she logged on the net.
Creamy here, she would write. R U rdy 4 it, Tongue?
Oh my. Oh yes. He always was.
So he’d taken the metaphorical plunge himself this time instead of waiting for his cyberspondent to do so. This was wildly out of character for him. Usually, he played along cooperatively, always there at the other end of on-line encounters when one of his lovers wanted action but never venturing into the arena of embodiment unless or until his partner suggested it. Following this pattern, he’d successfully transformed exactly twenty-seven Super Highway encounters into twenty-seven intensely satisfying trysts at the Comfort Inn on Cromwell Road—a wise and cautious distance from his own neighbourhood and night-clerked by an Asian gentleman whose memory for faces took a far back seat to his abiding passion for videos of old BBC costume dramas. Thus, only once had he found himself the victim of a practical cyberjoke, agreeing to meet a lover called DoMeHard and discovering two spotty-faced twelve-year-olds dressed like the Kray brothers waiting for him instead. No matter, though. He’d sorted them out quick enough and he was fairly certain they’d not be trying that little caper on-line again.13
What you should see is that despite being in third person, there is a distinct difference between the two narrative voices. Each has a different tone. Each reflects an entirely different way of viewing the world in general and women in particular.
When shifting third person is done well, the reader should be able to tell in whose point of view a scene is being written, even if the author never says the character’s name.
The final viewpoint is narrator as observer. This wears the guise of first person because a secondary character tells the story. But unlike first person or shifting first person, this character is generally outside the main action. He may be on the fringe of the action, but he never directs the course of the action or affects it in any substantial way. What he knows he knows because he’s been told or because he’s witnessed it.
The best example of this is Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories. He plays a part in the stories as Holmes’s friend and compatriot. But when Holmes tells him that “the game’s afoot,” the reader may rest assured that Watson is going to be on the sidelines, cheering the detective on and not getting himself particularly muddy in the scramble.
Sometimes this style of narration is used if a character has a vested interest in telling the story. In Oscar and Lucinda, for example, Peter Carey gives us a narrator who is telling the story of his great-grandparents. He himself is never once in the book.
So. How do you decide which of the viewpoints to use?
Essentially, you make an informed decision that’s based both on your personal preference and your level of skill. Beyond that, you start out by asking yourself which of the characters that you’ve designed can tell the story best. If you know that one of them can do it, you’ve settled on a single-character point of view. On the other hand, if you examine what you’re intending to write (hence the importance of the expanded story idea and the step outline) and you see that there are many scenes with many characters, you may be heading for one of the multiple-character viewpoints. In this case, you will always begin the running plot outline of a scene by asking yourself which character can best serve the interests of that scene. Finally, you ask yourself if you have a strong literary style and a lot to say about the idea of the book, the theme, the twists and turns of plot, the place, and the characters. If the answer is yes and if you have the firepower to create a strong narrative storyteller’s voice, perhaps omniscient is the way for you to go.
Keep in mind, though, that no matter which of the points of view you choose, each of them can be further refined. Within first person, you can create a narrator who is completely reliable, committed to the truth like Jean Louise Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, or one who is a devilishly clever liar like Dr. Sheppard in Agatha Christie’s controversial The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Additionally, this narrator can be likable or unlikable. And aside from laying out the story in a normal narrative fashion, first person can employ letters or journals as well.
Within third person, you can keep the reader close to the point-of-view character (this is what I like to do) or you can keep the reader at a distance from the character. Closeness implies an examination of the workings of the character’s mind. Distance implies an observation of his actions.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. But here’s the most important consideration about point of view: Written, it needs to reflect narrative voice. And it is narrative voice that’s crucial to the success of your viewpoint choice, not the choice itself.