Another Voice Heard

How does this happen? John just discussed a subject that I've been thinking about for two weeks; The importance of point of view in a novel. So I'll build on his comments.

What started me thinking was an article in the book review section of the New York Times. Written by Elliott Holt in his Critic's Take column, the article was entitled "The Return of Omniscience." Holt was referring to the surprising number of recent novels featuring a narrator "who is conscious of everything and isn't afraid to say so."

As an example he used the opening sentences from Celeste Ng's novel Everything I Never Told You; "Lydia is dead. But they don't know that yet."

I can recall a time when this usage would have sent a creative writer teacher screeching down the hall way. "No, no, no. The writer is not God." But why not? 18th and 19th century novelists did this all the time. Frankly when this technique is well done I love this authoritative voice. I think it's especially effective for historical novels.

In John Corrigan's excellent post, he refers to The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. This is an outstanding book. Another books that is a classic and one of the best is Frances Fugate's, Viewpoint. It's very hard to find and someone "borrowed" mine (I honestly forget who) and never returned it.

Holt provides an excellent analysis for "The Return of Omniscience."   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/books/review/the-return-of-omniscience.html?_r=0

John discussed the problems and advantages of first and third person viewpoint. As for me, I'm frankly curious about the reemergence of mix and match. We're happily and solidly in the head of the first person narrator and them wham! A villain described in third person but at such a close distance we are in his head too. But the "I" is gone. At that point, the voice, the viewpoint is technically a rather sneaky omniscient narrator. I think.

I'll tell you what I know for sure: Only the shadow knows the evil that lurks in the heart of men. Surely this old radio introduction was one of the most scary statements ever devised for the omnipotent voice.

It never gets easier

Writing never gets easier. Not for me, anyway. Not if I’m continuing to challenge myself.

I’ve written the first 30 pages of a novel-in-progress three times now, using two different points of view and even trying present tense.

Point of view is my largest concern anytime I start a novel. I think it’s the most important decision a fiction writer makes.

I’m several months –– but only three chapters –– into a new novel, one which I hope launches a new series. I want the book to feature a husband and wife team. The wife is a career-oriented power player in her profession; the husband is a cynical type who wants no part of his wife’s relative celebrity. I wrote the first three chapters from the husband’s third-person perspective –– he’s the outsider, viewing his wife, the most powerful person in their workplace. I didn’t love those pages. And, after writing three novels recently using the third-person perspective of a female, I was hankering to write from a male’s first-person point of view. (I grew up on Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald, after all.) So I scrapped the third-person opening, committed to the first-person voice of the husband, which moved him much closer to the action, while making sure the wife remains a large part of the plot from the start. I’m off to the races now.

No discussion of point of view is complete without also mentioning John Gardner’s “psychic distance” chart. In his book The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner offers this wide-to-narrow camera lens view of the distance from which a reader views an author’s scene:

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3. Henry hated snowstorms.
4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

When you reach No. 5, you are inside the character’s head –– and not far from first-person. The benefits of using third person, especially in a crime novel, are clear: You can zoom in (as Gardner’s No. 5 illustrates) with nearly the precision of first-person; however, in third-person, the writer can also withhold information that might be hard to conceal in a first-person story. Michael Connelly, in a2003 BookPage interview, speaks of the challenge of withholding information from the reader when writing in first person: "When you go into first person, all bets are off. You find yourself feeling like you're cheating the reader if you hold anything back. I think that's one of the things that was good about the old [third-person] Harry; I was able to hold things back and kind of spring them on the reader when I wanted to."

While third person has many benefits, I’m a sucker for the intimacy of the first-person speaker. I like to be closer to to the character. Writing in first-person, to me, is like acting: I step into character and voice and record (and convey) the information in a manner true to the speaker’s worldview.

What it always comes down to is making the appropriate choices for the work at hand. After writing 100 pages to get 30, I’m hoping I’ve done that.

Point-of-View

I’m knee-deep in my 2016 Peyton Cote novel, tentatively titled Destiny’s Pawn, and the process has me thinking a lot about point-of-view

I started the novel, wrote maybe thirty pages, and immediately decided I needed to use alternating close, third-person points of view. Of course, our single mother / U.S. Border Patrol agent, Peyton, is still front and center, but the spotlight has to hit several other players for the plot to hold up. Tony Hillerman was a master of this, as was Elmore Leonard (see link for an interview with him about point-of-view).

The third person limited point-of-view fits well in crime fiction for a variety of reasons. Among them: it makes it easy for the writer to withhold information. If I’m writing in first person, I have to show my cards all the time – anything Jack Austin, for instance in my other series, knows, the reader also must be told because the book is told in Jack’s first-person voice. In third person, though, I can know things – and other characters can know things – that Peyton doesn’t. Where I ran into problems in Destiny’s Pawn, forcing me to use alternating limited third-person points of view was that things were happening in the Ukraine that were impacting events Peyton deals with in northern Maine. There would, therefore, be no logical way to end the book that offered readers enough information or details to provide a satisfying conclusion.

No one understood point-of-view and its defining elements better than legendary author and teacher John Gardner. Within third person, Gardner defined layers of “psychic distance.” Here is his now-famous chart explaining the range within which an author can maneuver in a close third-person point-of-view.

1. It was the winter of 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3. Henry J. Warburton hated snowstorms.
4. God, how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging your miserable soul.1

Here, you see the camera zoom in until the reader is squarely inside Henry J. Warburton’s head, the pronoun “your,” in the fifth sentence, forcing the issue.

Many writers feel choosing a point-of-view is the most important decision they make when starting a work of fiction. I, for one, am in that camp.

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1Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If? New York: HarperCollins, 1995: 87.