8 CHAPTER EIGHT

Point of View

Point-of-view is the most important decision you’ll make in writing a story. It guides everything: perspective, voice, vision. In terms of perspective, your choice in point of view will shape how much knowledge the narrator will share or repress with an audience. In terms of voice it will invite us anywhere on the spectrum between a confessional telling mode or a reserved minimalist mode. In terms of vision the question of “from what distance?” (close to the lead character or farther removed and watching upon high like from the balcony) will add layers to the values the story puts forward.

Because of the importance of this decision, I’m not a big fan of telling students to change their point of view. As a matter of fact in my classes that’s bad form. I trust in initial impulses. I guess I’m an unrepentant Beat Generation guy; I believe that first choices are made for a reason and we should trust in those choices and find ways to make them work.

For the purposes of this primer I’m only going to recommend three points of view for the beginning student. These are the most prevalent, the ones I see again and again as an editor at the North American Review. Master at least one of these three classic points-of-view, and then, perhaps, try your hand at something a little more non-traditional. (like a second person POV).

Watch this video on Point of View 

First Person

Popular among YA writers and readers and great for telling stories of youth coming to terms with some of life’s harsh realities, this is a good way to develop your voice. First person narratives can have energy, sass, a sense of sharing from the heart—a real confessional vibe.

What kind of speaker are you presenting to your audience? Do they like to ramble? Do they wander off in long digressions? Do they judge the world? Do they find beauty in little, offbeat things, like the way a child wades into a pond, going farther and farther out, daring to discover how close they can get before flooding their rubber boots with pond water. Do they join a series of thoughts by “and” to keep the monologue going? Do they slide into apologetic transitions with a self-deprecating “anyways”? Do they comment on someone having too big of an upper lip or someone else having an uneven face like a Picasso painting as a way to distance themselves from those they encounter? All of these choices reveal character and vision. Holden Caulfield hates phonies and he is always on the lookout for them. Cynicism is his armor.

Moreover, “I” speakers let you into their limited range of understanding of the world, and this is really great for young writers. When I was in my twenties and thirties, the world was a strange, alien place, and what I knew was limited to my rather limited experience. So a first person voice was appealing because I didn’t have to know a wide range of things, or do a lot of research about provenance and antiques like Donna Tartt did for Goldfinch or dissect radio technology and Hitler youth programming the way Anthony Doerr did for All the Light We Cannot See. We can stay in our comfort zones of knowing as little as our central character does.

First person “I” stories are also great for writing private eye stories. It restricts us to knowing only as much as the detective and places the reader in the detective’s shoes, trying to out-guess him or her, knowing as little as the PI does. It also helps the writer create a series of surprises. We discover the two guys behind his frosted glass door with clamped guns in their hands at the same moment the detective does.

The dangers of first person, of course, is overdoing it, leaning too much into the playful voice you’ve created, letting it take on Promethean proportions and burning away from you. Prometheus breathes fire and too much fire will burn down the world building of your story. What you might find a regular riot, everyone else is getting a little tired of. So be careful.

The other danger is you have to allow your first person narrator to be who they are. You might want them to make a better choice, a more moral choice, but you have to stick to the imagined probabilities of the voice you’ve created and have your “I” character act accordingly. We love Huck Finn, we love how he stands up for Jim out in the wilderness and how Huck feels he’s going to be damned for a decision he makes half-way through the novel. But we’re also frustrated with him for not standing up to Tom Sawyer later in the book, and letting Tom do all his nasty shenanigans vis-a-vis Jim. Huck can’t stand up to Tom because he represents “civilization.” We want Huck to push back against Tom, but Twain has to be true to the Huck he’s created. And you have to be true to your first person voice. Stay consistent.

A different kind of “I” story

Years ago a student of mine, Darek Benesh, introduced me to a short story form that borrows from the works of William Faulkner (see As I Lay Dying) and Tom Perotta (see Election). A core incident (a child climbing inside a tree, getting stuck, and dying) is reflected upon by several “differing” first-person perspectives. Each brief section (2-3 pages) is titled by the name of the character who is speaking to us (Susan; Clifford; Denise; Mr. Switchback). Each character speaks in their own voice and this creates a wonderfully prismatic narrative, in the traditions of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which leaves us questioning what’s the real meaning of the story and filling us with a series of uncertainties. Over the course of a twenty to thirty page story, each character can speak to us on 3-4 different occasions. The core incident (why or how the child died) ultimately remains somewhat of a mystery. The narrative isn’t all tied up; the writer leaves us readers with a handful of loose strings.

Case Study #7: “Before the N-word”

C. E. Poverman’s striking story is about memory and accountability.

The protagonist attends a prep-school reunion and meets up with classmates he hasn’t seen in ten years. Percy, one of only three Black students from back then, is now dying of cancer and requests a chance to speak to his classmates addressing wrongs of the past.

Poverman, from the opening paragraph, freely moves from narrative showing to narrative telling, setting up his theme:

Starting up the stairs to the second-floor dining room—I’m still pressing my name tag to my lapel—I thought I recognized Joe Clark on the landing above me. As if looking into a distance, he said, “That you, Tim Moore?” He waited for me. Easily ten years since we’d seen each other, but he was much as I remembered him. There seemed to be guys who looked more or less the way we were when we were undergraduates—well almost—and then guys who turned a corner and became unrecognizable. I read that at some time in our lives we internalize a fixed image of ourselves and after that can never really know how we appear to others.

Memory, recognition, knowability.

Percy, “without reproach,” shares with his audience how difficult it was and is to be Black in America, and he relives his memories of a tricentennial event at Brewster in 1960. To commemorate the event, Mr. Stubbs, the headmaster wanted to “bring to life the original Elijah Brewster endowment to the school, which had been: one negro manservant and 440 British pounds. Mr. S had asked Percy if he would stand beside him during his morning talk and be the negro manservant.”

Percy agrees, except during the ceremony “instead of referring to Percy as the ‘one negro manservant,” Mr. S said, ‘one nigger slave.’”

Percy explores the denigration and pain this event caused him and how it led to his own rising Black consciousness. Our protagonist, however, has no memory of the story playing out that way: “None whatsoever. Had I been absent that day?”

No. “I’m sure that I was there. And yet, the episode was an absence.” Why? Because he wasn’t listening. The Black experience wasn’t on his radar, what they were facing wasn’t recognizable.

I admire how Poverman leans into the emotional complications of characters and storytelling. Rather than present a character we want to see (inclusive and present) we have a shadow self that was tone deaf and absent. Moreover, Moore’s white guilt shifts the story’s final emphasis, showcasing a stunning reversal:

I, too, started working my way forward. As I did so, I felt an uneasiness, which had been coming and going in me, rise and spread. It was a fear that I couldn’t name and then I realized that it was that Percy would not recognize me. On one level, I think I knew this was completely irrational, but on another, it had been a long time, all of us had changed, and then when I thought about it, I had to ask myself, why would he remember me, really?

I love the story’s confessional voice. Usually when writers tell stories that have an autobiographical slant, they often present themselves as the hero or the person wronged. But here, we have a real honest exploration of neglect, and a writer who’s not afraid to present humanity with all its blemishes.

Third-Person Limited

When I first started writing and sending out literary stories this was my favorite mode of expression. Henry James called it “central intelligence.” We walk alongside our protagonist and decide when to enter into their inner monologues or when to share some necessary backstory. A writer can decide how much, within this point-of-view, to balance inner and outer stories. And here’s where the difference between limited third and first-person perspectives are most pronounced. In first person, the backstory is spoken to us and closely aligned to the lead character’s perspective (unless you’re striking an unreliable, ironic voice); in limited third person you can play with the distance of your backstories, telling us what a character understands of the past or telling us more than your lead character understands. The possibilities for differing ranges of knowledge are greater in limited third.

I also felt as a young writer that a limited third point-of-view gave me more control. William Wordsworth believed that the formal properties of poetry (meter and rhyme scheme) controlled the emotional intensity of the work, keeping it in a sweet spot of intense feelings reflected in tranquility rather than swinging too violently into over writing. And I guess that’s how I saw third-person limited. Putting a limit on my melodramatic flourishes (and I do have them. I remember in one of my earliest workshop stories I OD’ed on adjectives, writing such gems as “unholy sink” and “Cro-Magnon face”). My voice, through limited third, became more tempered, restrained, less adjectival, and not lost in the quirky perspectives of my first-person protagonist.

The dangers of a limited third point-of-view are two-fold: how to avoid a flat voice and veering dangerously close to boring prose, and slipping perhaps into too much showing and not enough telling. I’ll lay my cards on the table: as an editor, I am really tired of camera objective point-of-view and clean as glass prose. I don’t particularly enjoy stories that read like they were adapted from screenplays.

What we have in our toolbox is the ability to tell a reader things. It’s harder to do in film and on the stage (you usually have to rely on self-reflexive dialogue). Prose, unlike a camera, can collapse time, can expand time. We can move outside the limits of the moment-to-moment now.

Your voice will develop with time (be patient—you’ll find your value systems in terms of style and themes) and that voice will help shape and hone your third-person perspectives.

 

Case Study #8: “The Treasure Map”

Jaqueline Eis’s “The Treasure Map” relies on a triangle: a widow (Elizabeth), her deceased husband (Edwin), and a wayward brother-in-law (Tommy ) to tell a strong but restrained story of frisson, family loyalty, and awkwardness.

The story’s opening paragraph begins with a doubling, a knocking sound that reminds Elizabeth of the final days of caring for her husband and his labored breathing and Tommy hammering, replacing shingles on the roof. “She knew she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.” This sentence establishes everything: the awkward distance between the two. But note the restraint that limited third gives Eis. The control as opposed to writing something in first like: “Goddamn it, what’s he still doing on the roof?” The last line of the story’s first paragraph establishes the triangle’s dynamics: “She would rather be haunted by Edwin’s ghost than to have his brother constantly shadowing her.” Again, note the control. In first person, Eis might have written, “Is this guy ever going to leave?”

The story and its triangle takes a turn when Elizabeth discovers and old photograph and notices something she was blind to:

A small photo album in the same drawer held a picture that made her pause. She remembered taking it herself on a ferry boat ride during a trip to Oregon in 1935. Tommy was along that time, at Edwin’s invitation. The picture had always been painful to her because Edwin glared at the camera, at her, angry that she’d let the boys get away with some mischief. They cowered next to Tommy, but she had never looked at his expression until now. Her cheeks flushed. His look, directly at the camera, smiling openly and unmistakably—though she shuddered at the thought—with something more than affection. Had Tommy once had feelings for her? How could she not have noticed?

A writer in limited third can decide from what distance and Eis’s voice isn’t in the balcony looking down nor is it walking tightly alongside her character. Instead she opts for a middle ground; the last two sentences of this paragraph are an interior moment but it’s tempered with some tranquility.

In the story’s final moments, Tommy’s departure, he tells “Lizzy” that she’s a good woman, and Eis writes, “She wished it was true, wished she’d made him some sandwiches for the road.” Midwestern reserve is still present (the story is set in Nebraska, 1957), but then the story moves into a space somewhere between quiet restraint and emotional intensity:

Her hand grasped the window so hard it wobbled in the door frame. “Oh, Tommy,” she said, but no other acceptable words would come. She wished she could point out to him that this too was a kind of love, his own, their own, peculiar and long-suffering way of showing it, but he wouldn’t know what to do with that either.

The window “wobbled”; she exclaimed his name, but then no other words poured forth. Eis stays true to her characters, what’s possible for them within this narrative. Just as in the case of Huck Finn being unable to speak up for Jim against Tom’s cruel pranks, Elizabeth and Tommy fall back into the story’s reserved tone and spaces. Poignant.

The story brilliantly ends with a return to the triangle and the presence/absence of Edwin as Elizabeth imagines her husband laughing over Tommy’s final exit and saying, “Isn’t that just like him?” Words that can’t be spoken directly are left in the landscape of the mind.

Omniscient Point-of-View

This was frowned upon in the 1980s. At least in the workshops I was taking at Kansas State University. “You think you’re writing War and Peace?” Save that for the novelists. And I can’t tell you how many times in the margins of my stories I saw scribbled “point-of-view?” and “head hopping.” The omniscient or what some folks like to call the God point of view was supposed to be the domain of sprawling novels, Mr. Tolstoy.

The challenge of an omniscient point-of-view is that the writer has to understand and know a lot more than just the limited experiences of your third-person or “I” protagonist. This will require research, wisdom, and, I believe (although this isn’t alway necessary), a generosity for the human condition and an ability to empathize with a variety of people (men; women; he/him; she/her; they/them; he/they; she/they), people from differing nationalities, races, faith-based systems, etc.

Why I don’t like labeling this the “God” perspective is that I think a writer should never play God, should never be an Old Testament prophet of righteous judgment or an all-knowing seer, but someone who is always open, humble, channeling whatever impulses the universe is gifting us with. Listen to those impulses, follow them.

Okay, that’s a little hey wow and out there, but that’s how I roll. Humility, living in uncertainty, and being present are, I believe, three of the central tenants of being a writer.

Case Study #9: “Three Days Discovered”

Marc Dickinson’s story is a tour-de-force of a bigger point-of-view and repressed exposition. The story centers around a strong core incident: the mysterious death of a high school student, Samantha. As the story unfolds, like a literary episode inspired by Twin Peaks we are faced with more questions instead of answers. The story’s repressed narration (the and how and exactly what happened) is opened but never fully.

Dickinson’s narration constantly shifts perspectives. The opening sentences suggest a town full of gossip: “Samantha Harris has been found. Three days missing and after all the search parties, all the theories—abduction? Runaway?—she’s discovered at a park two miles from her house.” This is followed by an even bigger telling voice filling us in on the setting: “It used to be a landfill, so sometimes with enough rain the soccer fields release a smell like rotten eggs.” The girl’s father is observed from the narrator’s balcony: “The father is too angry to cry. In three days his daughter has gone from Homecoming Court to Jane Doe.” By contrast, the mother’s perspective is much closer, veering into free indirect discourse: “Finally, the mom steps in, says to leave their daughter alone. Some lab rat with a scalpel won’t be going near her child.” Then the narrative stretches out like an accordion once again taking up an almost group mindset: “Today the school is full of stories. A friend of a friend, someone on the force, says once the court mandated an autopsy, traces of opioid turned up in the bloodwork.” Similarly, “The church had already prepared a candlelight vigil. Sunday night, they picked the best photo for the flyer—Samantha, almost angelic in a white dress—and then selected a theme: A Night of Hope.” And later, with high school lover Meg, the narrative voice closes in: “For years, Sam took Meg under her wing. And now she’s gone, leaving Meg open to attack.”

In Dickinson’s final turn the amalgam of these voices (the mix of individuals and group mindset) coalesce into a brilliantly non-resolved ending: “What’s a town without its martyrs? Still, tonight they continue to toss and turn, sick with hope the morning headlines will make more sense. That maybe Samantha can somehow be there for them one more time, telling them all the things they need to hear.”