The Power Of Point Of View, page 21
Another descriptive technique involves contrast between the POV character and another character. This is a bit trickier because the character himself has to be currently assessing the other character, and that has to fit into the story. Peter F. Hamilton accomplishes this contrast well in Judas Unchained: “Renne found herself having to look up slightly; Isabella was several centimeters taller than she, almost Tarlo's height.” This is not the place to describe the difference in their hair and eye color, because that doesn't matter to Renne at this point. The reader is going to learn only that Renne isn't overly tall. But if you continue to scatter a few of these details throughout the narrative, the reader will piece together a picture of the character.
You can also use action to convey physical details:
It took only one shove of his shoulder to break open the door.
She dug frantically in the dirt, ruining her $65 manicure. But what did she care now? She'd already destroyed her $90 hairstyle.
She yanked away, leaving several long strands of her dark hair in the tree branch.
In his hand, the baseball looked like a golf ball.
When you scatter details through the narrative, you have to trust that the reader will put it all together (along with other POV characters' descriptions) to form a coherent picture. If the character's physical appearance is really important — for example, if he's the spitting image of some movie star and an agency wants to hire him as an impersonator — then it's better to go with the concise contemporary-omniscient description than twist the character into knots trying to describe himself. As long as it's at the start of a scene or passage, a more distant POV probably won't bother the reader at all.
The Cumulative Effect
One happy circumstance of writing in single-third is that once the hard work of establishing a character's perspective and way of thinking is done early in the book, the reader takes over and applies that knowledge to later scenes. With every passage you write in a character's POV, you're training the reader to think and perceive like that character.
For example, let's say, in an early scene, you show the heroine coming up with a complicated solution to every problem. The next time, you can be in the hero's POV, and he'll notice the heroine preoccupied, contemplative, jotting down notes. He might not know what's going on, but the reader does, because the reader had that earlier experience of elaborate planning in the heroine's POV. The reader can imagine what's going on in her head, while the hero thinks she's just being inattentive.
Here's an example from a comic novel, Nobody's Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. The reader and the POV character, Cal, don't know it, but the heroine has planned all night for a complicated prank:
The Lucky Charms clattered into his bowl. “When I want your —” He broke off in mid-sentence, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“What's wrong?”
“Will you look at this?”
“My goodness.”
He stared incredulously into a mound of dry cereal. All the marshmallows were missing! He saw lots of beige-colored frosted oat cereal, but not a single marshmallow. No multicolored rainbows or green shamrocks, no blue moons or purple horseshoes, not a single yellow what-chamacallit. Not one solitary marshmallow.
“Maybe someone tampered with the box,” she offered in that cool scientist's voice.
“Nobody could have tampered with it! It was sealed up tighter than a drum when I opened it. Something must have gone wrong at the factory.” He sprang up from his stool and headed back into the pantry for another box. He emptied his old cereal into the trash, ripped open the new box, and poured it in the bowl, but all he saw was frosted oat cereal. No marshmallows.
“I don't believe this! I'm going to write the president of General Mills! Don't they have any quality control?”
“Would you like me to fix you a nice wheat bran bagel with a little honey on it? And maybe a glass of skimmed milk to go along.”
He was furious. Wasn't there anything in life he could count on these days? … He yanked his keys from his pocket and stalked out to the garage. He wouldn't just write the president, he decided. He was going to sue the whole damn company. By damn, he'd teach General Mills not to ship out inferior cereal. He jerked open the door of his Jeep, and that was when he saw them.
Marshmallows. Hundreds of tiny marshmallows … across the dashboard, on the front seat, and all over the backseat.
This is why head-hopping tends to ruin the fun — going back and forth between them would diminish the pleasure of noticing, even if Cal doesn't, that something is up if the caustic Jane responds so meekly (“My goodness”) to his angry consternation.
Remember, readers today want a more interactive experience. They need enough cues to know how to participate, but they don't necessarily want to be told everything. Leave room for them to have some fun.
While single POV isn't for every author or every book, it's helpful to learn the techniques of focusing on one person's perspective. Even in multiple POV, you'll be parked in one character's mind at any given moment, and you'll want to exploit that perspective to narrate that section of the scene.
EXERCISE
TRYING OUT SINGLE-THIRD
If you're considering single-third POV, the protagonist will probably be your major narrator. Who is that? Do you have more than one protagonist (as in a romance) or a protagonist and a major antagonist? (Antagonist/villain POV is never required, so don't assume because you have one that you need to go into that POV.)
Next to the names of the protagonist and any other potential major POV character, jot down four or five words that give a sense of this person's perspective during the book. This can include mood, situation, background, temperament, and any other quality that seems relevant.
For example:
Hamlet: angry, grief-stricken, well-educated, indecisive
Gertrude: excited, widowed, queenly, guilty
Claudius: in love, murderer, usurper, guilty
Look over a scene you've already written, or sketch out a scene. Who seems, at first thought, to be the best POV character for this scene? Look at the traits you identified in the second part of this exercise, and revise the first couple paragraphs of your scene to reflect one or more of those traits. Add in the character's thoughts and feelings if necessary.
If that isn't working, try closing your eyes for a minute and putting yourself in this character's mind. Then open your eyes and start to write. Respond to this prompt:
What's happening now, [character name]?
Answer in the first-person voice of the character. Don't worry if it doesn't come too easily, and don't stop to edit. Just write in the I mode until the character (or your subconscious) takes over. Then go back and see what of that first-person voice you can translate into third person.
READING RECOMMENDATIONS
Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz. Be warned: The deep third-person narration, especially in the first two chapters, is almost unbearable in its evocation of the grief felt by man who has lost his entire family. When Koontz is on target, no one does pain better, and this novel is especially resonant after 9/11.
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. This is a gentle but incisive novel narrated in third-person present tense by a gradeschool student who discovers she has an uncanny ability to win spelling bees.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is a good example of a modernist novel that explores a character's thoughts with clarity and depth.
The Golden Leopard by Lynn Kerstan. Here's a hero with some serious secrets, and a POV that intends to keep them. Great weaving in of backstory and revelation.
For My Lady's Heart by Laura Kinsale. Kinsale is one of the premier modern romance writers, always trying something new with POV. This medieval novel is written in the voices of its characters — in early modern English, that is.
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. This novel combines aspects of science fiction and thriller, following scientists who discover a virus that causes a fetus to move to an advanced stage of evolution. The narrative voice of each character reflects a careful, scientific approach, gradually deepening into controlled panic.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This novella, about a man who wakes up as a giant insect, provides a great lesson in focusing tightly on the reactions of one character to the situation of the plot. Kafka also does an impressive job of narrating the physical “feel” of an unfamiliar body.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. A tight focus on the major character POVs in this novel shows that big family dramas don't need to be done in omniscient.
PERSONAL THIRD PERSON: MULTIPLE 8
Every writer's creative process is different, and the way writers imagine and construct their stories can have a lot to do with the POV they choose. Whereas single-third POV writers tend to “receive” the story from inside a character — seeing an event through a character's perspective from the very beginning, exclusive of what other characters might be thinking — writers of multiple-third POV (which uses at least two viewpoint characters within a scene) “receive” the story in a more comprehensive way, almost cinematically. They can visualize a scene playing out, seeing the characters and hearing their reactions. The perspective is more complete and global, even as the story is just beginning to take shape.
Thinking about it even more deeply, and getting a little existential here, I'd assert that those attracted to multiple POV often believe that reality can only be apprehended through a composite of perceptions — that the reader will figure out what the truth is only by hearing several people's versions of the event and putting them together. Single-third POV advocates seem more interested in what a subjective view of reality teaches about people — learning more about a single character by hearing how she perceives an event. Again, neither approach is wrong. It's almost a difference in worldview, and both create unique experiences for the reader.
The reason why third-person multiple has earned a bad reputation is because it's easy to do it badly, and that's a real problem, especially for newer writers. Multiple POV can quickly devolve into head-hopping, indiscriminate switching between character POVs, and head-hopping is intensely annoying to many readers (and editors). Such POV promiscuity makes it difficult for writers to create a sustained plot narrative or identifiable characters. But that is neither the desired nor the inevitable result of conceiving a story in multiple POV.
Many accomplished multiple-POV writers are actually using a variation of single-third POV — allowing two or three characters to narrate an event, but creating each POV passage as detailed as possible and concluding one character's “part” before the scene viewpoint switches to another character. These scenes present more than one version of reality, but the reader finishes the scene with an understanding of not only how each character's perspective is unique but also how it contributes meaningfully to move the overall story forward.
MULTIPLE-THIRD BASICS
Third-person multiple became common as the popularity of omniscient narration faded in the twentieth century. The omniscient narrative can also sample several characters' perspectives, but the difference is that a multiple viewpoint has no narrator or authorial perspective. In true multiple viewpoint, you are never outside the perceptions of some character or another. You tell only what the characters know. So in that way, it's more restrictive than contemporary omniscient but also more personal. Here are a few other pros to consider:
With a large cast, multiple POV allows the reader to experience the event from different perspectives, and that's especially fun to give a Rashomon effect, where every participant has a distinct version.
Multiple POV can give a second character's version of an event without having to replay it in the next scene from the new POV character. (That's a real problem with single POV — making two scenes out of one event to show his-and-her versions.) Instead, at a judiciously chosen moment, you can shift from one POV to the other so both perspectives are explained.
In a dual-character scene, multiple can show how much in accord or discord the characters are. This also allows the reader to become intimate with more than one character at a time. This can be helpful in a romance or other books with two major characters.
Multiple also allows you to cut from one place to another, one person to another, without ending the scene. It's much easier to convey a variety of information this way.
In a densely populated scene, it can scan the crowd to show differing reactions. This is most enjoyable in comic novels, which use juxtaposition to create irony.
On the other hand:
Multiple POV can be dangerous, especially for newer writers, because the greater freedom can easily lead to head-hopping. (You can avoid this by staying as long as possible in one POV, and then shifting only for a good reason.)
Multiple can decrease reader identification with any one character if there's not enough time in that POV.
The multiple-POV approach can sometimes reduce reader involvement by telling rather than showing. That's because it's often easier just to switch POVs to have a character explain what's going on in the scene. However, this will decrease suspense by telling too much too quickly, without giving the reader time to guess what's unfolding.
Multiple can also lead to redundancy if every line of dialogue or action is followed by the other character's interpretation of it. In fact, multiple works most effectively with longer passages given to only two or three characters in a scene. Of course, it depends on your preferences and the actual story. But the smaller the “cast,” the more controllable the approach is, and the less likely you are to devolve into head-hopping. With only two or three POV characters, the reader can get to know each of them intimately, as long as you spend sufficient time in each person's perspective.
BUILDING YOUR STORY IN MULTIPLE POV
Multiple POV works best with books that aren't tightly focused on one protagonist. It can definitely enhance books with several settings and major characters, especially when you need to convey information or “experience” from several perspectives more or less at the same time. Think of disaster films like Airport or Jurassic Park that follow the activities of many characters through the same basic set of events. With multiple POV, you can show the pilot in the cockpit and the air-traffic controller down on the ground, all without contorting the narrative.
Multiple POV also works well in romances, using the POVs of both the hero and the heroine in the same scene. It's also a popular choice for “team stories,” in which a group of characters are working toward the same goal, even if for different reasons and with different methods. Family dramas often use multiple POV to create the sense of conflicting perspectives of the same event. But multiple POV is so common, you'll find it in most types of books that aren't strictly first person. Even mysteries, which have conventionally used only single-POV scenes, are more flexible these days.
Considering Story Scope:
How Many POVs and Why?
As you build your story, think about why multiple POV seems right for this story and what you hope to accomplish with it. First, consider whether this is a personal novel or a social novel. Do you see the story as personal (the journey of one or two characters)? If so, think about what other POVs you're thinking of introducing, and whether they'll add enough to make up for the change in focus from the major characters. Aim for as few nonmajor POVs as possible in a personal novel. As you plan or revise the novel, see if you can change the passages in a minor-character POV to be in the POV of one of the major characters. This helps keep the reader's attention on the main character's journey through the plot.
If this is more a social novel (exploring the actions and interactions of a group, however large or small), you might be working with only a few major characters who are present together in many scenes. Conversely, you might have several settings and a lot of characters, but a tightly compressed time frame, so that events are happening at the same time to different characters in different places.
Either way, it might help to outline the plot and note which characters are available to narrate that event and what perspective each character could bring to the narration. For example, Terry Pratchett's comic science-fiction novel Guards! Guards! uses a collage of characters who are instrumental in causing or repelling a dragon attack, including:
The sleeping dragon
The police captain, drunk and disappointed with life
The wizard librarian of the Unseen University (an ape, by the way)
Brother Fingers, the messenger who can't remember the series of passwords to the secret meeting
Brother Doorkeeper, the one who knows the many passwords
The Supreme Grand Master, who wants to resurrect the dragon and set it loose in the kingdom
A thunder god, who thinks maybe he'll interfere with the lives of men again
The innocent farm boy-turned-cop, Carrot
The varying perspectives, agendas, and voices of these many narrators contribute to a comically suspenseful chapter. Each advances the story a bit or describes a slice of the exotic setting.
Once you have all the major events outlined (or all you can envision at this point), go through and find the minor characters who play no real role in the plot, even though they might be involved in one or more scenes. Most novels have what in film are called “the spearcarriers,” the walk-on characters who come and go, serving coffee, delivering packages, and driving cabs, but have no essential and individual effect on the plot. Usually, they appear in just one scene. These characters are seldom worth wasting a POV on. (The exception is the minor character in a mystery who discovers the dead body. It's conventional to have this character's POV in the first scene — for the body's discovery — and never again.)
