Elements of Fiction Writing, page 23
The flaw here isn’t that the passage is cold and melodramatic by turns — though of course it is. The flaw is that the first-person narrator is watching himself as if from a distance, not seeing inside his own head at all. He sees what he does, but never why. We watch him as if through a camera — but since he is the narrator, he wouldn’t watch himself do these things, he would remember them from the inside.
He didn’t observe these actions when they were going on, he performed them. Yet we are given no clue about what any of his actions mean. He might be hung over, but he might also be sick. And why are we told so much about the shower? What does the shower mean? Why does it matter? It seems like any other shower. We all get wet in the shower. We all have the water beat on our heads and stream down our faces; the whole point of showers is for them to cleanse us. There is no reason for us to be shown this particular shower, because it is no different from any other shower, and the narrator has given us no reason to think it means more than usual.
In fact, if a friend of yours were telling you a story, and he got off onto a tangent about his shower — “the water felt so good beating down on my head, streaming down my body, cleansing me” — wouldn’t you tell him to forget about the stupid shower and get on with the story? Of course you would. So why should the reader, who is not your friend (and unlikely to become one, if you write like this), put up with such irrelevant nonsense?
The only seeming exceptions are the two melodramatic sentences about strong emotion: “I was overcome …” and “Grief was all I could think of …” Yet even here, we are not told what he is grieving about. So this barely qualifies as being inside the narrator’ s head. Instead we are given abstract labels for emotions, not the experience of those emotions or the reasons why the narrator feels them.
If there is any point to using a first-person narrator, it is in order to experience everything through his perceptions, colored by his attitudes, driven by his motives — yet we got nothing of that in this sample. This supposedly first-person account is as impersonal as a phone book. It is also exactly what a majority of novices do when writing first-person accounts.
Here is the same passage told more as a real person might tell of it:
I woke that morning with a brutal headache. I reached out for Nora, as usual, but the bed was empty. Just a piece of paper, which I brushed off my pillow, not caring to know what the note said. It wasn’t from her. She hadn’t been here for days. Months. When would I stop reaching for her? On my deathbed would I expect to find her there, and once again be disappointed? No, maybe on my deathbed she’d be there, watching me so she could enjoy the process, the bitch.
I opened my eyes and regretted it at once — sunlight streaming through the window is never kind to a man with a hangover like the one I had. I got up and staggered to the bathroom, each step like a knife through my head. The shower was too cold, then too hot, and they don’t make a brand of soap that could have made me feel clean. The aspirin bottle was empty, of course, but it didn’t matter — there weren’t enough aspirin in the world to deal with a headache like mine.
I toweled myself roughly, punishing myself for being the kind of jerk who has to wake up alone. Then I got dressed. I wasn’t completely uncivilized — I thought of putting on clean clothes. But it wasn’t worth the effort. I put on the same clothes I had dropped on the bathroom floor.
There was nothing to eat in the kitchen except peanut butter, graham crackers, and baking soda. The peanut butter and graham crackers made me want to puke. I put a teaspoon full of baking soda in a glass of water and drank it down. Turned out even worse than I expected. I went back into the bathroom and threw up. Oh what a beautiful morning.
This version, while it still doesn’t tell us why Nora left, at least gives us more reason to care about what’s going on. We aren’t seeing the narrator from the outside, we’re watching him from the inside — which is exactly what first-person narration is supposed to do.
Note that we get characterization this time, which was almost entirely missing from the first version of this passage. We know why his hand brushes the pillow; we know why he doesn’t pick up the note. We know how he feels about Nora — not just nebulous and melodramatic feelings of grief, but clear, specific attitudes and emotions. He doesn’t describe the shower, he responds to it — an attitude, not a photograph. We know why he decides to wear the dirty clothes from the day before.
Your first-person narrator might be the kind of person who doesn’t easily confess his motives or his feelings. Of course, in that case one wonders why he would write the story at all, or why the author would be so self-destructive as to attempt to write a first-person story told by a taciturn character. If for some reason you do want to write a story told by such a character, even he would not write the first version of this passage. If he is not in the mood for confession, he would not describe his morning. In particular, he would not confess to such things as putting on dirty clothes, nor would he describe something as private as a shower.
If the first-person narrator doesn’t want to confess anything personal, that is also an attitude and will show up in his writing:
Everything that happened to me this morning? All right, I woke up hung-over and there wasn’t any aspirin in the cabinet. I tried to settle my stomach with baking soda and ended up puking. I put on dirty clothes and went outside and spent the rest of the morning yelling obscenities at passing drivers and kicking dogs and little children. I ate lunch at Mc-Donald’s and didn’t throw away my trash or stack my tray. That took me up till noon. Is that what you wanted to know?
First-person narration must reveal the narrator’s character or it isn’t worth doing. The narrator must be the kind of person who would tell the tale, and her motives and attitudes must show up in the story. If you find that you can’t do this, then you have three choices: You can admit that first-person narrative isn’t going to work in this story, and switch to third person; invent your first-person character and create her voice by discovering her attitudes, motives, expectations, and past; or experiment with other first-person narrators until you find one whose character you can create.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THIRD PERSON
Most writers don’t actually think of themselves as God. We are much too humble for that. But within the world of our story, we do have nearly absolute power. Our characters live and die by our decisions; their families and friendships, location and livelihood depend on our whims. They go through the most terrible suffering because we thought it would be more interesting if they did, and just when they finally settle down to live a normal life again, we close the book and snuff them out.
Unfortunately, all that godlike power is usually used in private. We may be manipulating our characters like tormented puppets through the land-scape of our own demented minds, but we conceal all that from our readers. All our artistry as performers of fiction is designed to give the audience the illusion that our characters do what they do for their own reasons, that our story is a natural, believable series of events.
The only time we can act out our godlike role in front of the audience is when we write using the third-person omniscient point of view.
OMNISCIENT VS. LIMITED POINT OF VIEW
As an omniscient narrator, you float over the landscape wherever you want, moving from place to place in the twinkling of an eye. You pull the reader along with you like Superman taking Lois Lane out for a flight, and whenever you see something interesting, you explain to the reader exactly what’s going on. You can show the reader every character’s thoughts, dreams, memories, and desires; you can let the reader see any moment of the past or future.
The limited third-person narrator, on the other hand, doesn’t fly freely over the landscape. Instead the limited narrator is led through the story by one character, seeing only what that character sees; aware of what that character (the “viewpoint character”) thinks and wants and remembers, but unable to do more than guess at any other character’s inner life. You can switch viewpoint characters from time to time, but trading viewpoints requires a clear division — a chapter break or a line space. The limited third-person narrator can never change viewpoints in mid-scene.
What Omniscient Narrators Do Best
Only the omniscient narrator can write passages like this:
It took Pete two months to work up the courage to ask Nora out. She was so delicate looking, so frail boned, her skin translucent, her straw-brown hair wisping off into golden sparks around her face. How could a beer-and-football guy like Pete ever impress Nora Danzer? So he studied the kinds of things that fragile beauties are impressed with — the current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, the art of cinema; he drew the line at opera. When he was ready at last, he wrote his invitation on a whimsical Sandra Boynton card and left it on her desk with a single daffodil.
He didn’t leave his office, didn’t dare to pass her desk until eleven o’clock. The single flower was in a slender vase. She looked up at him and smiled that gentle smile and said, “I’ve never been asked so sweetly. Of course I’ll go.”
Taking her out was like taking a final exam. Pete knew he was failing, but he couldn’t figure out why. He kept bumbling along, trying to impress Nora with his sensitivity, never guessing that Nora was much more comfortable with beer-and-football types. She had grown up with brothers who thought that “fun” was any outdoor game that left scabs. She had often told her friends that all but six of her delicate, fragile bones had been broken during childhood — at least she could hardly remember a time when she didn’t have a cast on some part of her body. She liked rowdiness, laughter, crude humor, and general silliness; she had thought Pete was like that, from the way he bantered and joked with the others at the office.
So all Pete’s talk about the relative merits of the comic visions of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx only confused and intimidated her. She was sure that if she tried to change the subject to things she cared about — the ‘Skins’ chances of getting a third Super Bowl victory in the 80s, for instance — he would gaze at her with surprise and contempt, and take her home. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to be at an easy, comfortable bar somewhere, getting slightly drunk and laughing with Pete’s buddies.
So did Pete. After all, Pete was the guy who had run the length of the bar at Hokey’s, naked, because Walter Payton didn’t score a touch-down in Super Bowl XX. Why did he think he belonged with someone as refined as Nora? He was sure she saw through his disguise and knew he was just another former high school jock — that’s why her eyes were glazing over while he talked.
They sipped their tasteless Perrier, ate as if three asparagus spears and a dime-sized medallion of flounder made a meal, and pretended they were deeply interested in Polanski’s post-American movies. If only each had known that the other slept through most of Tess.
In this story fragment, I tried to show the omniscient point of view at its best. Because the narrator can see into both Pete’s and Nora’s minds, switching back and forth at will, we know things that neither character knows; the pleasure of this scene is that neither character’s point of view is accurate, but ours is.
No other point of view but omniscient would allow a narrator to say that last sentence: “If only each had known that the other slept through most of Tess.”
If either Pete or Nora were a first-person narrator, we would have seen that scene from only one point of view. We would have shared in that character’s misunderstanding of the other. Later, of course, there could be a scene in which they confess the truth to each other; at that point we would think back to their horrible first date and realize that it was all a ridiculous mistake. But we would not have the pleasure or the tension of knowing it was a mistake while the scene was actually happening. (Unless, of course, the first-person narrator violated the time-flow of the story and closed the scene by saying, “Later I found out that Nora had slept through most of Tess. It was one more thing we had in common.” But such a reminder that all these events happened long ago would usually be a gross mistake in a first-person account because it would distance the reader from the immediacy of the story.) A limited third-person narrator would also be forced to show us the scene from only one character’s point of view at a time. But limited third-person offers a few more options than first person. We could still have that later confession scene — in fact, a scene of unmasking is mandatory in a story that hinges on characters misunderstanding each other’s true nature.
Changing Viewpoint Characters
The limited narrator can also change viewpoint characters. Not in mid-scene or even mid-paragraph, as the omniscient narrator does, but from one scene to another, as long as there is a clear transitional break. The most obvious transitional break, and therefore the one that works best, is the chapter break. If chapter one is from Pete’s point of view — with his worries about asking Nora out for a date, his preparation for the “final exam,” and so on — then chapter two can be from Nora’s point of view. We’ll remember how anxious Pete was to keep “delicate” Nora from guessing that he was really a beer-drinking jock, so as we see the date from Nora’s point of view, with her memories of her brothers playing roughly in the yard, her longing to talk football and drink beer in a bar, we’ll get most of the delicious irony of knowing the truth about two characters who are deceiving each other too well.
But what if you want to write a short story, not a book? Can’t you switch viewpoint characters without having to resort to a chapter structure?
Yes. The next-clearest transitional device in fiction is the “line space”.
It looks like this:
In your manuscript, however, you must mark a line space so the typesetting and layout will know that it’s a deliberate space that should appear in the finished book. Usually a line space is marked in manuscript with three asterisks, like this:
* * *
The asterisks will usually appear in the finished book or magazine only if the line space falls at a page break. The rest of the time they’ll be deleted, leaving only a blank line.
The first part of our story, using Pete as the viewpoint character, ends with the line space. Readers are trained to recognize a line space as a signal that a major change is taking place in the story — a change of location, a long passage of time, or a change in viewpoint character. However, you must be careful that you establish what the change is immediately after the line space. The first sentence should use Nora’s name and make it clear that the narrator is now following her point of view. The first paragraph should also let us know, directly or by implication, where she is and how long it has been since the events just before the line space.
A change of viewpoint character is the most difficult transition for readers to make. (All right, a jump of 900 years and a change of planet might be harder, but usually time and place changes are a matter of a few days and a few miles.) It’s a lot easier for readers to adapt to the viewpoint change if they have already met the new viewpoint character, and it’s even easier if the new viewpoint character is already very important in the story. In this case, because the section from Pete’s viewpoint is focused on his feelings and plans for Nora, we won’t have any confusion at all when the section immediately after the line space begins:
Nora had never seen nouvelle cuisine before. To her the half-empty plate looked like someone in the kitchen had decided to put her on a diet. Had Pete called ahead to tell them she was too fat or something?
Since the section before focused on Pete’s upcoming date with Nora, readers will remember easily who Nora is and will have little trouble guessing from this opening that Nora is now out on the date with Pete.
Just as important is the fact that this paragraph immediately establishes Nora’s point of view. In the last section, we would have become used to seeing everything from Pete’s perspective, getting his thoughts and attitudes and memories. The first sentence after the line break gives us information about Nora that Pete would not know — her unfamiliarity with nouvelle cuisine. His point of view has been clearly violated; hers is being clearly established. The second sentence gives her attitude — her humorously paranoid guess about the chefs motive for putting such a small amount of food on a plate. And to complete the viewpoint shift, the third sentence starts showing us Pete, our previous viewpoint character, only this time from her point of view — her uncertainty about how he is judging her. Since Pete’s viewpoint section would have shown us how he practically worshipped Nora and thought she was the most fragile, beautiful woman he’d ever known, having Nora speculate that Pete might think she was too fat lets us know that Nora’s self-image is wildly different from Pete’s image of her. The viewpoint shift is complete in three sentences, and readers will settle in comfortably with Nora’s point of view.
Because we’ve had experience with Pete’s point of view, the limited third-person version of the dinner scene would have most of the irony we had in the omniscient version. Presumably the previous section, from Pete’s point of view, would have told us about his buck-naked run along the bar at Hokey’s after losing a football bet, so when Nora starts wishing she could talk about football during dinner, we’ll remember Pete’s football fanaticism and realize that if Pete would just stop pretending to be what he thinks Nora is, the real Nora would certainly enjoy the real Pete. The irony is working. We don’t have to wait for a later confession scene, as we would in first person. By changing viewpoint characters, a limited third-person narrator can get most of the same kind of narrative effects as an omniscient narrator.
