Stein on Writing (18 page)

Are you naming emotions instead of conveying them by actions? Is any character telling another what that character already knows?

While showing rather than telling is important throughout a work, it can serve as a miraculous cure for the ailing first pages of a novel or story. Showing means having characters do things that excite our interest, making those pages visual, letting us see what happens firsthand.

I have a small suggestion that carries with it a big reward. In a three-word note to yourself say, show the story. Then hang the note where you will see it whenever you sit down to write. Think of it as an antidote to a lifetime of hearing that a story should be told.

Choosing a Point of View

I
f all but one of the instruments on a surgeon’s tray had been sterilized, that exception would be a danger to the patient. It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.

The
term
point of view
as used by writers is misdefined even in good dictionaries. It means the character
whose eyes are observing what happens,
the perspective from which a scene or story is written.

Without a firm grasp of point of view, no writer of fiction is free to exercise his talent fully. This chapter is designed to help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each point of view so that you can choose knowledgeably which to use to accomplish what you have in mind.

Each point of view available to the writer influences the emotions of the reader differently. Since affecting the emotions of the reader is the primary job of fiction, deciding on point of view is important.

In general, I advise the less-experienced writer not to mix points of view within the same scene, chapter, or even the same novel. It is unsettling to the reader. If you mix points of view, the author’s authority seems to dissolve. The writer seems arbitrary rather than controlled. Sticking to a point of view intensifies the experience of a story. A wavering or uncertain point of view will diminish the experience for the reader.

The experienced writer who has mastered point of view can experiment with tightly controlled yet shifting viewpoints. When I started out I used the most neutral kind of third-person point of view. It was only after my confidence increased that I started using multiple first-person points of view in different parts or chapters, with the point of view established and clearly identified at the outset of each part or chapter.

Writers are often confused about point of view when they are presented with an unnecessarily large number of choices. Let’s keep things as simple as possible by examining the three main points of view:

I saw this, I did that.

No mistaking that one. It’s
the
first-person
point of view. What about the next example?

My friends Blair and Cynthia were doomed. I could feel their fervor when I saw them embrace, yet in their eyes there was a wariness, as if each of them knew that their happiness could not last. I must tell you what happened the next day.

That is also first person, a story told from the sole point of view of the narrator. He sees what he believes to be in the eyes of his friends Blair and Cynthia, but it is not
their
view of how they feel, it is
his
view.

The narrator can be merely the observer of a story involving other people. This form of first person was more common in the nineteenth century. Today, a narrator is more often the protagonist or a principal character directly involved in the action. He can even be the villain of the piece.

Can you identify the point of view of the following?

He saw this, he did that.

Third person
is correct. The simplest way of understanding third person is that it is the same as first person except that you have substituted “he” or “she” for “I.”

What about the second-person point of view?

You saw this, you did that.

Forget it. Second person is used so rarely that I suggest just shelving it. I think of it as the crackerbarrel mode, the storyteller seeking to involve the reader in the story as if he were a character. The fact is that the reader is quite prepared to be involved emotionally in the story not as himself but through identification with one or more of the characters.

Now let’s look at yet another point of view:

Kevin looked longingly at Mary, hoping she would notice him. She not only noticed him, she wished he would take her in his arms. Mary’s mother, watching from the window, thought they were a perfect match.

This writer is all over the lot. One moment he seems to be in Kevin’s head, the next moment in Mary’s, and a second later in Mary’s mother’s point of view. What’s going on?

In that short paragraph the reader knows what Kevin is thinking, and also what Mary and her mother are thinking. The author feels free to roam anywhere. That point of view is called
omniscient,
which means all-knowing.

Let’s recap the three main points of view so that we’re absolutely clear about the differences. In first person, the character—frequently the protagonist—tells the story from his or her point of view:
I saw this, I did that.

The easiest way to think of the third person point of view is to substitute “he” for “I”:
He saw this, he did that.

In the omniscient point of view all characters and locations are fair game.

The usual reaction of beginning novelists is “Why can’t I just use omniscient and be done with it? I can go anywhere, do anything—sounds great.” Imitating God, by seeing and hearing everyone, is tempting, but maturity usually provides leavening. The Deity can’t pay attention to everybody all the time, and neither can the writer. A story about everybody is a story about nobody. Before he’ll let himself become involved, the reader wants to know whose story this is. He expects the writer to focus on individuals.

Each point of view has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of first-person POV (writers usually refer to point of view as POV, so let’s call it that) is that it establishes the greatest immediate intimacy with the reader. It is an eyewitness account, highly subjective, and highly credible. When a character speaks directly to us, it’s easier to believe what the character is saying. If you are good at impersonating your characters, you will be comfortable with the first-person POV. Better still, once you know the character, you will become expert in talking with that character’s voice.

For each plus there is, alas, a minus. The author of a first-person story must constantly be on guard against telling the reader something that will sound like the author rather than the character. Furthermore, many
writers see a severe limitation in that the first-person POV can convey to the reader only what that character sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes, and thinks. You can’t have scenes your first-person character isn’t a witness to. He doesn’t know what’s going on beyond his ken, although there are ways of circumventing that liability, which I’ll demonstrate in a moment.

Another liability of first person is that it’s difficult for a character to describe himself without seeming foolishly egotistical. Hundreds of writers, including me, have used a mirror to get around that. Forget it. A character seeing himself in a mirror is a cliché. However, a first-person character can think about his looks, or changes in his looks. Or another character can say something like:

“Are you dyeing your hair?”

This could lead to an exchange about the character’s hair. Or:

“Are you getting taller?”

“I’m just stooping less these days.”

Dealing with the “I” character’s ego is more difficult. If he sees himself as weak, the reader won’t have much interest in him as a protagonist. If he sees himself as strong, the reader will think him a braggart. Therefore, in the first-person POV the author relies on action and the speech of other characters to reveal things—particularly good things—about the “I” character. An unreliable or villainous first-person narrator can lend credibility. A first-person commentary by a not terribly intelligent character can provide an experienced writer with opportunities. In any event, first-person POV can be exceptionally rich.

There’s something you’ll want to watch out for using the first person. If the character takes the reader into his confidence, the character can’t “forget” to provide the reader with an essential secret or other important piece of information. When the reader learns that something was withheld, he will feel cheated. The most dramatic way of handling information that the character is reluctant to convey is for another character to strip the secret from him in heated conversation:

I have been wedded to the truth my entire life. What would I be doing at a young person’s bachelor party? I told Jonathan flat out, “I didn’t go.”

“Bullshit, Maurice, you were there.”

“On my conscience, I swear I didn’t go.”

“You don’t have a twin brother, do you?”

I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. Jonathan pursued me across the room.

“Was it your twin brother who came out of the John in his suspenders? Maurice, you left your jacket hanging in the stall you were so drunk. You’re lucky somebody didn’t rifle your pockets before Adam steered you back in for it.”

I was barely able to speak. “You were there?”

Jonathan nodded. “I was there.”

A point sometimes overlooked by beginners is that if a story centers on the narrator’s ability to survive life-threatening dangers, some suspense will be lost in the first person because the character will have to survive to finish the story!

If you examine an anthology of short stories that have been selected for their excellence, you may be surprised by the number that are written from the first-person point of view. Despite the seeming limitations of a single character’s perspective, first person well done is immensely rewarding to both experienced writers and experienced readers. The first-person point of view is valuable, for instance, if you’ve drawn a character who is highly intelligent or perceptive. His or her complex thoughts can be conveyed much more directly and intimately to the reader.

Another advantage of first person is that it can involve the reader’s emotions—even empathy—with a protagonist who does horrible things. The
New York Times Book Review
carried an interesting interview with Scott Smith, a first novelist, that accompanied a review of his novel
A Simple Plan:

Scott Smith’s protagonist Hank commits bloody acts. The reader would find it hard to empathize with Hank if the story were told in the third person. In fact, Smith’s choice of first person was “vital to overcoming the reader’s natural distaste for Hank’s bloody acts.” Said Smith, “I think there’s something very seductive about a first-person voice, you sort of fall into it, no matter what horrible things the character does, and I wanted to keep that up until the very end, at which point the reader would have to sort of pull back. But no matter what he did, I was sympathetic to him. What’s seductive to the reader is even more so to the writer.”

Sometimes using the first-person point of view is a necessity. Jerzy Kosinski’s first and best novel,
The Painted Bird,
is a story of tremendous power. I once loaned a copy to a man I’ll call Michael, a hugely successful businessman who was expert in classical music, a collector of first-rate art, and an avid reader who “never reads fiction.” We were vacationing in adjacent cottages and after he’d read only a few pages, Michael rushed over to ask, “Is this true?” I strung him along with “Do you think it’s true?” and he kept coming back after several chapters, asking again, “Is this true?” That book converted Michael to reading fiction from that time on.

The amazing fact about
The Painted Bird
is that its language is full of imaginative images and some of the events depicted are bizarre or aberrant, yet because the use of first person is handled so skillfully the emotional experience for the reader is “This is true.”

The Painted Bird
begins with a preface in third person of less than two pages that sets the period and the locale. (In general I advise against the use of prefaces in fiction. Some readers skip them, and in doing so, miss essential information. I have found that the essential material of prefaces can almost always be skillfully developed in the story itself.)

Kosinski’s novel, unlike the third-person preface, is in the first person. The narrator is presumably a ten-year-old boy:

I lived in Marta’s hut, expecting my parents to come for me any day, any hour. Crying did not help, and Marta paid no attention to my sniveling.

She was old and always bent over, as though she wanted to break herself in half but could not. Her long hair, never combed, had knotted itself into innumerable thick braids impossible to unravel. These she calls elflocks. Evil forces nested in the elflocks, twisting them and slowly inducing senility.

She hobbled around, leaning on a gnarled stick, muttering to herself in a language I could not quite understand. Her small withered face was covered with a net of wrinkles, and her skin was reddish like that of an overbaked apple. Her withered body constantly trembled as though shaken by some inner wind, and the fingers of her bony hands with joints twisted by disease never stopped quivering as her head on its long scraggy neck nodded in every direction.

Her sight was poor. She peered at the light through tiny slits embedded under thick eyebrows. Her lids were like furrows in deeply
plowed soil. Tears were always spilling from the corners of her eyes, coursing down her face in well-worn channels to join glutinous threads hanging from her nose and the bubbly saliva dripping from her lips. She sometimes looked like an old green-gray puff-ball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to blow out the black dry dust from inside.