by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
However, do not mention the child or his feelings or any emotional state or thoughts at all. Stick to pure visual description and choice of detail to do this exercise. You are almost a camera, although you do have the power of metaphor and simile to draw upon as long as you don't overuse it.
Now, describe the same scene from the point of view of a doting father peeping in. Again, don't mention the father or his feelings.
Describe the scene a third time, this time from the point of view of a terrified mother. No mention of her and her fears.
Finally, describe the same scene from the child's point of view.
Character, Viewpoint, and Description
I hope you notice that the first part of that exercise affords a description that is generic when compared to those that follow. It is a lot like the exercise with the house without a viewpoint. The viewpoint in that first description ends up being the writer's.
Now, unless you're going to write a story in which the author is allowed to talk to the reader, a nineteenth-century technique that's rarely used today, it should become obvious that description is a function of viewpoint, and viewpoint is the end result of knowing something about who is doing the observing. So both viewpoint and description are extensions of character. If that is the case, then description is a function of character and the same visual image will vary depending on who is doing the seeing.
Inexperienced storytellers, when they write, though interestingly enough not when they verbally tell stories, place the readers in a certain position in regard to the viewpoint of the story and then suddenly yank them into another viewpoint at an inappropriate moment, such as in the middle of the scene.
Here's an example:
In the rattling subway car, Gordon felt somehow co-cooned from the bitterness of the outside world, at least for a while. If you sat long enough, and Gordon had nothing but time on his hands until tonight, you could observe the flow of passengers on and off the subway car. Hunched in a corner, studiously avoided by the New Yorkers who turned their backs to him whenever possible, Gordon began to feel not only that he was invisible, but that he was irrelevant. Mary was determined not to make contact with anyone on the train. Keep your attention on your Bible passage and just make sure you don't make eye contact with anyone, particularly men, she thought. The difficulty was that the bum in a corner seat a few feet from where she stood by the door stank to high heaven and kept staring at her and then ducking away.
So who is doing the observing here? Is it Gordon, or is it Mary? What happens when they eventually have to interact? Whose viewpoint will the writer choose? He can't swing back and forth giving each viewpoint every time one of them speaks or thinks because readers will get nauseous from the violent changes in camera angle. They will also have no touchstone with which to decide whom to identify with in a scene, and thus the writer will rob the scene of any potential emotional impact. He must pick a viewpoint and stay with it within a scene. If you want a more detailed explanation of viewpoint, take a look at my book The Elements of Storytelling (John Wiley & Sons).
Try to Keep to One Viewpoint
In order to maximize the emotional impact of your narrative, you should use as few viewpoints as possible to tell your story. Over the shoulder or through the eyes and in the head of one character is ideal from a perspective of maximum emotional impact. It's not always possible to do that, however. The reader cares about one or two people, but if she starts living vicariously and intimately through the eyes of too many characters and viewpoints, she becomes bewildered, forced to put the narrative at arm's length in order to process the story, which is the exact opposite of what you should want from a reader.
We can think of viewpoint as being of several types: omniscient, minor character, major character, and multiple.
Omniscient Viewpoint
Omniscient viewpoint is what is called the God view. It means you can know anything. You can know about other places, other times, future and past:
Humpty Dumpty didn't realize it, but soon he would have a great fall, and all the King's horses and all the King's men would not be able to put him together again.
Well, if Humpty didn't realize what was happening, then, of course, you're not in Humpty's viewpoint. You're in a godlike viewpoint that knows what's going to happen in the future and the past and what's going on in Toledo, Ohio, and anywhere else.
This is called omniscience. It's not something you should use. It's not even in style these days. It was big in the nineteenth century. "Listen, dear reader, while I tell you about these people," sort of thing. You shouldn't use this viewpoint for two reasons: First, it's very difficult to do effectively because you have too many options:
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down ...
OK, now what? Do I stay in Jack's point of view and go down the hill and see what it feels like to tumble down a hill? Or do I stay with Jill and watch Jack fall down the hill? And when Jill goes tumbling after, what do I do? Do I get inside Jill's head and describe what it feels like to go tumbling after?
Or do I switch to Jack and look up the hill at Jill coming down the hill? There are too many options. It becomes unwieldy.
Second, and more importantly, it's not really the way we experience life. We don't know what's going to happen a half hour from now or two years from now. We don't know what's going on in Toledo, Ohio. We probably don't need to know, either. Because we don't experience life that way, the omniscient viewpoint runs against the grain of the reader's everyday experience. The best advice is don't use it except for comedic effect.
Minor-Character Viewpoint
What do I mean by this?
Consider this opening line: "Call me Ishmael." Readers are about to enter the world of Moby Dick, through the eyes of a secondary character. Ishmael is going to tell the story of Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest to destroy the great white whale.
A more widely read example is probably Dr. John Watson. Who? The guy who tells us all about the exploits of his close friend, Sherlock Holmes. All the Sherlock Holmes stories, you may recall, are told from the viewpoint of Dr. Watson. Think about why that's true and you'll get a real understanding about what this kind of viewpoint in particular, but viewpoint in general, is all about.
Here's a typical statement Watson might make in the middle of a Sherlock Holmes story:
Holmes picked up the coffee cup and he sniffed it. A strange look came into his eyes.
That's all Watson knows. Holmes doesn't say anything. The cup goes back, and at the end of the story, Holmes solves the crime:
When I sniffed the cup I smelled this very rare brand of cognac, which I discovered only comes from South Africa, so it must have been Colonel Garon who did the
murder because he was only newly arrived from Cape Town.
Watson finds out and the readers find out at the same time.
If the Sherlock Holmes stories were written from Holmes's point of view, you'd have a different situation:
Sherlock picked up the coffee cup and sniffed. Immediately he knew. The odor was unmistakable. "Call Inspector Lestrade," he told Watson. "We have our murderer. He will need to arrest Garon before he leaves for the night train to Paris.''
' 'My dear Holmes, are you mad?" Watson said. There was hint of annoyance with his friend in his tone. "You haven't been indulging again in that appalling cocaine addiction of yours, have you?"
Holmes turned his famous profile to Watson and the coldness of his gaze and the firm set of his jaw announced that topic would be discussed no further. "Cognac, my dear doctor. Here, smell for yourself, the odor is unmistakable. South African Cognac." With a dismissive gesture of one hand he announced, "This case is closed. It is of no more interest to me."
We've just defanged the drama and the climax of this story because of a poor choice of viewpoint. The reader feels, and correctly, that she's entitled to all the information that comes to the viewpoint character. And so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle doesn't
use Sherlock Holmes's viewpoint because Conan Doyle wants to save this revelation for later and maximize the drama at the same time.
That is what viewpoint is all about.
Viewpoint is about how best to reveal information, who has that information and how you want to give it to the reader.
Major-Character Viewpoint
Let's talk about a single, major-character viewpoint. This should be what you use most in your narratives. It means you have chosen a character and thus a viewpoint for your narrative and everything that character knows is available to the reader.
However, the reader can know everything she knows only when she knows it, no sooner or later, no more and no less.
Let's assume the viewpoint character's name is Gary. You can write about Gary and what he knows about a situation:
Gary walked into the room. The carpet was green. There were five or six writers waiting to hear him say something brilliant. He had on a copper shirt.
All of these are things Gary is aware of. And you can't add things that violate the reader's sense of what makes logical sense in the narrative:
At that very moment some looney psycho by the name of Virgil Strunk crept up behind Gary. "I'm going to get that writing teacher person,'' Virgil thought.
The reason, of course, is that you've stepped out of Gary's viewpoint. You have jerked the reader around to another direction without warning.
Multiple Viewpoint
This leads us to a discussion of multiple viewpoints. This just means that you use a number of different viewpoints in your novel. It's not omniscient, though, because at any given point in the novel, readers only have access to one character's thoughts and feelings.
There are a couple of things to remember about this. First of all, don't use a lot of viewpoints just for the heck of it. Very often beginning writers—and some professionals, too—use multiple viewpoints as a crutch to avoid developing one character with depth and because the writer forgets that the story is not what happens, but whom it happens to. So, in order to tell his story, and because he's having trouble figuring out how to give all the relevant information to readers, the writer slides into lots of viewpoints, rather than trying to explore the problems that arise from learning about a single character's life and emotions and the moral and ethical problems the story raises about that character's life.
It's OK to use multiple viewpoints, but they work best in bigger, more epic kinds of narratives or in the reconstruction of specific events in, say, a true crime piece. Usually, it's best not to use more than three or four viewpoints. The important thing to keep in mind is that the more viewpoints you use, the less intimacy you give the reader with any one of these characters.
The key to successfully switching between multiple viewpoints is to do it at logical times in the narrative. Do it between chapters, certainly between scenes, but don't change viewpoint characters in a scene. If you do, it will have that quality of yanking the reader around. Also, once you've decided to change viewpoint, at the start of the book you need to announce to readers in some fashion that one of the rules of this book is that they can now have John's viewpoint as well as Mary's. If you decide to do this, however, you better use both points of view.
If, for example, the bulk of the book is written in Mary's viewpoint and only chapter two is in John's viewpoint, the book will feel out of whack. It's going to feel to the reader as if you have changed viewpoint once to solve some technical story problem. So use multiple viewpoint if you need to, but limit it to two, three or, at the most, four viewpoints, not every single character in a book. And keep it consistent until the end of the narrative.
Choosing Viewpoint
How do you choose a viewpoint? Most of the time you'll know which to use. In the planning of and the advance thinking about your story, it becomes obvious that this is Marvin's story or Janet's story.
But there are other times when a story comes to you and you can think of two or three different ways to tell it, two or
three different character viewpoints you could use, and you have to decide which one is best.
Here's the guiding principle I stated before that will work with any narrative writing question: All major problems with narrative storytelling have a structural basis. The solution is always to rethink, or otherwise examine and modify the characters who are populating your story.
The basis for deciding the best way to do that—or anything else in writing a narrative—is to filter your choices through the lens of emotional power.
Ask yourself, What will give my story the most emotional impact? What will dilute this emotional power?
Choose the solution that pumps up the emotional power of the narrative and you will never go far wrong. Emotional power grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go until the last word of the last sentence of the last page.
When in doubt, go for the throat—metaphorically, of course!
Here are couple of other things to consider.
Who is the active character in your story? Remember, earlier we talked about good ideas, and good ideas are about characters who are not reactive or passive. Who is the character who really does something in this story? Who really takes action, takes control of his fate and perhaps the fate of others? He makes a good viewpoint character. Certainly, books have been written about people who were passive, who sort of experienced the story secondhand, but those stories are difficult to write and they're not very satisfying to read.
Finally, of course, who is the person who has the information that you want to reveal to the reader and in the order that you want to reveal it? He may well be the best viewpoint character. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, for example, Watson certainly is. He has the information in the order Conan Doyle wants the reader to get it. Watson, like us, finds out at the end of the story who committed the murder, whereas Sherlock Holmes often realizes who the murderer is halfway through the story.
The Deeper Meaning of Viewpoint
Let's talk for a moment about character and the deeper meaning of viewpoint.
For the sake of discussion, and simplicity, we've been treating viewpoint as a sort of camera placement. In reality, it's more than that.
When you choose the viewpoint, you choose how the reader is going to experience that story. You filter the narrative through the viewpoint character's eyes and ears, feelings and emotions. The story is shaped and determined in large part by that character's perceptions of life. When you change the viewpoint, you alter the language, attitude, everything about how the story is being told. This is why changing viewpoints unexpectedly is so disconcerting to the reader and is such poor narrative technique.
EXERCISES
1. Think of the most villainous, nasty, rotten, miserable person you can—someone really awful. Write three to five paragraphs about this person, in first person, to convey what he thinks of himself.
2. Write a scene with two people in it. First, write it from the point of view of character A. Then, write it from character B's point of view. Write it in third person. Rewrite the same scene with two different characters. Again, write from each viewpoint.
Chapter Six
Goals
We're going to talk goals: why you're putting together the elements of your story the way you are and how best to focus and structure the pieces of your story so it is smooth and seamless.
To begin, let's talk about tennis.
Tennis is a sport with an ultimate goal: You have to win more sets than your opponent. You can win by beating your opponent two sets out of three or three sets out of five or whatever you agree on ahead of time. Tennis also has what you might call intermediary goals: To win a set you have to be the first player to win a certain number of games, usually six. And tennis has minor goals: To win a game, you have to be the first to get four points; and to win a point, you have to hit the ball over the net, past your opponent. All these progressive goals in a tennis match make sense, because you understand that the ultimate goal is to outwi
t your opponent and win the game. What's more, each progressive goal lends drama to the game in a mounting sequence that builds one upon another.
But what would happen if you had a tennis match in which the players just hit balls back and forth but didn't bother to keep any kind of score? Where's the drama, beyond the immediacy of individual rallies across the net? Where are the tiebreakers, the cliff-hangers, the unison "oohs" and "ahs" of the crowd as rallies of shots become increasingly hard to return, each shot retrieved with ever more amazing displays of athletic prowess and technical skill.
If no one knew what the players were trying to accomplish, it would be impossible to keep score. The game would lack drama and make no sense. And if you didn't keep score, you wouldn't bother to stay long at a tennis match, because there wouldn't be an ultimate goal—a winner.
The same thing is true with your story.
If the readers don't understand what your character is trying to achieve, they don't know whether your character's gotten closer to her goal or farther away from it.
Readers don't know how to keep score.
HOW TO KEEP SCORE
Throughout your book there should be a series of goals: There's an ultimate goal, intermediate goals, and minor goals.
Let's look at a science fiction novel as an example, but it could just as easily be a piece of narrative nonfiction.
In Planet of the Apes (aka Monkey Planet), by Pierre Boulle, the ultimate goal is for the stranded astronaut to get back to Earth. The intermediate goal is for him to find and steal a spaceship. The minor goal is for him to escape from the apes who have captured him and may well enslave him for the rest of his life if they don't kill him and stuff him in a museum, as they did his partners.
All the events in the story hold the reader's interest because they are linked by goals—the reader understands how the hero, achieving each lesser goal, is led to his ultimate goal. If the reader didn't know what that ultimate goal was, the scenes would just be boring and disconnected and wouldn't mean anything.