Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it another way around: Are we in any way like her?
But Atwood has Tony make one last action, a symbolic one:
Then she opens the door, and goes in to join the others.
For Tony, rejoining her friends is an important action that suggests she is ready to open herself again to women friends. That final action crystallizes all of Tony's thoughts and tells the reader that Tony has healed.
Final actions should speak to how your protagonist is going to behave differently in the world now that he has survived the trials of your narrative. Think symbolically. Ask yourself how a small action can convey a larger meaning. Your protagonist could be staring down a dirt road at the end of a narrative in which he has been afraid to make choices. As his final action, he can walk down the unknown road, for example. Symbolic actions carry weight at the end of a narrative and will give your final scene a feeling that there is more to come for your protagonist.
Final Reflections and Thoughts
By the end of the narrative, the reader can tell how the protagonist has changed, but it may still be unclear how the protagonist feels about his changes or about something that took place in the narrative. In this case, a direct expression of feelings is needed.
In Chuck Palahniuk's novel Invisible Monsters, a novel about identity and about learning to accept oneself in whatever way possible, the narra-tor—formerly a fashion model—is shot in the face early in the narrative and must undergo massive facial reconstruction, losing her beauty entirely. While in the hospital, she meets Brandy Alexander, a man in the process of undergoing sex reassignment surgery to become a woman. Brandy's female form looks uncannily like Shannon used to look before her accident. At the end of the novel, the reader isn't quite sure how Shannon feels about herself, now that her beauty is gone. What the reader knows is that she has made some sort of peace with the past and found friendship in an unlikely source—Brandy. The final sentences convey Shannon's feelings on her identity:
Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander.
And that's enough.
Brandy represents the self she used to hate—who was pretty on the outside, but tortured within. By admitting her love for Brandy, she does in effect admit to loving herself.
A summary thought or reflection on your narrative works best when it is unclear how the narrator feels at the end, or if there has been some sort of gray area or waffling about feelings. A final thought sums it up so the reader can rest with a sense of understanding.
Final Images
Images resonate with the reader more than actions or interior monologue because they speak the language of the subconscious—they directly trigger emotional responses without an intellectual interpretation.
In Richard Lewis's novel The Killing Sea, two teens are affected by the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004 in Indonesia. The life of Sarah, an American girl on vacation with her parents and brother, is changed drastically when her mother is killed in the tsunami strike and her father disappears. In the aftermath of the crisis, struggling to get back to a place where she and her brother can get help, she meets Ruslan, an Indonesian boy, and winds up helping him to find his missing father. All throughout the narrative, Sarah's grief for her mother is tangled. She has always believed that her mother didn't want to have her, and this thought haunts her. In the final scene, Rus-lan draws Sarah a picture of her mother as he imagines her:
And in the simple, graceful lines of her gently smiling face, in the eyes that looked right into her, Sarah saw all the love that her mother had always had for her, and how absolutely, utterly wrong she'd been to ever have doubted it.
While that is a lovely sentiment, the final sentence is the most powerful because it plants an image in the reader's mind, conjuring not only tears, but the waters of the tsunami itself that took her mother and father away:
Something gave way within her, and the raw waters of grief came rushing in.
I am a fan of images that symbolically and metaphorically speak to the journey the protagonist has undergone. Think about the themes of your narrative. Is it about loss, healing, faith, forgiveness? It helps to make a list of images that come to mind for whatever your themes are, and then from that list, to select or create a final image that speaks to your protagonist's personal journey.
FINAL SCENE MUSE POINTS_
•The final scene is a snapshot of your protagonist in the aftermath or at the very end of the significant situation.
• Final scenes should reveal that your protagonist has changed.
• Final scenes are slower and more reflective.
• Final scenes do not require much action.
In fiction, point of view (POV) is the camera through which the reader enters your protagonist's world, sees what he sees, and shares in his feelings and perceptions. POV has a direct influence on the tone, mood, energy, and pace of a scene (not to mention your overall narrative).
In order to master POV from one scene to the next, you must use it with integrity and consistency, by which I mean that the reader should feel expertly guided at all times throughout your scenes, never confused about whose POV is being presented. If you've shown the scene of a murder through a shocked widow's eyes, for example, you don't want to suddenly leap into the point of view of the vigilante detective who is hunting the murderer down without legitimate reason and careful transition. Otherwise you'll leave the reader a little feeling a little whip lashed and out of sync with your story.
In this chapter, we'll examine the different kinds of POV in relation to what effects they create. We'll also talk about how to make POV leaps and transitions inside scenes, and from scene to scene, so that whatever POV you choose to use works for your scenes, not against them.
CHOOSING YOUR CAMERA
POV is not only the camera that shows what your characters see, it is also what determines how close the reader can get to get to your characters. The
distance between your characters and the reader defines the intimacy of the scene or story. The more intimate the POV, the more the reader feels as if he is personally experiencing what the character is. The more distant the POV, the more the reader feels like an objective observer on the sidelines. Your content will motivate your choice of intimacy in part. If you are writing about the lives of women in Afghanistan, like Khaled Hosseini does in his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, then it will work to your advantage to bring the reader in close—through first person or limited third person, in which there is very little separation from the characters. Use this next section to choose the degree of intimacy you want, and the level of objectivity you need to tell your story.
First Person
First-person points of view reach out and grab the reader, like a small child standing in a room screaming "Me, me, me!" You can't help but turn to look. The "I" pronoun is very immediate, and it draws the reader emotionally directly into the characters' experience.
The following example comes from Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead, in which a dying minister writes down his life story for his young son to read someday. The memoirs are peppered with actual observations of his life as he is dying:
I must try to be mindful of my condition. I started to lift you up into my arms the other day, the way I used to when you weren't quite so big and I wasn't quite so old. Then I saw your mother watching me with pure apprehension and I realized what a foolish thing to do that was.
If it's intimacy you strive for in creating characters, you can't get much closer than first person. You are literally inside the protagonist's head, which is very useful when you want to put the reader directly into your characters' shoes.
On the same note, the problem with first person is that if your character undergoes tremendous suffering, physical pain, or crisis, first person might be too immediate and painful. To provide objectivity and pull back from the intensity, you can use third-person limited, which
we'll look at shortly.
Also, because first person is so immediate, your verb tenses will have a lot more power than in other points of view. The present tense, when conjoined with first person, is probably the most immediate experience you can give the reader: "I hold the gun up to Max's head." Whew ... that gun is liable to go off and poor Max may have only moments left. In the past tense, "I held the gun up to Max's head." Do you see how the past tense offers a tiny beat of distance?
Second Person
Second person is a narrative version of self-talk. The "you" pronoun is coming from the character, aimed back to himself. It is first person turned even more deeply intimate, because the reader is not only inside the person's mind and thoughts, he essentially becomes the character.
Here's an example from Aimee Bender's story "The Bowl" in her collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
When you open the wrapping (there's no card), you find a bowl, a green bowl with a white interior, a bowl for fruit or mixing. You're puzzled, but obediently put four bananas inside and then go back to whatever you were doing before: a crossword puzzle. You wonder and hope this is from a secret admirer, but if so, you think, why a bowl? What are you to learn and gain from a green and white fruit bowl?
This POV is very intimate. Best used when the intention of the scene is to explore a character's feelings or attitude, or to draw the reader in incredibly close; but not so effective when you have a lot of action or character interaction unfolding in the scene at hand. The "you" second-person point of view plants the reader deeper inside the character's experience until the line between reader and character is blurred.
Second person can seem slightly humorous, even when the subject matter is not, because it's not a tense that we use in actual spoken conversation very often. When was the last time you heard someone refer to himself as "you"? Second person is an exquisitely self-conscious point of view, which can be fascinating and fun when the subject matter or the protagonist is quirky or the style is experimental, but otherwise second person feels as if the reader has just opened a window on a character's mind in the middle of a deeply personal thought process. As a result, it's not used very often.
Third Person
You'll recognize third person by the use of pronouns "she" and "he." There are two main forms of the third-person point of view—omniscient, which is more distant, and limited, which is more intimate. I find that writers have a tendency to interchange the two in confusing ways.
Third-Person Limited
Third-person limited is really one of the most straightforward and practical of all points of view. It provides enough distance, via the "he" and "she" pronouns, that the reader is not riding piggyback with the characters, but it also allows you to develop one character at a time, and never confuses the reader. If the character's point of view is in limited third person, the reader knows, "I am looking out through Snow White's eyes here." There is no guesswork or moving between characters' thoughts.
In the third-person omniscient POV, the camera can move wherever it needs to, into any character's head, to look out upon any facet of the scene at hand. This flexibility offers more options for drama and conflict, and is often employed in an epic or historical novel, where important information needs to be communicated outside of a character's perspective.
Omniscient Continuous
When you can see inside the head of more than one character, and hear multiple characters' thoughts in a back-and-forth kind of fashion, you're in the omniscient continuous, as I like to call it. When the camera pans from Snow White to Dopey, Grumpy, and Doc, and you can hear the thoughts and opinions of each one as they discuss what to do about that nasty old witch, you're smack dab in omniscient.
When you employ omniscient in scenes, it creates a sense of movement because you must jump from character to character, which also creates emotional distance. It's useful to be able to dance back and forth between characters' thoughts when a scene involves multiple characters.
Omniscient Instants
Omniscient instants, on the other hand, are bits of information inserted into third-person limited POV that offer up information in the scene that the characters can't know but which helps clarify details for the reader.
Here's an example in Ingrid Hill's novel of ancestors, Ursula, Under, which is a series of linked historical stories that trace back the lineage of a child, Ursula, who has slipped down a mine shaft and is awaiting rescue.
[Rene Josserand's skull] is still there today, undiscovered, four and a half feet into the rich earth, beneath leaves, grass, and clay, never touched by a gravedigger's hand. There are local post cards, but none of them says, "Paradise, Michigan, home of the tomahawked skull of Rene Josserand," because no one knows.
Since Rene Josserand—one of Ursula's ancestors—is long dead, and "no one knows" about his existence, then technically, there isn't a single person in the narrative who could deliver that information to the reader. Yet Hill chooses to tell it to us, since his story is integral to the life of the protagonist, Ursula, and ties up his storyline for us as best as she can.
Keep in mind that too many omniscient leaps will inevitably pull the reader out of the continuity of his reading. He might stop to ponder, "Hey, I'm not really supposed to know that" or even, "Who exactly is telling me this?"—and you don't want too much of that.
USING MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW IN SCENES
In order to discuss multiple POVs in scenes, we need to quickly refresh the concept of a scene (at its most distilled): a container of significant action in which a protagonist acts on a scene intention, and in which conflict ensues, leading toward climax and change. POV is the camera through which you choose to show the events in the scene to the reader. If you have one protagonist only, then that is the character who gets the camera. Use the POV descriptions in this chapter to decide what kind of effect you want to achieve, and to choose your POV accordingly.
Choosing POV gets trickier when you have multiple protagonists, or simply multiple points of view that you want to show in a given scene. If you elect to use a limited POV, you will never have to worry about jumping from head to head within a given scene. Your biggest concern will be when
and where to switch from narrator to narrator. But if you do want to be able to pan the camera through the thoughts of characters A, B, and C as event X unfolds, you will want to pay attention to this next part.
Changing POV Within a Scene
If you have more than one character within a scene whose points of view are relevant, then you'll need to use the omniscient POV. When your narrative tackles large issues: war, culture, race, identity—in which a complex or comprehensive look at a situation is required, omniscient POV is a good choice. Omniscient allows you to go beyond the personal—beyond the intimate experience of a small handful of characters—to include more history, cultural details, or perspectives that will add up to a more cohesive look at a subject.
Omniscient is also useful when you need to show more than one side of a story—and need to be able to jump back and forth between characters to offer alternate takes on events as they're happening, rather than later on in reflection.
However, you must make omniscient clear right away from the first paragraph in the first scene. If the reader believes that he has only been able to see inside character A's head, and then you suddenly leap into character B's head, the reader will feel confused and possibly irritated. And a word of warning: Too much jumping back and forth—or between more than three or four people in a given scene—will create confusion.
Here's an example of omniscient POV from the novel Rosie, by Anne La-mott—the story of a single mother raising her daughter after her husband's death. From the first scene in the book Lamott shows the reader that she is in the omniscient by providing information that comes as if from a god-like source, a source that knows all:
There were many things about Elizabeth that the people of Bayview disliked. They thought her tall, too thin,
too aloof. Her neck was too long and her breasts were too big. The men, who could have lived with the size of her breasts, found her unwilling to flirt and labeled her cold. The women were jealous of how well her clothes hung on her.
Since this information is not being delivered directly through the camera of any one character, the reader is signaled immediately that it is omni-scient—the camera can move wherever it needs to go. Lamott maintains this POV throughout all the scenes, dancing effortlessly into the thoughts and feelings of her protagonists, Elizabeth and Rosie. In one paragraph she is in Rosie's POV:
Rosie Ferguson was four when her father died. As she sat on her mother's lap at the crowded Episcopal service, she knew that her father was dead but kept waiting for him to join them in the first pew, wondering what he would bring her.
Then in the next paragraph in the same scene, we're in Elizabeth's POV:
Elizabeth held Rosie on her lap, dimly aware that her daughter was trying to take care of her—Rosie kept patting her and smiling bravely—but Elizabeth couldn't concentrate on what was happening. It was too surreal. ...
Once you choose omniscient, you have to commit to it—you can't back down from it within the scene. Notice, too, that Lamott lets each character have a good paragraph of her own—the minimum amount of headspace I recommend you give each character if you're going to hop from head to head. Starting a new paragraph is a good way to signal to the reader that you're moving the camera again. Along those same lines, keep in mind:
•To keep a sense of cohesiveness, change POV at the end of action, not in the middle
• Change POV at the end of a line of dialogue—do not try to weave one character's thoughts into another character's speech
• Change POV when you want to offer another character's reaction to an event in the scene
A word of warning: When you're in the omniscient and can move into any character's head, be selective. The reader doesn't need to hear the thoughts or know the opinions of all minor characters. Stick to the point of view of characters who can contribute to plot information or deepen the reader's understanding of your protagonists.
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