by Marge Piercy
I have usually tried to get readers to identify with my characters. Why encourage it? When we identify with fictional characters, they offer us the opportunity to slip into someone else’s skin: a woman, a man, a black, a white, a Chicano, a Native American, a Norwegian dock worker, a Japanese physicist, a politician in Kenya, a midwife in Texas, a Neanderthal woman, a sled dog, a purple arthropod from Deneb 4. When we can empathize with others, we can less easily reject the alien, or what we perceive as the alien, because it truly becomes less alien to us. We enter another consciousness and experience life in somebody else’s shoes or boots or moccasins or ballet slippers. Like the life in dreams, it is not real but it can alter our perceptions, change what we think and do.
We imitate fictional characters. How many men still play Hemingway who played his own characters? Byron’s heroes in his narrative poems inflamed a generation of young men, and sometimes young women who wanted to play those parts, too. Characters in the novels of The Beats have reemerged to inspire another generation of young people in khakis, black leather and t-shirts just as the popularity of Charles Bukowski’s books hatched thousands of new barflies. An acquaintance of mine in college had an affair with an instructor based on the fact that both of them passionately wanted to live in a Henry James novel, in the late style.
Another important tactical choice has to do with how much you want the reader to trust your viewpoint character’s observations and reactions. This is quite distinct from whether or not we identify with a character. The power of the sense of dramatic irony often rests in identifying with a character who does not perceive what is bearing down on her or him, while you see and feel the approaching shock wave. Some of the best comic effects can come from our perceiving how a character is “doing it again”—once again digging a grave with his tongue, lying, exaggerating, boasting, whatever is his prevailing vice.
Now there are varying ways of using a viewpoint character, depending on how much of what the characters tells us we are to accept as the truth.
You may choose a viewpoint character who is pretty much transparent in that respect i.e., you want us to see what they see and believe what they believe, to know neither more or less. Conrad’s narratives are like this. So is Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nick is everybody’s friend, and as he comes to understand the characters, so do we.
You may choose a viewpoint character who knows less than we do, a child’s viewpoint, perhaps, or, because we are in fact switching viewpoints or getting some commentary in omniscient. We accept that they are honest and perceptive, but we know things they don’t yet know. A certain amount of energy can be generated by our sense of how a character’s naïveté or ignorance or mistaken beliefs may be about to wound or destroy her or him, or wreak havoc on others. The hopefulness of the narrator’s voice in The Diary of Anne Frank and her continuing discovery of life are especially moving given what we readers knew to be her fate.
You may choose a viewpoint character who is a flawed, a distorting lens. We learn as the story proceeds to disregard much of what that character believes, as in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or his Collector or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The character may even be lying to us and, as in real life, we have to try to separate the reality from the obfuscation.
In the first type—the transparent narrator—you are expected to accept pretty much the judgment, changing or constant, of the viewpoint character, whether first or third person; in the second, where each viewpoint character knows only part of the picture, you supplement what each knows with knowledge you the reader have learned elsewhere; in the third—the mistaken or duplicitous narrator—you the reader are required to exercise caution and your own judgment. The character may be lying or may be merely fooled or wrongheaded, but you are on your own to figure out the truth. Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita warns us straight away to beware of a murderer with a fancy prose style.
Another tactical choice is whether to tell a story from a single viewpoint, a multiple viewpoint, or an omniscient viewpoint—or from the viewpoint of a character who in essence sounds as if he or she is omniscient, because that narrator knows how the story comes out and what led up to that denouement. For instance, the novel The Family Orchard by Nomi Eve begins with a section called “I Tell,” in which a narrator addresses her husband and talks about how the story begins and suggests she knows things she has not told him, some inside or hidden knowledge. The true omniscient narrator who is above the story was most common in nineteenth century fiction and is common in potboilers today, but far rarer in literary fiction. This narrator knows what everybody is thinking and feeling, what everybody is doing—the narrator knows everything the author knows. With this kind of omniscience, withholding information from the reader, such as who done it or an important character’s shady past, is not an option.
Every time you switch viewpoints, you gain information and dramatic irony and new perspectives, but you lose momentum. You may lose the reader. It is a very important choice you make.
What you need to do before you begin any piece of fiction, whether short story or novel, is to figure out exactly where—from whose viewpoint—the story must be told. What must the reader see and know? In whose head are we going to be situated? Or is it a tale without a visible teller? If it is a tale told by someone, then to whom? to what end? And then the question returns, is that someone an idiot, a wise woman, a liar? Once again, is that viewpoint transparent or cracked?
A related tactical question is how close in to what you perceive as the center of the story do you want locate your viewpoint? Let us say we are writing the story of a divorce. The husband’s story is one point of view, the wife’s another, and alternating them creates an extremely different texture. The viewpoint of a friend who can comment is quite different again. So is the viewpoint of the other woman or the other man, or someone who wishes to be one or the other. In every case, a very different story or novel will be the result of whose story you choose to tell, and whether you wish to present that story—let us say the wife’s story is our center—according to how she herself sees it or according to how someone may see it who wishes her ill or well, or who is truly neutral in the divorce. All of those are a priori choices, wisely made before you begin to write.
However, one thing you learn is that when a story or a novel is going poorly, sometimes it is time to stop and ask these questions again. It may be that the story is being told from the wrong viewpoint, and that another is needed to supplement the one being used, or a different standpoint may be required altogether. You may want to add a viewpoint or viewpoints, or simply change the head you are living in to tell the story. The voice of Mary, the homeless woman in The Longings of Women, was originally written in the first person viewpoint and in second draft changed, to much better effect, to third person.
If you are telling a complex social or political story, or perhaps the story of a very large family over the generations, you may well need multiple viewpoints. But each time you go into a new person’s head, remember what you are losing. You take the chance of confusing the reader. You lose the suspense of the story going forward. You lose momentum. You lose any identification and rapport so far built up. You have to make this judgment freshly for each additional character you conceive of entering. But if you need to have the reader see your fictional world from multiple angles, you may choose to use multiple viewpoints. I often do that—certainly not always, but better than half the time—because while I encourage identification, I want the reader to arrive at his or her own truth, rather than buying the opinion of any one of the characters.
Remember that it is equally important to decide when you are using multiple viewpoint whose life you want to enter, because you want the reader to know what that person knows, and whose life you do not want the reader to see from within, because of destroying suspense. For instance, when the chief suspense element in your plot is who did something—whether
it was stabbing the old man in the library with a sharpened back scratcher, or writing a poison pen letter that destroys a friendship—if you enter the life of the person who did the act in question, you owe it to the reader to let her or him know what you know and what that character knows. But not all suspense resides in who did what. A great deal comes from such diverse questions as, Will they realize they’re in love, will they learn what X knows, will they succeed or fail, will she finally leave her husband, will he realize she’s using him, will he get the money in time, will she agree to the operation? Not only mysteries or adventure stories make use of suspense. Suspense is one of your basic seductions in getting the reader to read and keep on reading.
Similarly, if you use omniscient viewpoint, you may gain a kind of strong narrative voice otherwise available only in first person or with a narrator who lends a definite flavor to the story with their voice. You can go anyplace you feel like and witness anything convenient to your story. But you can’t withhold information from the reader, for you are in fact omniscient. That is why omniscience is seldom a good device in a mystery. Omniscience means you the writer are situated well above all the characters and can tell us what every one of them is thinking as well as doing. This may happen in telling or it may happen from simply shifting viewpoints constantly, as you find convenient.
Third person is the style of narration most commonly used: He strolled down the causeway with his shoes in his hand. Or: Dorothy stood at the head of the stairs listening to the conversation below, straining for her own name.
Second person is a trifle cutesy, used at best for something short. You walk down the street, you turn and look behind you. You stop at the corner for a light and you remember that guy at the party last night, the one with the throaty voice and the great grin.
First person is often used in autobiographical fiction but third person is commonly employed to create a distance from the actual teller of the story, a fictional self. There are times it has even been used in personal narrative. In The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer created a third person character named Norman Mailer. Writing about himself in the third person gave him some distance and a sort of dry perspective, enabling him to watch himself from above and comment on his own thoughts and behavior.
In Pam Houston’s short story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, she occasionally uses the second person. In the story “How to talk to a Hunter,” it has the effect of inclusion, as if to say, “You all know what it’s like to be with a guy like this.” There are fewer novels that use second person. In Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life, it is used by the narrator, Allison Poole, a big city party girl, and creates the illusion of the dialect of a lost young woman.
Second person can work, but it can also feel like someone buttonholing you and insisting you agree with whatever line they are putting out. It’s like sitting next to a stranger in a bar who keeps asking, “You know what I mean? You know what I’m saying?” until you wonder whether you really do.
First person is used frequently in fiction and is the most common form used in the personal narrative. First person brings with it the identification available from the colloquial speaking voice.
From Look At Me, by Lauren Porosoff Mitchell:I stood at the buffet where I could meet just about anybody at the party, except the anorexic of course. My half glass of wine from the cash bar clutched in my hand, I was hoping to get lucky or even semi-lucky, someone to talk to, to avoid resembling a potted plant.
That direct first person invites you in and whispers in your ear and can be used for direct address, exhortation, special pleading and everything in between. It has ultimate freedom because it has the spontaneity of the speaking voice, and it can have that intimacy. You can freely move around in space and time, editorialize and give or withhold information and insight as someone does in conversation. However, its vices are as flagrant as its virtues. It has a tendency toward talkativeness if not kept on a tight hold and can lead to an easy filling up of the page with nothing in particular, the long-windedness that destroys concentration and reader interest. Certain scenes are more difficult in first person. Sex scenes take careful handling.
A strong first person can seduce the reader, or it can put her or him off, for if the reader takes a dislike to your character’s voice, the book may go unread. I recently began reading a manuscript in which the narrator was a nineteenth century country woman, a domestic, whose voice was so whiny and irritating I could not finish the story. The question of matching voice to character is another tactical decision. A bad first person can feel like someone shouting in your eat, and that can be tiresome indeed.
Some writers write the whole book in one voice. Others switch voices when they switch viewpoints. It is a matter of preference. Again, there are advantages to staying with one voice, in the unifying flavor it gives to a novel. There are advantages to switching voices if you switch viewpoints, for you have then one more device for characterization, and the reader will pick up quickly which head you are in if the voice is markedly different.
Finding a voice can be a challenge. Oftentimes I find that if I know my character well, I have my voice. It comes from within the character and sounds like her, as Connie’s voice goes throughout Woman on the Edge of Time in the third person narration that never leaves her viewpoint until the documents at the end from the hospital staff.
However, with ten viewpoint characters in Gone to Soldiers, I paid attention to differentiating their voices. I hoped that if you read even a page of any particular chapter, you would know from the voice who was speaking. There were certain rhythms, certain types of idioms, vocabulary, ways of thinking and perceiving that belonged to each character.
When I had finished second draft, I took the book completely apart and wrote the third draft as ten separate novels, so that each character’s story would be consistent in language, style, the minor characters, the time line, the feel of that character’s world, and ambiance. Then in fourth draft I put it all back together. Many novels only take four drafts. Gone to Soldiers took six, and parts of it went above twenty.
Often when a writer of fiction is starting out, all the fuss about viewpoint seems overly technical and he or she may think, I’ll just tell the story. But it doesn’t work that way. Whose story are you telling? One of the standard exercises to understand viewpoint is to write the same scene from the point of view of two antagonistic characters: say a mother or father trying to discourage a son or daughter from continuing in a romantic relationship; and then from the standpoint of the son or daughter; then from the viewpoint of the lover being argued about. You may find your story is very, very different depending in whose head you situate yourself and therefore your reader. But the exercise works no matter what situation involving a clash of wills that you use.
When you are writing personal narrative, viewpoint may not be as pressing a consideration, but there are still aspects to consider. Most personal narratives are told in the first person, but there are many autobiographical novels and short pieces in which the author decides to put some distance between herself or himself and the story. Sometimes you may begin in the first person and find that it somehow inhibits you when you are telling your own story. You may decide to take another pass at the material by changing the voice to third person. This is a common way to solve the problem of narratives that feel too private for the author to tell us or that might put the reader off by seeming too intimate. The writer may worry that the story told by “I” will seem too full of special pleading or self-pity or self-congratulation. The writer may feel safer, more comfortable with third person.
Sometimes a writer creates an alter ego and writes books in that alternate voice which sees the world through a perspective similar to their own. The short story writer, Grace Paley, sometimes employs the witty and wise voice of a working class New York mother named Faith. Philip Roth has written a number of books through the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who has become rich and infamous through a scandalous,
semi-autobiographical best seller. Creating an alter ego for yourself is a way to blend reality and imagination and have fun doing it. You can always point to your character and insist, “I didn’t say that. He did.”
There is no right or wrong way to choose and establish viewpoint in personal narrative any more than there is in fiction. If one approach doesn’t feel comfortable and it clenches you up to work that way, try another approach. Do what works for you.
Some writers choose to tell their own story in the form of fiction, as we have remarked before, in order to create a greater measure of distance between the story and themselves, and perhaps in order to gain freedom to explore potentially volatile, painful and shameful material. Obviously if you label your piece “fiction,” the reader can never be sure what’s true and what’s not. Perhaps more important, you, the writer, are not forced to stay with the facts but are free to invent scenarios that are emotionally true, what should have happened, what almost happened, what you dreamed happened. It surprises some people that the Chinese restaurant scene in Ira Wood’s The Kitchen Man, never actually happened. For years after reading the book his mother asked him, “We never went out for Chinese food with you and Marge?” Not once, to a Chinese or any other kind of restaurant. But even to the participants, it feels as if it happened because all the emotions and characterizations ring true. That greater freedom may empower you or dismay you. Experiment. Becoming conscious of the various options that are open to you in your writing is one of the biggest gifts you take away from any workshop, course, or how-to book.
Some Exercises