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  • Come to Your Own Conclusions

    I don’t like being told how to feel, and I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel. When I’m reading a piece of fiction and I feel like the author was trying to force a specific feeling on me, I get mad. I generally stop reading. I realize this is somewhat immature, because aren’t most stories built with the idea that they’re going to make me feel something?

    When I write, I write in third person. First-person works best, I think, when the reader is meant to relate to the word through one character. I recently read The Hunger Games trilogy, which is in first person. As the readers, we’re obviously supposed to feel the world through Katniss’ experience of it — we’re supposed to relate to the cruelty and kindness of other characters as she feels those things. It’s not wrong. Obviously, it works pretty well for Collins.

    But in the same way that I don’t want to tell the reader how a character looks — because it rarely has any bearing on the story what a character looks like — I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel about any character or institution in the story. Where I find a character to be a flat villain, another reader might see that character as a tragedy. I don’t want to force the reader to feel the same way about a character that I do. Maybe it means I’m doing it wrong.

    For my writing, third person is the most effective way to share a story without getting too wrapped up in a single character’s thoughts and feelings.

    (And much like with Highlander II, I shove my fingers in my ears and refuse to acknowledge that second person exists. Absolutely refuse.)

  • The Author is Omniscient: An Argument for Honesty

    I have flirted with multiple points of view. I love the second person for its exotic directness; the first person for its appearance of unmediated access; the limited third person for its ability to draw the reader into the environment of another. But for fiction writing, I remain an advocate of the omniscient third person, the overreaching narrator who knows and interprets all.

    This point of view has experienced a decline in literary fiction (a statement I base purely on my own reading of 20th century literary fiction and not on any sort of statistical study). Some have deemed it arrogant or presumptuous for the authorial voice to assume possession of more than one body in a tale; the first person seems more honest, acknowledges more fully that but a single voice can come from a consciousness, that we cannot fully know the reality of another.  Margaret Atwood’s excellent first-person female narrators (in Bluebeard’s Egg, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, among others) participate in memoir-style novels. I love these books, but they also expose the dangers of solipsism in first person novels.  After all, one of the great strengths of the novel as opposed to poetry or short stories or numerous other fictional forms is the opportunity offered for many voices to participate in telling the story.

    Additionally, I struggle to distinguish my voice from the narrator when I write in first person. It is too easy to let a tale slip into memoir or a Mary Sue scenario.  Third person omniscient forces me to balance the concerns of characters that I might not identify with as fully with those whom I do draw more directly from my own experience.

    But why third person omniscient as opposed to third person limited, which restricts focus to the viewpoint of a single character? Well, the author really does create the whole thing,and it seems to me more honest to acknowledge this fact and open up the narrative to the possibility of dramatic irony.  Again drawing on Tess of the d’Urbervilles (which in the course of participating in this blog has shown itself to be my favorite book of all time, a fact I did not know before I was a Confabulator), would the reader be nearly as devastated when she is suffering as a milkmaid in the northern country, away from her family, shunned by Angel, if we did not ALSO know that her love is suffering in Brazil and missing her something fierce? Without our omniscient narrator, we are limited to personal tragedy, closing off the possibilities of societal tragedy and shared suffering.

  • I only write in past tense, third person. That last statement is ironic, I know!

    Without a doubt my favorite point of view to write in is third person past tense. I especially like to write in the style where you can see inside one person’s thoughts, whoever the main character is. I know that’s not omniscient because omniscient is being able to see everyone’s thoughts. And I know it’s not limited because limited is where you can only see what people do, not what they think. So I’m not sure what this point of view is called, but it’s the only way I write.

    OK, I just went and looked up the wikipedia entry for Narrative Mode. It describes my standard point of view as being “Third person, subjective, limited.” Third person because my narrator never uses the words I or we. Subjective because one or more characters feelings and thoughts are described. Limited because the narrator cannot describe things unknown to the focal character. If someone has a different opinion on how the narrative mode of my writing should be classified, then I’m all ears.

    I have deliberately tried other points of view. For example, I wrote a pretty long piece of short fiction (around 10,000 words) in present tense. A lot of the feedback I got on that was that my readers thought it should be a screenplay. This feedback made me wonder how much point of view affects how the story is received by the reader. Maybe different types of stories would work better with different narrative modes. Maybe if one were writing a thriller, the present tense would help elicit the feeling that the events of the story are unfolding before the readers eyes.

    The idea that narrative mode affects how the story is received goes for point of view as well as tense. I did an experiment for a while where I only read memoirs. Reading that many memoirs in a row had a weird residual effect. Immediately after reading all those memoirs, I read a novel told in first person, Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Even though the story is completely unbelievable, and the characters are outrageous, I had a difficult time remembering that it was was fiction. I don’t write in first person but I suspect that it may engender more empathy in the reader kind of like how my use of present tense made readers think they should be seeing events in movie form.

    Hmmm. It would be funny to write an entire story in the future tense. But would it really be taking place  in the future or would it sound like a bunch of prophecies from the present? What about languages that have other tenses and perspectives which English does not have? Anyone have any experience with that? Are there any points of view which are impossible to translate into English?

    So, anyway.  I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff. Maybe I should. I’ll set a challenge for myself to write a different flash fiction piece in each narrative mode anyone suggests to me. So comment away, here’s your chance to throw down the gauntlet!

  • It’s All a Matter of Perspective

    Let me assure you that, despite being stuffed and mounted, this buffalo is very much alive and performing at Walt Disney World. Photo from http://disneyatdisleelandiablog.blogspot.com/2011/04/country-bear-jumble.html

    When it comes to point of view in a story, you don’t have a lot of choices.

    You can go first person — “I ran naked through poison ivy and got a rash on my butt.”

    Second person, engaging the reader directly — “You opened the door, shrieked when you saw the dead buffalo bleeding on the carpet, and dialed 911.”

    Or third person — “He wept when he discovered there was no more cheese in the house, for cheese was now illegal in the state of Alabama.”

    There are variations, of course, mostly a little weird. I once wrote a short story in first person plural.  I did it because I had an assignment in a writing class to write in a PoV I’d never tried before. It was sort of a hive-mind kind of thing, effective in this one instance, but not something that should be done often. Really, first, second, and third person are your big choices.

    So, what’s my favorite? That’s today’s question, right?

    I don’t play favorites. When I start writing a story, I choose what I think is going to be best for it.

    Sometimes, mistakes are made. (more…)

  • My Point of View on Point of View

    As I’ve developed my writing style, I’ve played with several different points of view in order to figure out what works best for my way of storytelling.

    For a long time, first person was my poison. It was easy to write that way – it helped me relate to what happened to the character. Besides, when I first started writing, I was writing about all of the adventures I wished I could have myself, so I was the star in all of my stories.

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  • Shutting Out the Voices With a Single Point of View

    When we talk about the events of our lives, we often switch tenses without thinking about it. We easily transition from the present to talking about the past. But we rarely shift point of view, because our lives are from our own point of view and no one else’s.

    View Point
    Sometimes a single point of view offers more clarity.

    But art, unlike real life, affords us the opportunity to write from different points of view. As writer gods, we can peek into the minds of multiple characters and see what everyone is thinking at a given time. It’s an omniscient power that some writers embrace.

    Writing from multiple points of view allows the author the freedom to do almost anything in a narrative.  For one thing, a story can have multiple stories in multiple places. Think, Game of Thrones, for instance.

    I used to be a writer god, creating worlds filled with characters — each with a story to tell. The result was the most boring, bloated crap anyone would never want to read. My first manuscript was like Stephen King’s The Stand, but with multiple characters and storylines that all converged — in Kansas. And it had a religious message. And it was bad. Really bad.

    (more…)

  • Love Me! Confessions of an Attention Whore

    I have two sons. One is a quiet, reserved kid, but the other … not so much. My younger boy needs an audience. He craves affirmation the way some people crave ice cream, and he will go to great lengths to get it. (The attention, not the ice cream. Though he’s a fan of that as well.)

    I’d be lying if I said it didn’t drive me batty sometimes. This is a kid who will go through multiple iterations of the same routine just to get a reaction out of you, and if your response isn’t quite what he’s looking for, there’s a good chance he’ll cry.

    In case you’re wondering what exactly it is the 5-year-old is crying about, allow me to quote him directly.

    “Because you didn’t think I was funny.”

    (more…)

  • All the POVs in the world, and you had to walk in to mine.

    “It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.” – Carl Jung

    Point of view is a great tool for spicing up writing. A plot might be a totally different story from a different perspective. The classics are third and first person.

    My preference is for a first-person or third-person limited point of view. I’ve never been a fan of omniscient narrators. They don’t connect well to normal life. I stick close to a specific character and let the audience learn what drives him. Other characters are more interesting when viewed through the eyes of someone with their own prejudices.

    A limited perspective allows the reader to learn with the character. When the protagonist says “Aha!,” the reader says it, as well. When a character is hurt by his failures, hopefully the reader understands. (more…)

  • The POV Viewpoint (26 May 2012)

    How writers approach the point of view in a story is often as important as the characters or the settings themselves. It can allow readers to look at a tough social issue through the eyes of an innocent, as in To Kill a Mockingbird. Or it can range across a huge cast of characters telling a story that spreads across the country, as Stephen King did with his post-apocalyptic novel The Stand.

    This week, we asked our writers at the Cafe to discuss their personal preferences when choosing the point of view for their own stories. While their answers are sure to vary, they are likely to have one thing in common: personal preference based on experience.

    So grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and join us this week. And be sure to share your own point of view about the subject with our writers.

  • Writer Resource Links

    Over the past week, the Confabulators have shared their favorite web resources they use for writing. Below you will find all of the links collected in one place for one wicked list of writing tools. Also, keep an eye out here at the Cafe. We’ll be creating a web resources page with this information for quick and easy reference, as well.

    (more…)