The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: Tess

  • 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.

  • Warped Characters?

    In the very first draft of my very first novel, I struggled with character a lot–I didn’t have any bad ones.  Nope, all my characters were well-meaning, with great heart and minor, excusable flaws.  Even the person who burned down the church had a perfectly good reason for doing it–not a justification, exactly, but certainly enough rationale to make him a sympathetic character.

    Readers commented that my characters were all just too unbelievably well-behaved and pleasant.  So, in my next novel attempt, I did try to make some more believable bad guys. Really. There were some guys in a lab, there were some military guys, there were some guys who just wanted to protect their own ill-gotten power. But then it turned out they all had interests in the situations, and that in some circumstances they were wonderful supporters of all that was good and right, and only in certain other circumstances did they release their inner villain.  Of course, this time, the person who burned down the church had absolutely iron-clad reasons for why he had to do it, and he was a hero, not a villain.

    In my third novel, I think I finally managed to make some bad guys–actually some people with anti-social interests sitting in a room plotting to wreak havoc on the lives of those around them by taking away their health insurance and jobs, or something like that.  Truly bad guys, the sort that wanted to return rampant inequality and hierarchical authority to the world.  And then, people got to yell at them for a long time about how much they wanted to hurt them.  At least I got through that book without any new arsonists!

    Writing heroes and heroines is relatively easy for me.  I can invent past lives, ambitions, dreams, quirks, and speech patterns.  I can describe days in the lives of, their homes, their companions.  But writing characters who intentionally do evil things is a struggle.  At those times, I tend to go to stock characters and stereotypes.  I need to work on building characters who are human, who do bad things, who might feel bad about doing those bad things but still are not totally redeemed at the end of the day.  Like Alec in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who is totally a villain and totally understandable and mostly redeemed and still experiences poetic justice.  Writing a villain like Alec would be the  crowning achievement of my writing career!