Stein on Writing (19 page)

At first I was afraid of her and closed my eyes whenever she approached me. ...

This story is seen through the eyes of the narrator. If it were told in the third person, it wouldn’t be credible. The fantastic old lady would have seemed “made up.” In my judgment, the author didn’t have a choice. First person was inevitable. Kosinski chose it and wrote a novel that is now an established twentieth-century classic.

Third person is the most frequent choice of so-called commercial novelists. A majority of the books on the fiction bestseller list at any given time are likely to be written in the third person. It is a popular form for action/adventure and mainstream stories. There is strong precedent for today’s third-person stories. Before stories were written, the man who told stories around a fire undoubtedly spoke of the adventures or experiences of others. When man invents myths, he is using the third person. Third person works best when the story is seen consistently from the point of view of
one character at a time,
though the author is free to report what any of the characters hear, smell, touch, and taste. Bottom-line editors and publishers favor third person. Here’s an example:

Peter Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and surveyed his domain. The two children were lying ass-up on the carpet, watching television, and didn’t turn to greet him.

Were they ignoring him, or had they simply not heard him come in?

He opened the door again and this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she hadn’t heard me the first time.

Jonathan, a blasé thirteen, turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over her father,
taking his hat, holding on to his arm as it were the limb of a backyard tree.

There are many variations within the third-person mode, which is often confusing to less experienced writers. Third person can be close to first person, telling only the experiences of a single character as that character would know those experiences, but always referring to him as “he.” As the author takes advantage of the third-person form, he can move into a scene from which the protagonist is absent, and show that scene from a different character’s POV. But be warned: POV has to be consistent within a scene, otherwise you’ll be crossing the line into the omniscient point of view, which gives you license to go into any character’s head at will but involves the danger of confusing the reader or losing him along the way.

Plausibility is a major concern of third person. In the first person, a character can say, “I ate six bananas” and perhaps we believe him. In the third person, when a character says “Mary ate six bananas,” we are inclined to think, “Oh yeah?” We accept things from a first-person speaker that we would question in a third-person speaker, who has the same distance from the reader as a stranger does in life. The first-person speaker becomes an intimate. We are inclined to accept his word.

Once the author establishes the limitation of the third-person point of view, he must stick to it and the limitation becomes an advantage, a restraint, a discipline. If you adopt a loose form of third person in which, say, each chapter is seen from a different character’s POV, be sure to choose for each scene the character
who is most affected by the events of that scene.

Though I have written in third person
(The Magician, Living Room, The Childkeeper, The Resort),
I love writing in the first person and am partial to it
(Other People, The Touch of Treason, A Deniable Man, The Best Revenge).

In the “know-it-all” omniscient POV, the writer can go anywhere, especially into the heads of more than one character even within a scene. Hemingway in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” skillfully gets into the mind of a wounded lion. Look it up.

The omniscient POV allows the author to speak in his own voice, to say things that would be inappropriate for any of his characters to say. The author’s voice, however, should have personality, authority, some wisdom, and ideally a fresh sense of humor. The author, in other words, needs to be quite a character to manage the omniscient point of view interestingly. One of my most talented students, Anne James Valadez, whose work sparkles with originality, prefers the omniscient point of view; her voice is unusually distinctive and exudes the authority of myth.

The danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking instead of experiencing the story. The omniscient POV lacks discipline. Because the author can stray into anybody’s head, it is hard to maintain credibility and even harder to gain a close emotional rapport with the reader. Total freedom can be as upsetting to the writer as to the reader.

Even authors with several published novels to their credit can make errors in point of view. In a novel called
Talent,
the looseness of an uncontrolled omniscient point of view results in passages like this:

“Driving up here always makes me feel like Paul Newman at the wheel,” joked Allison.

She and Diana climbed quickly to Mulholland, which twisted for miles along the spine of the ridge like a carelessly abandoned garden hose.

The point of view at that moment is presumably Allison’s. From the driver’s point of view, would a twisting road ever look “like a carelessly abandoned garden hose”? The image is forced. But more important is the fact that it mixes point of view within the same paragraph. A twisting road might look like a garden hose from a helicopter or a low-flying airplane, but from a car?

Readers don’t notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.

Clifford Irving handles the omniscient point of view skillfully. His novel
Trial
begins with an objective view:

In Houston, Texas, in the early winter of 1985, a petty thief named Virgil Freer devised a scheme to bilk the chain of Kmart stores.

Virgil’s scheme is outlined, but by the end of the first paragraph he was arrested and in jail. Virgil hires a young criminal defense attorney named Warren Blackburn. We get glimpses of what Virgil is thinking. He says to Blackburn,

“You got to help me.”

And immediately we are inside Blackburn’s head.

I’ve met a lot worse than Virgil, Warren decided.

In the first few pages, we’ve heard the author, and we’ve been inside the head of Virgil and the lawyer he picks. Clifford Irving is using a
controlled
omniscient point of view—with good results.

Let’s take a moment to examine the comparative subjectivity of each point of view. In first person, the POV is entirely subjective. Think of it this way: the character talking to the reader is not only conveying everything the reader gets to know, the character is making a case for himself. It’s his view of himself, the others, the world.

In third person, the choice is greater. If the story can be told as if from a single character’s POV, the reader will have some sense of subjectivity. The writer can even choose to shift the subjectivity to another character, but has to be careful not to shift about carelessly. Back in 1973, John Godey, a thriller writer, published a book called
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,
about the hijacking of a New York City subway train. Godey wrote in the third person, shifting from character to character every few pages. Every short section was headed with the name of the person from whose point of view he was writing. The problem was that in the first twenty-eight pages, I counted seven characters into whose point of view the reader was admitted for a short period. It was a dizzying experience.

If you use the third-person point of view, you can be a partisan of all the characters or some. You can be entirely neutral or objective, conveying nothing of the characters’ thoughts or aims. Complete objectivity tends to be sterile of emotion, particularly the kind of intimacy that readers enjoy in literary novels, but it is useful in stories that are mainly action. Whatever genre you write in, my recommendation is that you focus on the POV of one character at a time, and sustain it, or you’re likely to get into trouble. If you’ve got to let your readers know what everybody thinks, you’d probably be better off using the omniscient point of view, the loosest of forms. You can more readily let the reader know what each character thinks than you can in the third person, as Norman Mailer did in his first novel,
The Naked and the Dead.
The novel starts with:

Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours, some of them were going to be dead.

That is clearly an omniscient point of view. The next long paragraph begins with:

A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully.

The reader experiences everything in that paragraph and the next long paragraph from the point of view of an anonymous soldier. That paragraph ends with the soldier coming back from the latrine:

And as he returns, he is thinking of an early morning in his childhood when he had lain awake because it was to be his birthday and his mother had promised him a party.

The reader might expect to be taken back to the anonymous soldier’s childhood party. Instead, the next paragraph introduces us to new characters:

Early that evening Wilson and Gallagher and Staff Sergeant Croft had started a game of seven card stud with a couple of orderlies from headquarters platoon.

Then we get a scene of a card game with Wilson, Gallagher, and Croft. We get inside Wilson’s head:
He was feeling very good.
In the next paragraph, we enter Croft’s head for a second to find out he is annoyed by the hands he’s been getting. Soon Wilson
reflected for a moment, holding an undealt card in his hand.
Then we are told Wilson is dejected. We get into Gallagher’s head—his conscience is bothering him, he is thinking of his seven-month-pregnant wife back home. And so it goes. We are told things by the omniscient author, and we go in and out of the minds of the three card players. Young as he was when he wrote
The Naked and the Dead,
Mailer’s natural talent overcame his lack of experience. His use of the omniscient point of view seems instinctive,
but he made it work well because the reader feels the author is in control. The great danger in using the omniscient point of view is the loss of control that is attributable to the lack of discipline.

While an author can write about characters more sophisticated than himself, it is difficult to fashion a character who is more knowledgeable and intelligent than the author, particularly if the author is going into the character’s most profound thoughts. That’s why characters like scientists, public figures, and intellectuals in some popular novels come across as stilted or fake. Similarly, if the author is writing about people less intelligent than himself, he must be careful not to put thoughts into a character’s head that are beyond that character’s capabilities.

The major decision, of course, is which point of view to use. Some of the authors I’ve worked with have an instinct for one or another point of view based in some measure on their experience as readers. Those who write thrillers usually write in the third person. Those whose reading has been mainly literary are more often tempted by the first person. But that still leaves a large terrain in the middle. Mainstream fiction is written in both first and third person. My advice is to try the form that feels comfortable to you. One advantage of understanding point of view is that if your work isn’t satisfying you, you can always put the draft aside and rewrite it from another point of view. If you’ve used third person, try first. If you’ve used omniscient, try third or first. Or both. Switching points of view has saved novels that were going nowhere.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that there are ways to get around some of the limitations of first-person point of view. The most important, of course, is to get beyond the character’s horizon and let the reader experience an event where the first person narrator was not present. In the following example, a character named Florence is speaking:

“The old bitch threatened to blow the party if I was invited, though the occasion was as much mine as Rose’s. Helen told me she put her punch glass down in the first minute because the punch tasted as if it were made with grape juice and gasoline. Debbie, would you believe it, phoned me from her car to say the background music was so loud you couldn’t hear what anybody said if you didn’t know how to lip read. I could hardly hear her because of the traffic noise. Thank heaven Maryanne came zipping straight over from the party to tell me Sally’s husband looked like he wouldn’t last an
other day. And Rose, she said Rose’s breath kept everyone standing at least three feet away from her, looking for an excuse to escape. I wasn’t invited, but I might as well have been. I probably know more about what happened than anybody.”

Note that to help credibility, there is a sense of cattiness and conflict in Florence’s attitude toward the people at the party. A simpler but perhaps less credible way would be to give the first-person character a legitimate reason to ask about what is for her an offstage event. Or the first-person character addressing the reader can guess what might be happening at that moment elsewhere. The point to remember is that you have to motivate the reporting of offstage scenes. And whenever possible keep the report visual. We see Helen putting the awful punch down. We hear Debbie with difficulty as well as see her use her car phone. We smell Rose’s breath.