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Shelly Lowenkopf shares this advice with us....
Who’s telling your story?
Why?
On their face, these two questions may seem simple enough, but determined, dedicated writers need to poke beneath the surface. Failure to consider the implications of these questions is a direct cause for literary agents and editors rejecting fiction submissions.
Point-of-view means what it says: Story is filtered through the sensitivity and vocabulary of one or more characters.
If your story has two, three, maybe even five or six point-of-view characters, well and good. But these points-of-view must be restricted to one at a time. No jumping from character within the same scene or chapter. No requesting the indulgence of omniscient perspective. When you can manage scenes and characters as deftly as William Trevor, we can issue you a hall pass. But not yet. Right now, you’re limited to one character per scene.
Among other things, that means “Author, stay out.” No stage directions, footnotes, or background checks supplied by a writer who wishes to make sure the reader is getting all the information necessary to make the story work. If the point-of-view character doesn’t get it, doesn’t see it, then the reader needs to be able to get it by indirection and implication. Mr. Stevens, the butler-protagonist of The Remains of the Day, didn’t “get” a great many things. He was by all accounts a naïve narrator. But his author never told us that. We were able to see it from his point of view—the way he responded, or did not respond, to dramatic events.
This leads you to the rabbit hole portal to the world of publication. It is a world in many ways like the one Alice found, a world where twenty-first century fiction is not the descriptive world it once was. The world of fiction is evolving toward a landscape of evocation. By the events, feelings, and responses you, the writer, assign to your characters, the reader is able to infer how the character is holding up in a story, giving the reader a chance to root for the success or failure of that character’s agenda.
Now we can approach that second question, the Why? of your choice of character.
Why, for instance, did F. Scott Fitzgerald assign Nick Carraway to narrate the story of The Great Gatsby? Because Nick saw Gatsby as Fitzgerald did, a hopeless romantic, driven by his goal of achieving at any cost the illusion of love conquering all.
When William Faulkner set the character of Benjy Compson into motion for The Sound and the Fury, he did not have to tell us Benjy was an idiot. We knew from direct experience of Benjy’s point-of-view of reality. And we learned through our own experience of the entire novel that Benjy was the one character of absolute integrity and vision.
As writers, we chose our characters with care. They are our foot soldiers, our tools, our intentions in telling the story. They are also, to mix the metaphors, our children whom we trust to drive the family car. They carry the story. By allowing them this freedom, we are able to join the readers in our concerns for their welfare and understanding as they confront the obstacles we set in their path.
Before you submit that latest project to come out of your creative process, take another look at those critical questions. Who’s telling the story? Are there too many? Not enough? Are there places where you threw in such things as “Laird did not see Fred leave the gathering?” If he did not see Fred leave, you’ve violated point-of-view by throwing in your own.
There’s enough going on in your story without you getting in the way. The answer to the Why? question is also simple. You chose these characters in order to keep them in the story and you out.
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