Firstly, and most
importantly, that I have no idea what goes on in their heads and how that
connects to what comes out of their mouths.
Actually, that’s
pretty much it. For ‘some important
conclusions’, read ‘one fairly useless conclusion.’
Despite two linguistic
degrees and personal study of a whole lot of pre-school wittering, I have
absolutely no insight into the process of language acquisition in small
children.
Thomas barely said a
word until he was nearly two. There was
a lot of ‘bu’ and ‘ca’ and ‘do-y’ but very little actual communication until
the day he announced, from the back seat of the car, that ‘that man not indicate,
mummy.’ Which made me look slightly daft
when the health visitor rang me to follow up my concern about his lack of
speech.
Ben, on the other
hand, has followed the ‘repeat everything indiscriminately until something
sticks’ model.
Leading to useful
utterances such as “Wassa story Balamooooory’ and ‘Bob Builder canny
fissit. ES! E CAAAAN!” and ‘Isa any ‘ticular reason oo doin’ dat?’
He also appears to
have no preference for any particular tense or viewpoint. So ‘My no like dat’ is interchangeable with
‘Nonono mummy. Ben do it.’ or ‘I want it. I WANT IT!’
I have some sympathy
for this confusion. Tense and viewpoint - particularly viewpoint - are probably the
most fundamental choices that a writer has to make when beginning a new
project. And that choice can create a
whole lot of angst. Particularly when
you get 30,000 words in and then develop a sneaking suspicion that your first
person viewpoint should actually have been third person, and then start trying
to work out whether you need to entirely re-write, or whether you can get away
with a ‘search and replace’ exercise on ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’, ‘I’d’, ‘I’ve’
and every other possible permutation thereof.
Or when you’re
particularly pleased with your innovative use of the third person omniscient
narrator, and then your entire writing group perform a co-ordinated
nose-wrinkle, before chorusing ‘Really?
Are you sure?’ and extoling the virtues of first person.
There’s been reams of
advice and theory written about viewpoint.
I’ve read a fair bit of it, and I still struggle with it. I don’t find that it’s a choice that I ever
actively make. Each idea and project
seems to come with its viewpoint packaged up with it, as part and parcel of the
whole, and I don’t tend to question it, unless something is fundamentally not
working and I need something to blame.
Then I start pointing the finger at viewpoint, and trying to remember
how to do a ‘search and replace’ in the mac version of Scrivener.
In that respect, I can
empathise with Ben, and his desire to be left in peace with whichever point of
view fits his mood at the time.
Angry:
I DO IT!
Inhabiting his
emotions. Using the unequivocal,
self-exposing first person in order to communicate the true extent of his fury
at having his socks put on by an intrusive third party parental figure.
Contemplative:
Ben no like dat.
Distancing himself
slightly from his likes and dislikes in order to provide a wider context, and a
better overview of his complex relationship with in-car music.
Irrational:
My not eat it.
Employing disorganised
grammar to convey the chaos of his conflicting thoughts about baked beans, and
the way they interact with the toast.
Or something like
that.
Possibly.
Anyway, I
empathise. I don’t like viewpoint
rules. Mainly because they never seem to
quite fit with what’s actually going on in any project.
First person, for
example, is supposed to be the most immediate viewpoint, with unfettered,
direct access to a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. It’s supposed to dump us right in the middle
of that character’s emotions, so that we experience what they’re experiencing,
in as close to real time as you ever get in fiction.
I’m not entirely
convinced.
I like first
person. It’s probably the viewpoint I
use the most. Well, I know it’s the
viewpoint I use the most. Both novels
are in first person, which means that there are at least 280,000 first person
words kicking around in my computer.
Even if everything else I’ve ever written was in third person, the I’s
very much still have it.
But I’m becoming less
and less convinced that it’s automatically the most immediate point of
view. I think that there’s a certain
distance in some first-person writing that you don’t get in the equivalent
third-person approach. Because you’re
never going to be able to experience someone’s thoughts and feelings as that
person experiences them. The act of
writing about them means that they have to be vocalised and verbalised and
honed into some sort of coherent structure.
This creates an automatic editing of sorts. A first-person narrator who communicated
every fleeting, irrelevant thought, would be spectacularly difficult to follow
– and I suspect you’d probably not bother.
It would be like a conversation with Ben, with every little fleeting impulse broadcasted in incoherent technicolor.
It would be like a conversation with Ben, with every little fleeting impulse broadcasted in incoherent technicolor.
So with first person,
what you often get is a nicely edited, carefully trimmed version of what the
viewpoint character sees as the truth, or wants to be seen as the truth. People don’t generally have absolute insight
into ever nuance of every thought that crosses their mind, and fictional
characters with that kind of piercing self-awareness would be fairly
unconvincing, and probably more than a little bit dull. For this reason, I think that most first
person narrators are unreliable, to some extent, whether it’s because they
don’t understand something, or because they don’t want to acknowledge
something, or because they are deliberately trying to fool themselves, or
someone else.
You’re kept at something
of a distance, because the character is, on the face of it, in control of what
the reader learns about them.
So what about third
person viewpoint? This is traditionally
considered to be the slightly more detached point of view. But I’m not sure I agree. With a third person viewpoint, you are
watching the character, and analysing what they do, and you can be as detached,
or as involved, as the author allows you to be.
I had a blinding
lightbulb moment at a workshop with Emma Darwin, at the York Festival ofWriting. She was talking about ‘psychic
distance’, a term coined by the author, John Gardner, in his posthumously
published The Art of Fiction. Emma used the following example from Gardner:
1.It was winter of the year 1853. A large
man stepped out of a doorway.
2.Henry J. Warburton had never much cared
for snowstorms.
3.Henry hated snowstorms.
4.God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5.Snow. Under your collar, down inside your
shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.
The examples show how the reader can be
kept at a distance from the main character, or granted direct access to his
thoughts and feelings. The fifth
example, while in third person, is every bit as immediate as a first person account,
arguably more so, because the third person narrator is like a ghost, barely
there and with no agenda or filters of their own.
There’s a lot of discussion about ‘voice’
in writing workshops and books, and people often talk about the importance of
‘finding your voice’ as a writer. I think
that the trick is actually finding your voice as a narrator, in any given piece
of writing. And I think that, to some
extent, finding that voice is about balancing viewpoint and psychic distance.
If I was trying to write a best-selling
‘How to build a best-selling novel’ type book, I would probably announce at
this point that I’d discovered the secret formula at the heart of all fiction
writing. I’d assign characters and
symbols to it and put it in big block letters.
VOICE=VIEWPOINT+PSYCHIC DISTANCE
V=V(PD)2

I’ve never been good with equations. I never understood quadratic equations, much
to the perpetual and incoherent rage of my GCSE maths teacher, who did not feel
that ‘well I’ll just miss them out ’ was a valid approach to a whole branch of
mathematics.
It clearly was. An A
in GCSE mathematics attests to the complete irrelevance of quadratic equations.
Unreliable? Me? |
Of course, all that would probably involve equations again, but as long as I don’t have to do them myself, I can live with that. I’m sure the clever people at Apple can come up with something. I’ve recently switched to an Apple and it seems to do pretty much everything else.
Unfortunately, I suspect it’s not actually
as straightforward as an equation. I
suspect it’s probably more like tuning one of those CB radio thingies, where
you twiddle knobs...
...no – not like that.
If you’ve come here on a ‘knob-twiddling book’ google search, 50 Shades of Grey is that way...
...until it stops making a horrible noise and
you start hearing voices.
Or voice, perhaps.
I think I’m starting to get my head around
the whole viewpoint thing. I don’t think
it’s something you can really figure out in isolation. It doesn’t seem to me that you can consider
an idea and simply think “Right. Third person.
Off we go.” You need to work out
what kind of person your main character is, and what relationship they are
going to have with the reader, and with the fictional world around them. Maybe that equation should be something like:
Viewpoint+Attitude=Voice
Or maybe I have absolutely no idea what I’m
talking about. Maybe I’m an unreliable
narrator. Maybe it is as simple as “Right. Viewpoint selected. Off we/you/I/he/she/it goes.”
In which case, I might adopt a multiple
second-person unreliable narrator for my next project.
You
are sitting on the radiator, posting dominos through the slats. When I shout and wave my arms, you look at
each other and something passes between you.
Then one of you looks me in the eye and tells me “Ben did it.”
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