Looking at viewpoint
with Sarah Bower
Stories are precious possessions. We fight hard for them. We
all know the indignation of another person cutting in to give their version of
a story we are telling; when they do this, they trespass on our souls.
Fictional characters are no different. Every one of them
is clamouring to tell his or her story, battling it out in the mind of the
writer to be given the privilege of a viewpoint. When the novelist performs the
work of characterisation thoroughly and properly, every character she imagines,
however minor a role they have to play, will be fully rounded, with a deep backstory,
a rich hinterland that may never appear in the finished book but is always
there between the lines, the life-giving secret shared between author and
character. Every one of these characters will therefore be pressing you for a
voice; every one has a story to tell.
The way in which you manage these competing claims will,
perhaps, determine the course of your novel more than any other single thing.
It affects, obviously, the development of and interplay between characters, the
unfolding of your plot, what readers know, are left guessing, are lied to
about, and the voice of the novel – the forms of words, the images, the
cadences of its storytelling.
So how do you decide which of your characters will be
given a point of view, which of them is going to work hardest alongside you to
bring the novel to life? Kazuo Ishiguro, it is said, actually goes through a
process of ‘interviewing’ characters to determine which of them is best suited
for the job!
There is no single right way to arrive at a decision. As with
most aspects of creativity, it is perhaps best to begin with your intuition.
Whose story does it feel like? Which character’s voice is most often in
your head when you are thinking about and planning your novel? Even for writers
whose ideas come to them plot first, as a series of dramatic situations or
confrontations, character must follow close on the heels of the plot because,
without characters, you have no-one to enact the plot. So, there is much to be
said for beginning by listening to the voices in your head and focusing on
those which speak loudest.
As with every aspect of constructing a novel, however,
the intuitive work must be given form and reinforced by reasoning based on
technical understanding. You must understand what narrative viewpoint is and
how to deploy it if the voices of your viewpoint characters are to be authentic
and intelligible to readers. Narrative viewpoint refers to the point (or
points) of view through which the novelist tells her story. It determines
through whose eyes (and other senses, of course) the reader perceives the
action and whose voices will be given a privileged hearing. This may, and most
likely will, also suggest whose lies the author would like readers to believe.
I began this discussion by talking about the viewpoints
of characters inside the novel because this is the commonest mode of narration
in contemporary mainstream fiction. The convention is that readers follow
certain characters, but the characters are unaware of the readers’ presence.
They act out the part of their lives examined in the novel as if they are
unaware of their status as fictional constructs in an artificial, imagined
world.
This was not, however, always the case. The convention of
the early modern novel was for the author to make his role in the story
explicit. Thackeray, for example, subtitles Vanity Fair ‘a novel without
a hero’; by imposing his own acute and merciless vision between his characters
and his readers, he makes sure the latter see the former warts and all; he
gives them no voice with which to big themselves up to readers. Throughout the
novel, the reader is aware of the author himself mediating the text and
manipulating the characters; this is more like puppetry than CGI. This is an
authorial viewpoint, producing a novel which is very much about the author
telling us a story and drawing the moral he intends.
A form also popular at the same period, and which has
remained so in contemporary fiction, is the fake memoir. Robinson Crusoe is
an example of this, as is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. These are
novels which are presented as the truth – in Boyd’s case as a diary, in Defoe’s
as travelogue-cum-adventure, but because their narrators are fictional, ergo
the stories they tell are also fiction. Crusoe and Logan Mountstuart are what
we call virtual authors, who stand between the ‘real’ author and the rest of
the characters in the novel, who have no viewpoint. This kind of novel is
almost always narrated, for obvious reasons, in a close first person voice. The
entire action is filtered through the virtual author and spun according to his
agenda. So, although both the novels I have given as examples contain elements
of historical fact, the reader cannot necessarily trust it because it is shown
through the eyes of a self-promoting, and therefore unreliable, narrator.
As I have said, however, the commonest mode of narration
in mainstream fiction is that which uses the viewpoints of one or more
principal characters. Clearly, viewpoint characters must be major players in
your story, otherwise their knowledge of what is going on will be too little
for them to contribute to readers’ understanding. Principal characters are also
the ones most likely to engage readers emotions and therefore the ones whose
voices readers will most want to hear. If you choose multiple viewpoints, try
to avoid using too many as this can become confusing. As a rough rule of thumb,
a maximum of six different viewpoints is probably the most it is wise to use in
a novel of average length. When using multiple viewpoints, it is also a good
idea to try to establish some pattern in the way you deploy them, as this is
another way of helping readers navigate your text. You could, for example,
always use them in the same order, associate certain voices with certain locations,
or give them a chronological relationship so that each narrates aspects of the
story from fixed, but different, points in its chronology. This latter can be
either cyclical or linear, where the story is handed on from one to the next
like a baton in a relay.
Many beginning novelists start out believing multiple
viewpoints offer the best way of telling their story because they worry about
the handling of information. If I only have a single viewpoint, how can I tell
the reader things that character doesn’t know? It is, of course, a valid
question, but what I ask my students is this: how do you find your way through
life? How do you assimilate knowledge or an understanding of other people? The
fact of the matter is, the single, close viewpoint is actually the easiest to
do because it is the most like life. All of us go through our lives with a
single viewpoint. We have no idea what is going on in other people’s heads
other than what we can intuit from observing them. Our readers are the same so,
if your single viewpoint character tells them her boyfriend says he’s going
fishing but can’t look her in the eye and clears his throat a lot, they will
know he’s lying and is probably off for a hot weekend with the femme fatale.
Viewpoint characters who have limited information, or
choose to lie about what they do know, are unreliable. The unreliable narrator
is one of the key tools at the disposal of the novelist who chooses to use
character viewpoints or a virtual author figure. Unreliable narrators do not
tell the truth, either because they do not know it due to their limited
viewpoint or because they do not wish to share it with readers. If, for
example, you are writing a murder mystery and choose to narrate it from the
viewpoint of the murderer, the murderer may not want to give himself away so
you and he will both have a vested interest in keeping his action quiet until
investigation forces it into the open. Of course, your murderer may be dying to
confess, in which case you have a novel which uses a reverse chronology (like
Gabriel Garcia Marques’ Chronicle of a Death Foretold, even though the
author classifies this book as journalism rather than fiction). We know who the
victim is and who killed him, and his motives are the mystery the book
explores.
I have referred already to the close viewpoint. Having
decided on your viewpoint characters, you must also decide how close you want
to bring readers to them. Do you want readers to participate in the fictional
world from right inside the heads of the viewpoint characters, giving them a
visceral experience of those characters’ physical feelings as well as their
thoughts and emotions, or do you prefer to keep your distance? The former has
obvious advantages in the immediacy with which it can engage readers and bring the
fictional world to life. The latter, on the other hand, can be a useful
hybridisation of character and narrator/author viewpoint. The view of the
fictional world is confined to a limited cast of characters, but they still
keep their innermost feelings secret. We might see, for example, that Jane is
wearing new Louboutin shoes, but we will not necessarily be aware that she has
blisters as a result. Not only can this help with the management of
information, but also helps the author exercise control over the atmosphere of
the novel. In Never Let Me Go, for example, Ishiguro always maintains a
distance between his characters and the reader, and this contributes to the
detached, somewhat glacial atmosphere of the novel, an atmosphere which is
needed to reinforce its theme.
Finally, keep in mind that you can mix and match
different degrees of closeness, much as the cinematographer zooms in and out
from wide angle or cherrypicker to close up. There may be times when it suits
you to keep readers and characters apart and times when you want to make the
reader feel at one with a character, slower moving passages where you want a
wide angle, descriptive approach contrasted with tense sequences in which you
want us to feel the protagonist’s racing heart.
I have to end with an apology. Writers must, of course,
read widely, but the more they learn about their craft, the more critical they
become as readers. Once you start reading for viewpoint, which is virtually
unnoticeable unless done badly, your days of reading for enjoyment are
numbered! Sorry.
