Group Hug: Playing with Point of View

The Three and I played around with point of view for a couple of hours the other day. We wrote a huge amount—more I think than we ever have during group before—and we didn't get done with everything I had planned. It was a good thing (for us, at least) that the moms all got caught in traffic.

The Warm Up

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. (This took us a while. The random name generator kept generating dumb names. Finally, L suggested Maple, and we went with it.) Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but the character must be contemporary (living in the here and now), and you must include what kind of music the person likes. 

These are not the yummy cookies
M made. We ate all those.

No sharing yet! When the five minutes is up, choose a second randomly generated name. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of that character, with the same restrictions as before. 

Once both characters are done, share. (This is also when we ate cookies and drank cocoa or tea and chatted for a while about point of view, which I covered in the last post.)

Third Person Limited

Once you have your two characters, it's time to put them together. Here’s the scenario: Your characters are in a car together, driving down the road. They’re arguing about what kind of music to listen to. Who wins and gets to listen to the kind of music he or she likes?

He like jazz; she likes Nine Inch Nails.
But they're going to be even more
incompatible when he wrecks the car.

Write the scene in third person limited. That means pick one character and write from his or her perspective using the pronoun he or she. Remember that limited means you only know what that character knows, but you have some flexibility in terms of what you can describe in the world. (You can write about what that character looks like, for instance, without having her look at herself in a mirror.)

Spend 10 minutes writing. Don't share yet!

First Person

Now, go back and write the scene again—the same scene, part of the scene or a continuation of the scene—but this time from the first person perspective of the other character. Remember that you can get closer in this time: How does she feel about what’s happening? What does she think about the music? What is she going to do once she gets out of the car—and how does all this affect her relationship with the other character?

You have 10 minutes. Don't share yet!

Third Person Omniscient

Okay, I'll admit it: We shared after writing in first person. We had totally run out of time. If you're doing this on your own, though, or you have more time than we did, you'll write one more time.

He can't believe the woman inside the
car just said that about the guy's
taste in music. 

This time, write the scene from the perspective of someone outside the action, either as a god-like narrator or as someone who hasn't been seen or mentioned before and who the other two characters don’t know. Keep the focus on the two characters in the front seat, not the emotions of this uninvolved observer. Ten minutes.

POV Smackdown: I vs. We

You’ve got your characters and your basic plot, and you’re ready to start writing. Not so fast! First you have to decide which point of view you’re going to write from. You’ve got three basic choices: first person, third person limited and third person omniscient.

(Technically there’s a fourth: the you form, or second person, which we reserve mainly for self-help books, travel guides, experimental literature and Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The main difference between the three basic POVs is intimacy and scope.

Intimacy is a measure of internal knowledge. The closer you are to the narrator, the more intimate your understanding and the easier it is to forge a bond with the narrator. The further you are, the less you know about the narrator’s feelings.

Scope is a measure of external knowledge. It has an inverse relationship to intimacy: The closer you get to the narrator, the less you can know about what’s going on inside other characters and in places she’s not directly observing.

In our continuum, first person is the most intimate but has the least external knowledge, and third person omniscient is the least intimate but has the most external knowledge.

Seems simple, right? Oh, but you know things never are. So what’s tricksy about each of these?

I Ate the Taco: First Person

(Yummm…)

First person is most common in YA because YA novels are often focused on the particular, personal experience of one teen. You don’t see first person as much in adult novels.

First person: One eye, very close

First person is intimate; you experience the narrator’s thoughts and emotions with her. But want to know what someone else is thinking? Too bad. Need to know what’s happening behind the narrator’s back? Bummer. But just because you can’t get inside the other characters, you still need to make sure they’re fully developed. One of your challenges with first person is to do that within the very limited perspective of your narrator.

Another challenge is that you really have to nail the voice. After all, your narrator is telling her story directly to the reader. If anything is off, you’ll lose the reader. 

And that wonderful introspection you get with first person? Yeah, don’t overdo it. It’s easy to dwell too much on the internal when writing in the I. Focus on what’s happening, not what the narrator thinks about it.

She Ate the Taco: Third Person Limited

(Hey! That chick stole my taco!)

Third person limited is the Toyota Camry of POVs: common, dependable, affordable. Outside of YA, most novels are written in it.

Third person limited: A handful of eyes

In third person limited, we know what’s going on only from the perspective of one person or a very limited set of characters. Because of that switch in pronoun (I to she, he or even it), it’s less intimate than first person, but you’re still closely focused on one character at a time. That slight distance allows you to keep things from the reader. In first person, the reader is inside the narrator’s head every moment and knows everything that’s going on. In third limited, there can be a little mystery about exactly what the narrator is feeling or thinking. That’s good for tension.

What you lose in intimacy, you gain in scope because in third limited, you’re allowed to head jump. Want to know what someone else is thinking or what’s going on somewhere else? No worries. You can find out in the next scene when your focus moves to another main character.

Here’s the tricksy: Third limited is limited. The reader knows only what the POV characters know. Unless you’re George R.R. Martin, you can’t pick a billion different characters to inhabit. You get to pick two, maybe three. So make sure they’re good ones. Also, you don’t want to give your reader whiplash. Pick one perspective per scene or chapter. No changing mid-paragraph.

She Ate the Taco Redux: Third Person Omniscient

(This is getting ridiculous. You people better leave my tacos alone.)

Third person omniscient is also called the god’s view because the narrator knows and sees everything. It pops up a lot in 19^th century literature, like Pride and Prejudice. An omniscient narrator tends to be a lot more removed from the action and may even address the reader directly.

Third person omniscient: All-seeing
and pretty creepy

What’s cool is that you can tell your reader anything you want to about what’s going on in a character’s head or what’s happening on the other side of the world, unbeknownst to any of your characters. On the other hand, seeing everything can be a super fast way of destroying tension. And an omniscient narrator can seem like a pretty stiff know-it-all.

I said earlier that third omniscient is the least intimate POV. You may be wondering how that’s true, when an omniscient narrator knows everything. An omniscient narrator may know exactly how someone feels, but her distance from the characters makes it harder for the reader to bond.

Who Else Can Eat the Taco?

There are lots of variations on these three basic POV: multiple viewpoints, the epistolary (letter) novel, the unreliable narrator, first person plural (we instead of I). The weirder it is (first person plural and second person fall in this category), the more careful you have to be. But strong voice is the key to all POVs. Heck, strong voice is really the key to pretty much everything. Like the strong voice I use when someone steals my taco. 

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Rules for Writing a Novel

Cranky Rah has been kept cranky and in the depths of her cave for the past two weeks by a non-creative editing project. Cranky Rah is now very behind on everything in life except for said non-creative editing project, which is almost (!) finished.

Yesterday, The Further Four came to visit the cave, but Cranky Rah has had no time to draft an astonishingly inspiring blog (or even an astonishingly uninspiring blog) about it because of—all together now!—the aforementioned non-creative editing project.

(Cranky Rah should point out, in case anyone associated with the non-creative editing project reads this, that the non-creative editing is for a Very Good Cause and that Cranky Rah enjoys editing projects very much. Even if her boss on the project, the Perilous P, disagrees with her on comma placement.)

Anyway, lest anyone fear that I have become lost in the beautiful dark depths of my cave, let me post the Three Rules for Writing a Novel, by W. Somerset Maugham. Here they are:

I love this quote. I gave it to The Further Four yesterday and told them this truth: There are millions of writers in the world, and lots of them enjoy telling other writers how to write. But there are millions of ways to write well and what's important is to find the ways that work for you and to not be bogged down by something someone else tells you. All twelve-year-old girls should take this to heart in many, many ways.

So go. Be free. Write.

Love is Like a Cliche

S recently shared a piece she had written called The Meaning of Love. It was about (oddly enough) love, and it came with this note: This is the terribleness that happens when I try to force myself to write.

When I asked her why she thought it was terrible, she responded: I think it's terrible because it's full of sappy love, which I hate with the soul that I don't have.

Love is like a book of matches.

Was she being harsh, both about her writing and her soul? Probably. But it's a real concern, right? How do you write about something writers have been writing about since there were words? How do you find something new or fresh to say about love (or hate or truth or beauty)?

I suggested to S that she start by making a list of what she wanted to say about love, without any flowery language. It might look like this:

Love is painful.
Love is amazing.
Love is something you regret.
Love is vulnerable.
Love is irresistible.

This is a lot to cover, and as you delve deeper, you may discover that it's more effective to focus on just part of this list.

Once you have your list, what do you do with it?

Go with a cliché, but turn it on its head. 

Instead of comparing love to a rose with thorns, how is love like a Venus flytrap? Instead of love being innocent like a child, how is love like a temperamental two year old?

One of my favorite poems is T.R. Hummer's Where You Go When She Sleeps, in which Hummer takes the cliché image of being filled with love and drowning in love and turns it on its head by comparing love to drowning in a silo full of grain.

Pull those clichés apart and find new ways to express what is true about them. 

Love is like Big Brother.

We like the image of love being like a rose because it's both beautiful and painful. What else is contradictory like that? How about love being like a bulldozer? It plows down anything in its way and denudes the land—but it also can clear away the dead and useless, creating a place where new things can grow. 

How about love being like a spy who lies her sultry way into your life, intending to betray you, only to betray herself and her country by turning double agent.

Focus on what love isn't or how it isn't like those clichés.

A famous example of this is Shakespeare's sonnet Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shakes spends his 14 lines explaining how his love ain't nothing like a summer's day.

Pay attention to how other writers do it.

Somehow, singers, poets and other writers continue to find ways to talk about love (and hate and truth and beauty). They do it over and over again, and while they aren't all geniuses about it, there are plenty of great examples of someone finding that fresh approach, those new lines that resonate with us.

Take Sting, for example. The guy's been writing about love since, like, the last Ice Age (or at least since before he lived in a castle), and he keeps bringing it home. Give a listen to these four songs, all different takes on the same topic:

• Every Breath You Take. From the Police years, this song is played at a lot of weddings, but Sting meant it to be about obsession. It takes something that seems so sweet at first ("He loves me so much he pays attention to my every breath!") and turns it pretty creepy.
• Fortress Around Your Heart. Sting takes this fairly common metaphor of someone walling themselves off after being hurt by love but uses concrete details to turn the metaphor into a story.
• Fill Her Up. This song is about what love can make you do and how maybe you should think twice before you do it.
• Love is Strong Than Justice. This song is also about what love can make you do, but it's unapologetic in the end.

Love is like concrete. Or a meltdown.

One thing you'll see about all these poems and songs is that they focus on one extended metaphor instead of a series of similes or metaphors. Pick one idea, and build it through your entire piece. (And don't be afraid to use humor, even on a serious topic.) Keep in mind that even though you started with a list of abstracts (Love is painful), you don't want it to stay abstract. You want specific details to make the abstract concept concrete and real for your reader; something they can see in their heads and hearts.

So What is Love Like?

Love is like a TARDIS. Tell me how.