Category: first

That being said…

As the story goes, there once was a young carpenter here in Hollywood who wanted to be an actor. He had trouble getting parts. The problem, according to his agent, was that the young actor sank too deep into his roles and never got noticed. He’d gotten a small supporting role as a bellboy and just vanished into the background. The agent pointed out that one of Tony Curtis’s first roles was playing a grocery store clerk, but he dominated the scene. “You looked at that guy and you knew he was supposed to be the star,” said the agent.

“I thought the point was you were supposed to think he was a grocery clerk,” said the frustrated actor.

And that young bellboy grew up to be Harrison Ford.

Who, let’s all be glad, also had enough sense to stop making Indiana Jones movies after Last Crusade.

(la la la la la la la la not listening la la la la la la la)

Anyway…

This fun observation by Mr. Ford hammers home a problem I’ve seen with a few narratives. It’s not uncommon for fledgling writers to center the narrative around a character and then tell a story that’s far beyond the scope of said character. nailing down the perspective a story is being told from is tough, and picking the wrong one can leave the story painted into one corner after another. This comes up most often in two forms—a first person person story and an epistolary story.

To recap…

In a first person story the reader gets everything through the eyes and thoughts of one of the characters. On the plus side, we get to know and see everything this character knows and sees. On the down side, we only get to know and see what this character knows and sees. First person is a very limited viewpoint. We don’t get the suspense of us knowing something’s happening that the character doesn’t know about. This also means we can’t be privy to extra detail, nor can we have any doubt if something did or didn’t register with the main character. To Kill A Mockingbird is a phenomenal first person novel, as are Moby Dick, A Princess of Mars, and Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.”

(Yeah, there’s no the in the original title. Seriously. Check it out.)

An epistolary novel is told through “existing” documents. As the name implies, it was originally letters, but it can also include journals, police reports, newspaper articles, and even blogs or tweets or social network updates. By its nature, a lot of epistolary writing comes across as first person, but there’s a notable difference. This form is very episodic. There are gaps in it where the “writer(s)” didn’t have time or inclination to put things down on paper. Dracula is an epistolary novel, as is Fred Saberhagen’s The Frankenstein Papers, and Mr. King did a rather horrific epistolary short story some of you may remember called “Survivor Type.”

Now the catch for both of these forms is that once a writer chooses to use them, they’ve just put themselves into what can be a very limiting viewpoint. If Wakko’s my main character, I can’t see, hear, or understand anything if he doesn’t. His limitations are mine. If he doesn’t know what happened out on Highway 10 that night, I don’t get to know.

More to the point, it’s going to make Wakko crumble as a character if he’s constantly stepping out of his boundaries. When he does know what happened out on Highway 10, as a reader I end up puzzling over how and when he found that out. If he suddenly reveals on page 120 that he studied Goju-ryu karate in Okinawa for twenty years, I’m going to wonder why this never came up before. Since I’m inside his consciousness, inconsistencies stand out like flares and each one means I’m going to believe in him less and less.

I recently read a book where the narrator goes to great lengths to tell us she has no writing ability. Oh, like anyone who graduated high school she knows the bare mechanics of how to write, but she’s not at that level that she’d consider herself a writer. Why, not counting work memos, this is probably the longest document she’s ever committed to paper (or computer memory). So hopefully we, the readers, will go easy on her as she tries to record the events of the past few days.

Said narrator then launches into a flourish of vivid metaphors, purple prose, elaborate sentence structure, and parallel constructions. This went on for the entire book. The vocabulary was the kind of stuff you might hear tossed around by Harvard alumns trying to outdo each other at literary conferences.

She did not come across as someone who never expressed themselves through writing.

Definitely didn’t sound like a grocery clerk.

Just as a quick note—some writers have managed to pull off stories where a first person character who should be ignorant of certain facts manages to convey enough information for the audience to understand what’s really going on. Perhaps he or she has some knowledge that goes against the character we’ve seen so far. We’ve all seen stuff like this. The illiterate guy who manages to describe a stop sign, the Neanderthal girl who explains a pistol, or the bellboy who it turns out has a degree in chemical engineering so he can help thwart a terrorist attack. You can get away with this once or twice, but it’s a device that wears thin fast so you shouldn’t be depending on it for an entire book.

Now, there’s a somewhat-related problem that tends to crop up in epistolary work. Some writers litter the journals and letters there creating with typos and misused words. The idea here is this makes the documents (and thus, the characters behind them) seem more real because they contain the kind of errors that real people make, especially folks who aren’t usually writing for an audience. And, let’s face it, it also spares those writers from learning how to spell or bothering to do any sort of editing.

The catch here is that any typo is going to knock a reader out of the story. It’s going to be an even bigger hit if the reader stops to figure out if this was a deliberate mistake or just… well, a mistake. Like up above when I used there when it should’ve been they’re. All of you stumbled on it, and a few of you probably stumbled even more as you paused to figure it out if, being the sneaky bastard I am, I was doing it for a deliberate effect. And I was. And you still stumbled and paused.

A great example of doing this correctly is the book Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. It’s the epistolary story of a man named Charlie who’s mentally challenged. If you felt cruel, you could call him severely retarded. The book, in theory, is a journal his doctors have asked him to start writing. It’s painful to read. Charlie can barely spell, has only the barest understanding of grammar, and no real idea how to express himself.

His doctors are giving him a series of treatments and surgeries, though, and as the book progresses the journal entries become clearer and more elaborate. At one point they actually get close to going the other way—Charlie has become so smart he’s taken over the enhanced intelligence project and is using his journal for research notes and brainstorming. Now the journal’s almost unreadable because it’s so advanced! The language he uses becomes one of the elements Keyes uses to show the reader how much Charlie is changing.

So one of the big tricks with these two formats is to create a character who’s believable and relatable, but still has the abilities, intelligence, and experience to deal with whatever challenges the plot may throw at them. A cheerleader may be great for figuring out who ruined homecoming, but not as much for an assassination plot. A Nobel-prize winning physicist isn’t going to be much help at harvest time. The trans-warp drive on a starship is probably going to be out of the range of the guys who work at Jiffy Lube.

Choose your character wisely.

Next time, I was going to blather on about the world we live in. Or, at least, the one we thought we were living in.

Until then, go write.

All those wanna-bes and posers gone?

Good. So, I figured I’d start by ranting about something I see crop up more and more in fiction. Would-be screenwriters, this week might be a bit thin for you, but if you follow along, who knows, I may say something clever.

Anyway, there’s a fiction writer (and sometimes writing coach) named Damon Knight who points out that first person is really a bit of a trap. A lot of people use it because they think it makes their story more personal, more realistic, and easier to get into. It also creates an instant character in the story—the narrator.

Truth is, though, first person is one of the most difficult tenses to write well. It isn’t personal, it isn’t realistic, and it makes it extremely difficult to create a character. I mean if it’s so easy, why aren’t the so-called hacks like Stephen King or Dean Koontz using it more often? Oh, sure, King’s written a few first person short stories, a novella or two, but the vast majority of his work is plain old third person perspective.

The reasons first person is so tough are kind of invisible, which is why it’s a trap. They’re things that make perfect sense when they get pointed out, but until then… well, it’s easy to wander in, set off a dozen tripwires, step into the beam of light, and suddenly you’re at the bottom of a deep hole. Hopefully not one filled with stakes.

To be clear, I’m not saying first person is a bad tense to write a story in. Far from it. Some of my favorite stories are written from this perspective, and it is some gorgeous, genius writing. It’s definitely not an easy viewpoint, though. Even experienced writers will run into a lot of problems with it, and inexperienced writers will often hit them at terminal velocity.

Here are a couple of those hidden problems. If you’ve got a first person story, you may want to take a glance through and make sure it doesn’t suffer from any of them.

The first problem is suspense and tension. You’ve probably heard this one before, because it’s one of the first issues that needs to be addressed in a story with this perspective. Any story has to have a degree of conflict and tension, but in a first person story a thick layer of that tension is scraped off the top because of the format. If we’re only halfway through the book, we know there has to be more than the narrator’s tale than just getting the girl. We also know the main character isn’t going to be killed in a first person tale because… well, they’re telling us the story.

Yeah, there’ve been a couple clever stories that have gotten around this roadblock, but they usually do it with a bit of a cop out. At this point, enough stories have revealed their first-person character is a ghost, angel, vampire, or some such thing that this reveal is probably just going to frustrate or bore readers more than anything else.

From this angle, writing in first person just drives us into a corner.

Next, first person is a very limited viewpoint. The reader can only see, hear, and experience things the main character does. We never get to see the other side of the door and we have no idea what happens to Wakko when he leaves the room. We don’t get the suspense of us knowing something’s happening that the character doesn’t know about. This also means we can’t be privy to extra detail, nor can we have any doubt if something did or didn’t register with the main character.

By its very nature, this also requires most first person stories to be told from a very “average-man” level. If the character is too smart and figures things out too fast, it kills the story. If said character is rock-stupid and can’t solve a single problem, it kills the story and frustrates the reader. Consider that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories are told in first person, but not by Holmes. They’re told by Watson, a very smart and able doctor–but nowhere near the range of his best friend.

So, from this angle, writing in first person drives us into another corner. A different corner, yes, but a corner nonetheless.

Another problem that relates back to viewpoint is that you can’t have forward motion in your story without action, and the common way action grinds to a halt is when the writer stops for description. I mentioned a while back that the problem with pausing to describe details about the main character‘s height, weight, eye and hair color, shoe size, skin tone, education, and preferred underwear color (sorry Facebook folks) is that everything comes to a halt while we do.

This kind of gear-grinding stop is bad enough in a regular story, but in a first person story what’s the only way we can get this description? That’s right– if the main character starts talking about themselves. And what would you think of me if I spent the next ten or fifteen minutes talking about my chiseled abs, broad shoulders, or rock hard glutes (all of which, I can assure you, are a complete fabrication).

So in a first person story, this kind of description brings the story to a halt and it makes your main character look more than a bit egotistical. What kind of woman writes two pages in her diary about how hot she is? How much of a ninja are you if you pause to admire your posture and build in a convenient mirror?

Heck, imagine how awkward this would seem in a horror or adventure story? I open the door to reveal the armed terrorist/ hungry zombie/ angry ninja and I pause to describe them as they’re leaping at me. The thing is, we see a lot faster than we can write or read. My first person character may register a lot of details, but it’s a very tricky balance leaving those details in or out during moments of action. I can notice the ninja is a woman with green eyes and a wisp of red hair peeking out of her hood, but if I pause to say that it seems that she’s just standing there in a very un-ninja-ish way. If I describe her afterwards, I now have to pause and refer back to something the character actually saw two or three pages back.

And so, here we are, written into a corner again.

For the record, I’ve just decided the word for a female ninja will be ninjette. At least for our purposes here. Just thought I’d get that in writing.

Now, Knight has a nice exercise in his book Creating Short Fiction. What he suggests is to rewrite a few chapters into third person with as few changes as possible. Don’t restructure, don’t add anything– just turn me into him or her. He really suggests rewriting the whole thing, but he’s usually talking about short stories. Twenty or thirty pages will do for most of us here.

Once you’ve done this, re-read your story. If the character you had in first person has vanished, it’s because there wasn’t a character there to start with. Just the illusion of one. If your story vanishes… well, there’s some work to be done. That’s the trick of first person, and why you have to be careful with it. It gives the impression of creating a personality and defining a person, but it rarely does.

This ranty blog (any blog, really) is a great example of a first person trick. I may seem personable, funny, and clever–but do any of you reading this actually know me? Okay, granted, a handful actually do, but I know there’s another, much larger handful that wouldn’t know me if they bumped into me on the street. It feels like you know me, my likes, my dislikes–you may even have an image of me in your head. Once you stop and think about it, though… you really don’t. Try writing down a rough character sketch of me based off the two or twenty times you’ve read something here and you’ll be surprised how little there really is. If I rewrote this post as a third-person column I would vanish altogether.

Which is a great time to wrap this up.

Next week I’d like to take a moment to re-introduce the blog for those who came in late. It’s still early in 2010 and I’ve been at this for almost a year and a half, so it might be good for all of us to recap.

Until then, go write.