This Itch of Writing

Are you Showing too much?

Over on her excellent blog, The Elephant in the Writing Room, Sally Zigmond's been talking about Showing and Telling. And as well as flattering the Itch by linking to my own post about it, she makes a very good point that trying to Show often leads writers into endless, endless details about missing the alarm-clock switch, and scrambling out of bed and tripping over the dog and dropping things and running out of breath and tumbling onto the train and feeling sweaty when shaking the MD's hand.... and all to Show what could be told: John arrived at the office late, hot and flustered.

Undoubtedly, lots of beginner writers do this - and lots of more experienced writers find in revision that they have done it too, and cut a lot of it. So it's obvious that this kind of too-much-stuff comes naturally to many of us. But I have heard aspiring writers say "showing takes longer", and I don't think it's necessarily true, as the examples in my post about Showing and Telling prove. In other words, I'm not sure that it's fair to blame Showing, in itself, for the problem of Too Much Stuff. I think it comes from various, very natural, aspects of the process.

Writing to find out what you're really trying to say. If you're a Cutter, as a writer, then it's by putting words on the page that you find out which are the words you really need, and which you don't. You just have to remember, when revising, that you need to dust down each sentence to see which ones are really earning their keep.

Leaving in the scaffolding. This is a slightly different matter which I explored in The Common Scaffold. Because we all imagine, as well as think, by writing - by asking our imagination to supply the next word - these words came about as part of you having to imagine John's journey from being asleep to the MD's office. Which, again, is fine; it's process writing. Now it's time to decide which bits the reader needs, to get them from asleep to the MD's office, given the structure and pace and plot of the chapter, and of the book as a whole.

Thinking that Detail means lots of small stuff which adds up. What it should mean - what you should be thinking in terms of - is a few things that are particular: particular in the sense of particular to this person, this place, this time, this moment. Crudely, They met at the big tree isn't as Showy, because it isn't as particularised, as They kissed under the rotting willow, or They fought beside the sapling oak. (Although, of course, sometimes, They met at the big tree will be exactly what you want...)

Thinking that Showing means Showing Everything. It doesn't. It doesn't take a paragraph of detail to evoke the room of an old, paralysed Dowager Duchess, or the bear-pit of a bedroom shared by two brothers who hate each other. Indeed, it's quite likely that you don't have to write what you may think of as "description of the setting", at all. It's almost always stronger - and all you need - to evoke a setting in terms of the character in action within it.

So if you find that as soon as you stop summarising (Telling, Informing) and start detailing (Showing, Evoking) the wordcount starts to get out of hand and the story slows down, I'd suggest that you go back to summarising, but work hard at being Show-y, in the smallest space.

So, of the fifteen things that happen to John to get him flustered, which is the most telling? Which has the strongest sensory presence - toothpaste down the front of your clean shirt, or skiddy sand on the bathroom floor, or the bashed elbow? Which is most John-ish of the misbehaving objects he interacts with; the 1970s Star Wars alarm clock he bashes, or the antique silk prayer mat he trips over? Of all his actions from bed to boardroom, which is the most characteristic of him - still getting coffee on the way - or uncharacteristic - spilling it?

Mind you, a very common side effect of developing your ear/eye for evocative words is to use too many of them: to over-write. Even when you're Showing in this very economical, less-is-more sort of way, you still need to give each evocative word some space of plainness round them, so their evocation has room to work. And of course, you may still decide that what the story needs here is still a straightforward bit of Informing, in which case go for it. But can I suggest that you're nonetheless firm with your first draft version of: John overslept and woke up late so he arrived at the office upset. In revision, see if it wouldn't be better as: John slept through the alarm, and scuttled to work in a fluster. Why not? Fluster is a good, strong word, after all, and so are alarm, and scuttle. And it'll even keep the creative writing fascists happy, because there's not an adjective or an adverb to be seen (at least not of the sort the CW fascisti disapprove of: 'through' is an adverb here).

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 4: moving point of view and other stories

This is Part Four of a four-part series. Part One: the basics is here, Part Two: internal narrators is here, Part Three: external narrators is here. 

MOVING POINT OF VIEW: how to do it

Obviously you can just switch from one limited viewpoint to another: a double-line space, or a new chapter, and as long as the first sentence or two grounds the reader, so that (even unconsciously) they sense that we're not in the previous point of view, and where we are instead, that's fine.

But what if you want to use the usual, "traditional" technique of a narrator who has access to more than one consciousness, and/or to a "god's-eye" point of view, and can move between them at will? At some point you have to think about how to do it without the reader getting confused or bored. This is where so many writers trip up, and I assume why so many of the more narrow-minded teachers and editors tell you not to do it. But it's not complicated, and it's not difficult to get right.

What usually goes wrong is that the narrative is fairly deep in Ben's point of view as he sits sulking in the corner, scorning his horrible family in detail and wondering if the dog has found his stash of weed under the sitting room carpet. But the writer then realises that some bits of plot need to be caught up with, and "head-hops" out, to tell us what Aunty Mary thinks of Ben's Motorhead tee-shirt, or that Uncle Joe's having a heart attack in the kitchen. The writer then drops us straight back into Ben's ruminations. At the best it just means we feel a bit lost, as the connection we felt with Ben is broken, but then we have to pick it up agin. Feeling a bit lost, with no connections, makes the world and the characters less vivid... and a reader who doesn't feel the world is vivid is likely not to bother to pick the book up again. At the worst we don't know what's going on.

The other thing that goes wrong is that the writer just hops us from head to head, sentence after sentence, so the reader has no special emotional involvement with any one character. We never have the chance to experience the world of the story as that character does; no way to get to know them as a rounded, vivid person; no sense of what matters or doesn't; no real emotional centre to our experience of the story. It's like watching a film made of constant, jittery cutting between different actors; we even have trouble remembering who's who, because memory remembers things better when they have emotional content, and we certainly don't care about any of them.

But it's easy to deal with if you understand psychic distance. If you don't know what I'm on about, please follow that link, and then come back here.

All you have to do, if you want to change point of view, is to make sure that you don't teleport us from deep inside one mind - personality, voice, point of view - straight to deep inside another. Make use of the different stages of psychic distance to take us in stages out of that head to something external about them, then show us the new character, show us something external about the next character, then go inside their head.

So here is a demo of moving point of view (rather crude, for the sake of clarity, not to mention space):

The pastry crumbs down Ben's front were all tickly and scratchy, like when he was ill in bed and Mum brought him biscuits. He wriggled until they slid round to where his teeshirt wasn't so tight. Then he looked up, and Uncle Joe gave him a wink. Ben felt his cheeks go hot: what did Uncle Joe think he was doing? Uncle Joe smiled, but a bit stiffly, as if it hurt. It was only a week since he came out of hospital, of course. Sharon had had to bring him to the party in the car. Joe's left hand still didn't work terribly well, although he was managing the biscuit all right. He had to ask Sharon to put his teacup down on the table for him, though. For a moment he felt quite despairing and a tear slid into his eye. How on earth was he going to manage, once she'd gone back to Portugal?

And finally, although I don't believe in rules, I do think that rules-of-thumb can be handy, so here are three which can make it easier to work successfully with a moving point of view:

1) don't expect the reader to cope with too many viewpoint characters. Remember that a viewpoint character is the reader's representative in the story: it's through them that we experience it and our experience will be conditioned by who they are. So think hard about which characters to give your narrator access to. Two or three or four would be a good place to start, as well as the neutral, god's-eye-view of the narrator (but see 3) below)

2) apart from moving outwards to god's-eye-view, don't change a viewpoint character more than, say, once a page (and as above, don't change between too many). And change for a real reason - which probably means you'll change less often than that. Think hard about why you want to change, and what the effect will be on the reader's emotional and mental engagement with the story and the important characters. Don't switch to avoid a minor awkwardness of plot; only switch if there's real reason of character-in-action and story, which will make the scene and the novel better and stronger and more vivid .

3) the more present the narrator is, the more explicitly they're in control, the more viewpoints you can use, and the more often you can shift. This is one very good reason for using a privileged narrator, rather than locking the narrative into a single point of view, and then abruptly jumping into another for a new chapter, say. A strong narrator's voice (even if they're not explicitly a character, or a teller of tales) can integrate a more complex collection of elements into a seamless-seeming narrative. For example, my memoirist, in Part Two: internal narrators (ii):

I was three when their disagreements over politics - specifically Appeasement - caused my parents to divorce. All I remember is my father telling my mother that she should trust in Herr Hitler. Like so many of his generation he was haunted by memories of the First World War, and Hitler at that date was still taking care to show nothing but good will towards Britain...

can unify in a single sentence a three-year-old's eye, an adult understanding of her parents, and a wider explanation of the politics of late 1930s Europe. They're all drawn together under the umbrella of a single voice and consciousness. You may not choose to do that. But it's worth remembering, as you work out what you do want to do.

This last rule-of-thumb does demand that you've got to grips with handling psychic distance, and almost certainly free indirect style, since the close-in distances are hard to do without it. It's easy enough to tell (inform) the reader about Aunty Mary's doubts and Uncle Jim's secret pain down the left arm and Ben's worry about the weed in three sentences, but you can only really do it by staying out at a bland, level-2 sort of psychic distance. For us to get involved with - 'care about' in writerly shorthand - your characters, you need to be exploiting the deeper-in distances so that you're really evoking their consciousness in the reader. And if you're going right in, it's simply not possible to switch so often or (unless you're a really remarkable writer) so widely.

 A WORD ABOUT SECOND PERSON NARRATIVES

In English, we use second person - "you" - in two ways, and neither of them are, conventionally, much use for fiction, but they do have their place. There's also a third way that "you" turns up in narrative.

The first "you" is addressing someone: "Do you get up early?" Imagine a narrator of a story about a break-up: I assume you go downstairs first thing in the morning, probably earlier these days now that I'm not there to urge you to stay in bed. You open the back door for the dog, and forget that it was me who gave him to you... You're most likely to meet this as "interior monologue", when we're admitted to the character-narrator's thoughts, as s/he talks to another character.

The second kind of "you" is what the grammaticians call "generic you": the casual, colloquial way of saying "one", as in "I find if you get up early in the morning then ..." Or in a narrative: You go downstairs in the morning and she isn't there; you go to feed the dog and he's gone; you go back to bed, and it's empty, because she's left. It's so common in ordinary conversation, but I used to say that it's very, very hard to use well in fiction, although it's bound to crop up in narratives which make a lot of use of stream of consciousness. And then I read Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light, which is largely written in the voice and point of view of Molly Allgood/Maire O'Neill, J M Synge's great love. Much of the narrative of Molly's later life is in this kind of second person, and it's utterly wonderful. But it's a very, very hard trick to pull off, and works largely because Molly's voice, as a character, is so strong. And also because she's slightly mad.

The third time "you" shows up is when the narrator addresses the reader (rather than, as in the first example, another character): Anne left on Monday. On Tuesday evening John changed the locks. Well, what would you have done? Or are you the kind who clings on to every relic of the past? John, you'll have realised by now, wasn't that kind of person at all. On Wednesday he put all Anna's clothes on the bonfire.The narrator isn't quite "breaking the frame", as David Lodge puts it The Art of Fiction: the narrator isn't breaking the contract of fiction whereby we all write, read and behave as if this story really happened, even though we all know it's made up - the narrator of a non-fiction narrative could say the same thing, of course. But in addressing the reader as "you" the narrator is, if you like, making itself present, explicitly as the teller of the story.

AND THAT'S IT

This series has come out quite long, but I hope it's clarified things, even if it hasn't simplified them: as you'll know by now, on This Itch of Writing creative writing truths are rarely pure and never simple. The main thing to remember is that the three keys to handling point of view and narrators are a) understanding the basic idea of what a point-of-view is, in writing, b) thinking of the narrator, however neutral and invisible, as a separate entity from the characters, and from you as the storyteller, and c) working with psychic distance.

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 3: external narrators

This is Part Three of a four-part series. Part One: the basics is here, and Part Two: internal narrators is here.

EXTERNAL NARRATORS

A narrator who isn't a character in the story will tell everything in third person, because as an "I" they're not present in the events. Evelyn was thinking about seducing Alex, while on the other side of town Joanna was planning to seduce Evelyn. But, of course, it's up to the storyteller - you - which consciousnesses you allow the narrator to lead the reader inside. And it's up to you whether the narrator can tell things that no character in the story knows.

And, of course, that also means that the narration may not enter any individual consciousnesses. This objective point of view is sometimes (and perhaps more usefully) called dramatic point of view. 'Dramatic', that is, in the sense that it tells nothing that the audience of a play couldn't see: dialogue, setting, and physical action. We're told nothing of what characters think or feel: nothing of the inside of their heads or bodies. Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants" is a classic example, although as that Jauss article points out, he twice breaks the "rule" of objectivity, to immensely powerful effect. That effect is partly the result of what John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes as the "savage sparsity" of this kind of narrative.

If the narrator does give us access to individual characters' thoughts and perceptions of what's going on - shows us the world through characters' eyes and minds, and perhaps with their voices colouring the narrative - then it's called subjective point of view. That's much the most common kind of narrative, because the normal project of fiction in our culture is to admit us to characters' minds and feelings until we're convinced by them: until we feel that these characters-in-action are real.

So, assuming you do want your narrative to take on at least one subjective point of view, how many might you, the storyteller, choose to let the narrator narrate from?

EXTERNAL NARRATORS (i): one limited point of view

As with an internal character-narrator, even if you have an external narrator it may seem easiest to limit it to a single point of view of a single character: nothing is told or known except what that character knows and experiences. You could pretty much write this in first person and just switch the pronouns, and it would have all the same advantages of reducing the options to something manageable. An internal character-narrator, and an external narrative limited to one point of view, are so similar that when I have a student whose third-person narrative seems rather distant and flat, I often suggest re-working in a bit in first person, because getting closer in psychic distance often comes more naturally in first person; they can then switching the pronouns back from "I" to "he", to discover how to get close in third person.

Writers often choose to work with a third-person narrative with a limited point of view, instead of first-person, because it adds a little flexibility: it's natural to pull a little bit further out in psychic distance, where you need to, towards something more neutral and "god's-eye-view", which is why this kind of narrator is said to have "limited omniscience", and can mention the weather, for example, even when the character might not specially notice it, or fill in a bit of background knowledge or geography. The problems are the same too, though: plot-difficulties, limitations of voice and setting, and an overall narrowness. Above all, the drawback is what John Gardner suggests: this limited-subjective viewpoint has a "pettiness and unseemly familiarity" which he finds frustrating as well as unattractive. I think he has a point, although I'd talk more in terms, again, of claustrophobia, because the subjective point of view allows for nothing - no feeling or experience - beyond the individual.

EXTERNAL NARRATORS (i): switching between limited points of view

This is many new writers' solution to those problems: for the sake of manageability the narrator locks the story into a particular character's point of view, but switches to another limited point of view at a break between scenes or chapters.It can work well in practical terms, as it does solve some of the difficulties and limitations in plot and setting, and gives an opportunity for different voices and attitudes.  But it's relatively inflexible, since the story might work better if you could move point of view in the middle of a scene, to shine a light from more than one angle on what's happening. And although the narrative can take on the flavour of the character's voice that it's locked into at the moment, or move outwards to something more neutral, it can't move fluidly between different characters' voices to build a sense of the scene as a whole, and make the most of the contrast: it can only switch, abruptly, from one to another.

EXTERNAL NARRATORS (iii): the privileged point of view

This is the kind of narrator who is usually called omniscient, or sometimes authorial, or knowledgeable. This narrator is privileged because you, as storyteller, grant them access to whichever consciousnesses you choose, and they can also range more widely and tell things that no character knows. "Omnisicient" is the traditional term, but isn't really accurate as there are always characters and events they don't narrate. Also, some writers and critics, reacting against the 19th century likes of Eliot and Dickens, are irritated by the idea of an authoritative, objective voice who knows the absolute truth of this tale. There's no such thing as objectivity, they say, and no absolute truth. That seems a bit daft to me, given that behind the apparent narrator stands a novelist who is always in complete control of what's said and told in a novel. But it is true that many of us are more interested in exploring a shifting series of subjective realities for our characters, than setting forth the "truth" of the world we're depicting.

It's handy for plotting, of course: if the reader needs to know something, or the tension will be greater if they do, or there's something no character knows, it's possible to convey it. It can make it easier to cope with complex action or a scene with many different elements if you're not locked into a single point of view until a change of scene or setting. And there's another privilege you can grant your privileged narrator: it can tell what a character doesn't know, in the sense of something they don't know they're feeling/thinking - motivations they don't consciously understand, effects which will only flower into behaviour later. As anyone who's had any kind of counselling or psychotherapy will know, much of how someone acts in life is controlled by parts of our past and personality we're scarcely aware of. Although a narrator-Evelyn, telling their own story, may well understand and tell us things that character-Evelyn didn't, what Evelyn can tell us is still only the tip of the iceberg of what really makes up his/her personality. More broadly, any narrative - with an internal or an external narrator - which is limited to a particular point of view will not be able to convey things about the viewpoint character which are deep in their unconscious. You may be able to get the reader - or another viewpoint character - to read between the lines and deduce things. But only a privileged narrator can actually give us access to the very darkest and lightest corners of a character's soul.

At the extreme end of the possibilities of the privileged narrator is what James Woods in How Novels Work calls the essayist narrator, a personality expressing opinions in their own voice about not just the events and characters of the story, but also the world at large. I suspect that readers (and writers) either love, or hate this kind of novel, because the personality - voice, opinions, judgements - of the writer looms so large in it. You love it, if you love the narrator.

Then there's the kind of narrator who I'd call a storyteller, if we weren't already using that term for something else. This is the teller of tales: the fable-writer, such as Angela Carter, where the narrator is always in charge even if they never set out to prove a point or persuade you of something. This narrator's project is quite different from the normal purpose of realist fiction. Here, the narrator's voice is all, and (rather as with the essayist narrator but to an entirely different end) that's what keeps us reading: the voice of the storyteller. Our engagement is less with the characters as fully-rounded, realistic people, although we may care about them, but instead it's very much with the narrator.

The essayist and the teller of tales are the only external narrators who might sometimes say "I". They're not present in the story - everything there is "she/he" - but because they have a direct engagement with the reader, they might say to the reader, If you've ever been on a sleeper train you'll know that... or even I don't want to bore you so I'll skip....

Having said that, if you're planning to use any kind of narrator other than a limited character-narrator, it's essential to have in mind a "god's eye" point of view, separate from any characters. Giving your narrator a separate point of view in this way needn't mean that it sets forward opinions or writes essays, it needn't mean they're a character in any full sense of the word - though you may find it helpful to have some idea of what kind of person they are. It only means that there is a point of view, which knows more than any character knows, as a god would: that's another privilege that you, as storyteller, have granted your narrator.

Next: Moving Point of View and other stories

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 2: internal narrators

This is Part Two of a four part post. Part One: the basics is here.

INTERNAL NARRATORS (i): The character as narrator

If your narrator is internal, a character-narrator, then the question of point of view is usually assumed to be simple. A character who is inside the story tells their story in first person, because "I" was there. So Andy narrates: I saw John with the stolen brooch in his hand - I guess he stole it, but I don't blame him. His baby was crying in the next room, so he must have stolen it to buy milk. I frowned, because I didn't think I could bring myself to report him. And generally speaking the narrative will take on at least some flavour of Andy's voice, because voice is the combination of what is said, and how it's said - and here Andy's character will shape that.

A character-narrator such as Andy, it's usually said, is limited to narrating what he can perceive, and what he knows: his consciousness is the lens through which we're granted access to the scene, and it's our first tool in understanding it. If he's not there, we don't have access to what happened there, unless he discovers by some other means. If Andy's in one room, then he can't perceive and therefore can't narrate what's going on in the room next door, except in terms of hearing raised voices or smelling the fire. And, crucially, Andy can't actually, truly know what another character is thinking or feeling. He can guess, he can deduce, he can report what another character says they're thinking. But he doesn't have access to the inside of anyone else's head. So in the conventional concept of a first-person narrative, what Andy can't say is: John had a brooch in his hand, and he was trying to work out if I knew he'd stolen it; I was frowning, and he felt guilty because he wasn't going to buy milk for the baby, he was going to put the money on a horse.

This strictly limited point of view is in some ways very easy to deal with. It sorts out what scenes you can write for your story, and how you're going write them, because Andy's consciousness and voice filters everything. It's simple to ask yourself, each time, "Is this something that Andy can see/hear/feel/understand/think/know? Is this how he'd understand it and tell it?" And that's probably why it's many, many people's choice for their first novel: instinctively, and in some ways rightly, they feel it makes things manageable.

But like all limitations, simplifying some questions can actually make other things more complicated. It can make plotting very awkward, as you have to work out how to transmit things the reader needs to know which Andy can't. And if Andy doesn't like someone, or misrepresents them, it's a problem if you don't want the reader to feel the same... unless you're willing for us to be cross with Andy for being stupid or unfair. If we really don't like him we may give up on the book. It takes clever writing to get the reader to think something other than what the character-narrator thinks. And many readers (especially at the commercial end of the market) are uncomfortable with a character who they can't work out - who they don't know whether to like or hate. More generally, a character-narrator can make the world of the novel very claustrophobic, and the experience of writing it frustrating, because you can't range widely in voices, places, times and emotions.

INTERNAL NARRATORS (ii): Understanding the difference between narrator and character

So, if you want things to get more interesting and flexible, (and just possibly annoy some of your more narrow-minded peers, teachers and editors) stay with me. Inspired jointly by this post by Jauss on narrators, and by my own exploration of memoir and life writing, I want to suggest that a character-narrator isn't one entity, but two: a narrator standing outside the story, and a character inside it, who just happen to share the same name.

As a character, the normal human nature of point-of-view applies: Evelyn can't see into the next room, s/he doesn't know what will happen next, and s/he certainly can't know what's going on inside Joanna's head. Evelyn's experience is still limited by his/her consciousness.

But as a narrator, Evelyn's telling a story and like any storyteller - like you - s/he has the privilege of telling whatever will make the story work, whether or not any character knew it at the time. As a narrator, Evelyn can say: While I was getting dressed to seduce Alex, over on the other side of town Joanna was planning to seduce me. She was singing to herself with the thought of our night together.

I'm not being as unorthodox here as you may be thinking. It's very common to have things in a first-person narrative such as: I didn't know then that things were about to get much worse, and that's not, actually, any different from narrator-Evelyn telling us that Joanna was making plans. These are both things that the character-Evelyn didn't know at that moment, but the narrator-Evelyn came to know later, or understand later - and now chooses to tell the reader.

So, though you'll get a lot of people disagreeing with me and with Jauss in that post, I'd argue that there's no reason, in principle, that such a narrator can't tell us whatever she likes about what's going on in other people's heads. People writing their memoirs do it all the time, after all: I was three when their disagreements over politics - specifically Appeasement - caused my parents to divorce. All I remember is my father telling my mother that she should trust in Herr Hitler. Like so many of his generation he was haunted by memories of the First World War, and Hitler at that date was still taking care to show nothing but good will towards Britain...

So why shouldn't you do this in your novel, if it suits the project? As ever, if you do it badly people will tell you not to do it. If you do it well, unless they're specifically looking for PoV "mistakes", they may not even notice. One thing that will help, though, is if you keep that memoir example in mind. If you build the novel as narrator-Evelyn telling us What Happened Last Year When I was Young, then it's easier to get the reader to believe things that character-Evelyn couldn't have known. The other thing that will help is looking hard at the next part of this series, where I discuss Privileged Narrators, because that's what we're talking about here: the fact that because this character-narrator is telling a story of what's already happened, they do have priviliged knowledge that they didn't have while it was happening.

IT MAY NOT BE THE NARRATOR'S STORY

Of course, a character-narrator may not be telling a story about themselves, but one about someone else. The peerless example of this is The Great Gatsby. Narrator Nick Carraway is in the story; who he is and why he's telling it is mildly important to the plot, but very important in our experience of the whole story. The story from another character's point of view might chart some of the same events, but it would have a very different effect on the reader. And most people forget that the narrator of Wuthering Heights is a character-narrator: Mr Lockwood, and within his is another character-narrator, Nelly Dean, and between them they put together the story of Cathy, Heathcliff, and the poisoned generation they gave birth to. These narrators' personalities shape the story - it couldn't be otherwise - but they're not the central point of it. Which is proof - if you needed it - that we don't need to be inside a character's viewpoint to care about them.

Next: External Narrators

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 1: the basics

Point of View seems to get more aspiring writers in more of a fuss than almost any other technical issue... with the inevitable result that there's also more nonsense talked about it, and more prescriptive "rules" bandied about, than almost any other technical issue. I've even heard "first person" described as a point-of-view, which is a category error.

But it's not, actually, that complicated to understand the basics, so this is the first of my fourt-part breakdown of the issues, for you to decide for yourself how you're going to handle it. And, indeed, many writers handle PoV naturally and well from the start, so don't worry if you haven't ever thought about it. Maybe - just maybe - you don't need to. Having said that, most aspiring writers do need to think about it, because most aspiring writers do let their writing down by handling it badly. First, let's clear the decks a bit.

WHAT IS POINT OF VIEW in writing?

All novels are written by people, about people (even when they're apparently about animals), so let's start there. Any human being can perceive certain things through their senses, and not perceive others: human consciousness is the basic filter between real life, and the words on the page. As visual animals we talk about 'view', but it encompasses all the six senses: we can't physically see behind our own head; we can smell the bakery next door to us in Brixton; we can't hear a song being sung in China.

In writing (as in the rest of life), this idea of what a particular human can, and can't, perceive widens, to include how they understand it, how it makes them feel, what else they know about the world, what they think of it all, and what they say and don't say about it. So: I and my husband can both smell the bakery.

But because I'm pregnant the smell makes me feel sick, and because I don't want to be pregnant that makes me angry, but I don't say that because I haven't told my husband I don't want to be pregnant. Whereas my husband had a beloved uncle who was a baker, so the smell makes him feel happy, but also child-like and nostalgic, which makes him look forward to the baby's arrival. Two totally different experiences of the same phenomenon.

And another: my best friend Jane thinks that the world would be better if we gave up eating wheat, so the smell reminds her to write another article, and the thought of the fee makes her decide to take her partner out to a (wheat-free) dinner, except that she knows they'll end up having a row about whether to give up keeping a car, given that they desperately need the money for infertility treatment, which she hasn't told me about yet. All these perceptions, and more, together reveal various truths about human beings and bread, and about each of our selves.

But, crucially, no human being can truly experience another human's consciousness - their thoughts, their feelings. We cannot, actually, see the world through their physical or mental eyes. I can only know that the smell makes Jane want to write another article if she tells me, although I can guess it (because I know her of old), or deduce it (because she gives a loud sniff and then dashes to the computer and starts a new document called wheatismurder.doc). But I could be wrong in what I guess or deduce, and when it comes to fiction, the reader knows it.

YOU ARE THE STORYTELLER

Everything in a story is told through one human consciousness: every story has a teller each time it's told, and this time the storyteller is you. In your novel, at bottom you are always the storyteller because you invented this story, and its your mind and personality which shapes it. And because it's your imagined story, within the basic lie that this stuff never happened but you're writing as if it did, you can get as close as you like to the objective truth of this story and the world in general. You can enter the consciousness of as many of your characters as you choose to, and tell things which none of them perceive, in ways none of them would think. You can't, actually, get away from the power you have to make this story whatever you want.

BUT WHAT KIND OF NARRATOR ARE YOU USING TO TELL THIS STORY?

However, as the storyteller you may also choose to form your story by being selective in what and how you choose to tell: to give up some of the power you have to know and tell everything. I think this is most easily understood if you think of creating a narrator who is an entity separate from you, and one you create specifically for this novel. The narrator's is the consciousness which filters the events of the story, and expresses them in some ways, and not in others.

And of course that narrator may be a character within the story. Any narrator may be very knowledgeable about the events and characters they're telling, or extremely subjective, or honest but limited in their understanding (Inadequate Narrator). They may even be a liar (Unreliable Narrator).They may be highly visible, addressing the reader directly, or with a very strong voice which is different from any character's. Or they may be almost invisible: a near-neutral transmitter of the action, like a fly-on-the-wall cameraman. Although, of course, what is filmed and what footage ends up in the final cut is where the narrator's point of view can't help but be revealed, even when they're trying to appear neutral.

So the fundamental question, in talking about Point of View, is actually, Who Is Telling This Story, and where do they stand in relation to the events? If it's a character who experiences the events of the story we call it an internal narrator: Jane Eyre tells her own story, for example, from shortly after the novel ends. If it's some person or entity who has no part in the action it's an external narrator, such as the narrator who for convenience we call "Henry Fielding" (who may be a rather different entity from the mid-18th century magistrate who wrote stories in his spare time) telling the story of Tom Jones at an indeterminate period after Tom gets his happy ending.

Of course, in taking on a particular point of view the narrator's voice may stay very much itself, telling  the reader about what a character is seeing or feeling as the teller of a fairy tale tells us that Snow White's stepmother is jealous. Or the narrative may take on a flavour of the voice and opinions of the character concerned, in free indirect style. If the narrative goes right in to give us a character's interior monologue and physical perceptions as they occur, it becomes stream of consciousness and the sense of a narrator almost disappears altogether. Thinking in terms of psychic distance, then, the closer in to an individual character's consciousness the narrative gets, the more the character is present and the more their voice dominates, and the more the narrator and their voice fade out.

So in the rest of these posts about Point of View and Narrators we should remember that questions of voice are closely involved in decisions about point of view, and they work together in the effect of the story on the reader. But they're not the same thing.

And one last, preliminary point. It's true that getting deep inside the point of view of a character (whether they're the narrator, or courtesy of an external narrator who takes you there) is the way we become most intimately involved with them. But it's entirely possible for us to be engaged with a character whose point of view we're never admitted to, and indeed we should be: we should care about what happens to the MC's children, or the villain's elderly mother. Their fate does matter hugely to our overall experience of the story. After all, if we couldn't care about character unless we could enter their consciousness we'd never care for a single character on stage or film. Come to that, if we could never engage with a character whose consciousness we couldn't enter, we'd never fall in love with a partner, children, or care about a friend. The viewpoint characters are our representative in the world and events of the story, and it's through them that we experience it. But that doesn't mean we can't or won't mind about the others.

Next post: Part Two: Internal Narrators

How don't you do it?

One of the things about becoming an author is that people start asking you for opinions and advice. But I've sometimes heard an author saying or writing things about How to Write (as opposed to How I Write, which is different) which have made me think, "Oh, help! I hope no one here thinks it's the only way, and/or the ticket to success!" That's not because I write better, or sell better, than whoever's talking. It's because I know that there are other ways than the one they've just described. The opposite is also true.

I know of one aspiring writer, now published, who claims blithely that he 'never plots.' But he has a powerful, instinctive grasp of plot; as the sentences grow across the pages there's a mental dance of instinct: "X... no Y, with a bit of Z... no, A would be better, yes, we're off again". If you don't have that instinctive plot monitor, say - and lots of writers who are good in other ways don't - then it's probably wise to do some conscious plotting and planning fairly early on, or you're likely to find that you're 30k words across a soggy marsh of nice but pointless writing, and sinking fast.

The opposite is also true: it's easy enough to say "You must plan before you write a word" if your sure and certain instinct will always tell you when you should abandon the plan because the scaffolding has become a strait-jacket. But that sends a lot of aspiring writers wrenching their characters about as miserably as the writer wrecking good prose to get rid of the word was; they can't yet hear that still, small voice of warning, or they hear it but don't have the confidence to heed it.

I think that whether or not each of us formalises advice/opinion giving into some kind of teaching/lecturing/workshopping, as soon as anyone gazes at our book in our hand and wants to know how they can get there, it behoves us all to acquire the mindset of the good teacher. What good teachers know is that in their subject, there were things they were always good at. Those things came naturally and they didn't really have to think about how to get them right. My two sisters have four Maths A Levels between them. They are both teachers but, asked to explain something mathematical to O Level Emma, Carola will explain it as algebra, Sophia as co-ordinate geometry; each reaches for her own most natural way of expressing the same concepts. But good teachers know that even a good student can have a completely different set of natural talents from their own, and both Sophia and Carola could use the other system to explain, if I looked as if it would make it clearer to me.

So what's stupid to the point of cruelty-to-aspiring-writers, I think, is to take "your own most natural" way as the only way, and transmit it as that. "Just write", says the author blithely from the platform, not understanding how inhibited many potentially good beginner writers feel, either because they believe they need to "understand grammar", or because they don't feel entitled to be heard. "Learn your craft first," says another author, just as blithely, not realising that for many writers, technique-consciousness may prevent them from ever daring to put a word on the page, so it needs to come later, once they've got some confidence by writing whatever comes into their head, and shaping it with nothing but instinct.

Which is why, if you're likely to find yourself talking about How To Write, I think you should get to grips with How You Don't Write... But Others Do. Forums are hugely useful for this: one aspiring writer member of WriteWords, say, asks about how to handle a daunting report's-worth of revisions, and ten published and ten unpublished writers will talk about what they do and why. Our processes are all subtly or hugely different from each other, plus many of us will add in things we've seen work for others. Offered a bunch of possible tools, anyone with any creative and writerly DNA at all is much more likely to be able to sense what's likely to be right for them.

Reading threads like that has been a huge education to me as a teacher. So if you hear me talking about How I Don't Write, it's not because I don't want to give away my trade secrets. It's because I know that the opposite is also true.

The centipede, the shape-sorter and being Martina

My name is Emma, and I am a technique geek.

Not that that's any surprise to anyone who's been reading this blog for more than about five minutes. But every now and again, when I've been unpicking/listing/analysing something about how writing and writers work, someone says, "I dunno. I don't think like that, I just do it on gut instinct." Which of course we all do, much of the time, before, during and after that central process of moving from total beginner to adequately competent writer.

The thing is, although I find being geeky about creative work fascinating, I think the chief value of talking technical is actually to train your gut instinct so you don't have to think technical when you're writing. When a tennis player is waiting to serve in a match, and she wants to put the ball in say the extreme RH corner, she isn't thinking, "Now I must turn my wrist a bit this way and lift my shoulder a tad higher and toss the ball to the left a bit more..." She's thinking "I must put the ball over THERE", and her body obliges.

All the stuff about wrists and shoulders happened in practising: separating out the toss, the set of the shoulders, the racquet, the topspin, then putting it all together in serve after serve, long before there's anyone on the other side of the net. Over and over again the connection between the bit of the brain that says "ball over there", and the muscles, is re-fired until we're hardly aware it's happening. It's how we learn most things: a toddler first tries to put the cube in the shape-sorter by jamming it at every hole, then works out the right hole but tries the cube at random angles to the square hole till it happens to drop through, then learns to turn it to be square to the hole. And finally an older child just 'puts it in', with the mind-hand operating below conscious thought.

And when a coach (or writing teacher) says "Martina's naturally gifted" it means that there's already a very open connection between the thought of where the ball goes, and the bodily-arrangements that make it happen. Other players aren't so naturally gifted in some ways, but intelligence and perseverance make up for that, with lots of practice of the individual elements so that the mind-body learning all comes together.

I entirely sympathise with anyone for whom talking technique makes them feel like the centipede who walked perfectly well till someone asked him if he started with his right foot or his left, and he got in such a muddle he died of brain fever. And I always warn students that if they've always worked purely by gut, then they may have an ugly duckling phase before all this technique beds down into intuition. And of course you'd go nuts if you subjected every possible next word to conscious interrogation. Talking technique is about isolating individual things so that the intuition is trained.

And even in techie-talk, it's all about intuition - about sensing the whole not just the parts. Psychic distance sounds highly technical when I explain it, but it's also extremely intuitive. I don't need to explain the difference between "a large man stepped out into a snowstorm" and "Snow! Inside your collar, down inside your shoes": students can feel it. And when I ask them to write their own version they may do it well or less well, but it's intuition which controls things, and if they feel something's not right (or someone else says it could be better) their word-hoard is tilled over by their sentence-tractor until it turns up what they recognise (intuition again) are better words for what they're trying to do. And gradually you'll find that, just as once upon a time you slowly stopped having to worry about how each word should be spelled, and regained your capacity to tell stories, the right words for the most effective psychic distance for this moment tend to hit the page first strike. Not always, of course. But more often.

Geekery helps later, too. By developing your capacity to see particular aspects of how writing works on their own, you're not only better-placed to know what to do when something you've written just seems very un-engaging. You're also better-equiped to cope with feedback which says oh, so helpful things such as, "It seems very claustrophobic and confusing" and, "I just didn't believe in her grief". It seemed all right to you, so how do you set about curing it? Your intuition may answer, "I'll open it out," and "I'll go deeper in". Or you may think "Those might both be psychic distance things". But either way, it was the original bout of geek-think, and a bit of practice first in isolation and then in with everything else, which gave you the tools to know the answer.

Flashing, slipping and mixing things up

One of the most useful dicta (I won't say "rules" because there are no rules) I came across early in teaching myself to write was "start as near the end as possible". It was a propos short fiction, and of course it's not really as simple as that, but there's a lot to be said for remembering it in novel-writing too. Later I came across the thriller-writers' dictum "Get in late and get out early", which is the same idea and equally sort-of-true (see here for a discussion of the "getting out" bit). And I usually find that students' MS have much more explaining of backstory and past history than they need, and it's quite rare to have too little. As so often, you needed to think all that out to write it, but we don't need to read it

But where does that leave you with the bits of What Happened Before which we really do need? The crucial underpinnings of feeling and thinking on which the events of Now are built: the lost relationship with the sister which has brought your MC back to their childhood home; the bullying at school which destroyed his confidence and so is wrecking his marriage; the difficult, lovable, hated parent who's now dying slowly in your spare bedroom. How do you convey that stuff?

If you have an external narrator - a knowledgeable entity, a storyteller, with privileged access to any amount of information and any number of heads - there's nothing to stop you simply narrating the necessary knowledge. That might be the best way for plain, fact-y facts, of course. As I was exploring here, sometimes Telling/Informing is the best way. But what if important past events need Showing/Evoking? What if you need bits of the past to have full emotional punch? We're talking flashbacks, aren't we.

The usual way to insert a chunk of Before is simply to write the bloomin' thing, slipping from simple past to past perfect until the reader's established in Before, and then making all our lives easier by switching to simple past for the rest of the passage:

Jane looked at the estate agent's details. The house was bright and new, with plastic windows and a York stone drive. It used to be so scruffy, all weedy gravel and paint peeling off the walls. Her father had raged about the chaos almost every day, but he had never done anything; it was as if he had used up all his energy in anger. And then one day he grabbed a palette knife from Mum and attacked the bit by the back door, hacking and hacking until there was a great hole, and shouting all the time. Jane started to cry, and then Mum scooped her up and carried her out of the house and down the drive ... It was all a long time ago, of course. Now, the house cost far too much. Jane dropped the details into the bin.

Note "It used to be so scruffy,", which leads the reader into the Before, and "It was all a long time ago", which brings the reader back to Now. And note how the narrative takes advantage of free indirect style to let the voice takes on a shade of child-Jane, in the Before sections. Of course experienced readers can cope without these leads if you make the break between Now to Before clear: a double-line space and a block of simple-past narrative of Before can do the job perfectly well. Then there's the present-past option (which I explored in more detail here), which is essentially the same with all the tenses up-graded by one.

Jane looks at the estate agent's details. The house is bright and new, with plastic windows and a York stone drive. It used to be so scruffy, all weedy gravel and paint peeling off the walls. Her father raged about the chaos, but he never did anything; it was as if he used up all his energy in anger. And then one day he grabbed a palette knife from Mum...It is all a long time ago, of course. Now, the house costs far too much. Jane drops the details into the bin.

But of course it's true that we don't remember in tidy blocks, we only remember the things which were significant. That needn't matter: a narrative isn't the same as a person remembering or even experiencing. Flashback is a narrative technique, not a reproduction of how people actually think, and that's fine. You just need to make sure that you teach your readers from the beginning that this is how the book works and this is how to read it. Make sure the first few jumps are particularly clear - give the reader enough hand-holds, as my editor says, and help it along with changes in the voice - and then you can trust they'll come with you.

But the point about how people remember does lead us into more interesting territory. Your character Now has a relationship with that past so we could stay aware of Jane Now, even as we're also admitted to her Before. Think about how you might write a memoir in first person. Would you write it like a straightforward novel, evoking the experience of this child who happens to share your name? Or would you keep you-as-adult present? Would you explain or comment on the child's experience? Would you fill in things the child can't know? How do you connect you Then to you Now? Now transmute that understanding into using Jane's Now to channel Jane's Before, and keep an eye out for words like "now" and "one day", which act as hand-holds:

Jane looks at the estate agent's details. The house is bright and new, with plastic windows and a York stone drive. Surely it used not to be like that? Yes, it used to be scruffy. As a teenager she saw it suddenly through the eyes of friends she brought home: all weedy gravel and paint peeling off the walls. But when she was small, she didn't notice. It was just home, the way things are to children. She heard her father rage about the chaos almost every day, but she didn't really understand it, and he never did anything; now, Jane wonders if he used up all his energy in anger. And then one day he grabbed a palette knife from Mum and attacked the bit by the back door, hacking and hacking until there was a great hole, and shouting all the time. Jane started to cry and then Mum scooped her up and carried her out of the house. The drive seemed very long that day, even though it was only actually thirty yards or so; a maple leaf came swirling down and landed on her tummy where she was bent in the middle in Mum's arms. But she can't remember how old she was, although she must have been heavy: too old to be carried except in an emergency. Her feet can still feel the sting of gravel under bare feet as her mother finally put her down. What was her mother thinking? Was she afraid for them? There is no knowing, now. And it is all a long time ago, of course. Now, the house costs far too much. Jane drops the details into the bin.

You'll notice that despite my reservations about solidly present-tense narrative, Now is present tense here, because it's a real help in keeping the reader with you as the narrative slips to and fro in time (as I did so much in A Secret Alchemy here, for example). Of course it would be perfectly possible to do this as simple-past and perfect past, but even this post is going to have to stop somewhere so I'll spare you the demo.

There are real riches to be had, in handling Before in this sort of way. It's much more fluent, for one thing. Instead of having to grab your reader by the hand so that you can move into the flashback - or jumping without a hand so that you're relying on the reader to hang onto your coattails - you have the reader by the hand all the time. Jane's thinking Now can connect apparently unconnected bits of Before, rather than them being chopped-up scraps on their own. That's not just about fluent storytelling, either. Jane is acting as the narrator (or perceiver might be a better word) of her own past, connecting bits of Now to bits of Then as we all do to make up a single human life. This is what I was getting at, in 17 Questions to Ask Your Novel, with "Where does your narrator stand... relative to the events of the novel?".

What's more, the more conscious we are of Jane Now as the perceiver of Before, the more we're aware that she may be inadequate or unreliable as a lens on the past. That paradoxically widens our sense of the world of that past: we might see things beyond Jane's perceptions. And since it's Before which is powering Now, keeping the two in relationship makes the drive within Now much more powerful. In Past and Present Tense I was arguing that in many ways past tense has more drive (contrary to so much that the stupider CW pundits say), because it keeps up the pressure of the past behind the present. I'd suggest that it's true of the temporal structure of your novel, too. Try it on a story, if you don't want to risk it in the WIP till you're more confident. Some of my most successful stories started as exercises: yours might too.

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PS If you came to this post via Twitter and a link from my @itchofwriting persona, you might want to know that I'm not tweeting from there any more, but consolidating it with @emma_darwin. So if you'd like to keep up with what's going on here, do follow @emma_darwin, and you can be sure you'll hear as soon as a new post goes up, and of course any other news, trivia or argument about writing that's occurred to me...