There's More to Point of View Than They, You, and I

Narrative perspective is a matter of focus and distance

A new installment from MFA Lore*

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Yes, writers, narrative “point of view” does refer to the First-, Second-, or Third-person voice telling a story. And yes, that can be a complicated choice with a lot of hidden challenges and consequences. But point of view also refers more broadly to your authorial vantage point. And in that sense, it’s even more nuanced.

Imagine that you, the author, are the camera lens trained on your story. Where are you positioned in relation to the action? Long lens, or closeup? Are you using a wide shot encompassing a crowd or landscape, or a tight focus on one face or detail? What exactly can the reader see through your words? And how many other senses do those visuals evoke?

Your narrative point of view will shift throughout the story, just as the lens typically changes position while shooting a movie. And just like a cinematographer, you need to control each and every one of those shifts. Be aware at all times of where you stand and how you’re focused — and whether this point of view is delivering the impact and information you’re aiming for. [For many more insights into this whole business, get your hands on The Conversations, by cinematographer Walter Murch and novelist Michael Ondaatje.]

Even if you favor ideas and exposition, narrative distance matters. An overview from 30,000 feet may deliver broad analysis and generalization, but it’s likely to bore your readers and leave them skeptical of your conclusions unless you also provide nitty gritty evidence, which you can only get by taking deep dives into the granular details of your subject, preferably through scenes and dialogue. Whether your “characters” are animal, vegetable, mineral, or numbers or tech, you’re writing for humans, and humans think, read, and interpret information through the framework of story. Unless they can see it play out in their mind’s eye, they’re not likely to trust or remember what they’re told. This means that journalists, too, need to orchestrate the focus of their narratives as if they were shooting a movie.

This problem of distance and focus was often a central theme in my MFA letters. Here, then, are some of the observations and advice I’ve shared with my students.

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Focus

Your camera lens is static and set too far from the main action.  We need to feel that we are in the room, either with your subjects, or else with you (the narrator), as at your end of the phone line. To make a story dynamic, you need to orchestrate your focus, judiciously controlling when you move in close, turn sideways, pull back, and shift between characters’ POVs. If you don’t adjust the focus, your story will have the quality of video from a security camera. The trick is to make each focal shift intentional and ensure that the reader can always track the narrative position. Control of the lens is as critical in writing as it is in film.   

Craft your moments to reveal the narrative perspective.  I’m a perfectionist, so it doesn’t seem that odd to me if a character makes 6 trips to the paint store (or 60 drafts of a book) to finish the job.  If you want to convince me that a character is truly eccentric or unhinged, then you need to cherry pick examples of behavior or depict them in such a way that all readers will buy in to your perspective.  A friend once told me of a woman who spent the night on a stranger’s houseboat and stayed up all night redecorating – moving every lamp, every picture, every book.  She proudly told the houseboat owner, honestly believing that she had done a wonderful thing – and was dumbfounded when the owner, furious, insisted she restore every furnishing to its original position. That’s a story, I think, that conveys genuinely abnormal behavior — in fact, a bipolar high.

Revision tip: The imperfect tense – would do xyz— is useful in transitions and to get you into a scene, but if habitually used, it turns everything into a blur. One way to heighten your focus is to go through and mark all the past imperfect verbs, and for each use see if a particular moment comes to mind, then replace the imperfect reference with that moment, mined for all it’s worth. Make it come alive as if it is happening right now, blow by blow.  Jo Ann Beard’s memoir, The Boys of My Youth offers a cornucopia of immediacy examples.

Orientation

Turn the lens outward. As author, you are the camera. You watch the world, you reflect on it, but if you turn that lens directly on yourself or your narrator, your readers are likely to lose interest, finding self-scrutiny tedious and suspect. And yes, this applies “even” in memoir. The best way to write about yourself or your POV character is through indirection, by writing what you observe about others. What did you think as you watched the little boy in aisle 2 stuffing a Mars bar into his waist band?  What about those old suffragettes at your mother’s party?  Or the anonymous ex-wife visiting your father in the emergency room? Those are the thoughts that will show us — indirectly — the narrator’s identity and perspective. So there’s no need to explain or tell us explicitly what you or your narrator feel behind the lens, because we already know.

Play it like a scene. Orient your readers to the setting through your perspective in the moment. Do not tell us that you “fell in love with the land.” Introduce us to that land by slowing down and taking us on a tour.  Give us a lovely sentence about the archway of trees that you first noticed when you arrived at age 5, then show us what else wooed you. The roll of the hills, fields of purple alfalfa, a view of Holy Hill from the top of the back forty, the secret glade that dipped down to a brook where you could imagine leprechauns living. Signal your five-year-old excitement by showing us how you and your parents reacted – did you clutch each other’s hands, whisper about bringing your relatives to see the place?  And what, exactly was wrong with that house on this beautiful property?  Roaches and blood stains in the bathroom?  A stench of urine in the front hall?  Did you fear that your dad would veto it?  What did you say when he proposed horses and a riding ring? Pull us into the moment through your particular perspective.

Revision tip: Every line in good writing operates on multiple levels – showing us what literally happened; telegraphing what everybody is feeling; working the underlying themes; foreshadowing or delivering the unexpected.  Beware when you are dutifully, literally transcribing exactly what happened without hinting at what was going on beneath the surface. Go through your draft to ferret out those thin lines. Develop them, or cut them.

Reveal perspective through the sparring match of dialogue. Conversation on the page should volley back and forth like a ping pong game.  Each speaker has a distinct point of view that’s anchored by what they want, know, and believe. You want truth; your father wants to deny. He serves lies; you return facts.  Will he beat you?  Will you beat him?  If we see more of his skill than yours, it seems a one-sided game.  And vice versa. The game needs to be lively, meaningful, and unpredictable. Someone has to win each match, if only by a hair, and it can’t always be the same player.

Dig deeply and honestly into your own emotional truths.  They’re the heart of your perspective. Pull that depth forward, so it clobbers us over the head from the first pages.  First drafts often read as if you’re drawing a well-made blanket over a politely sleeping family.  One member of this family is dying, but everybody nevertheless is sleeping.  The blanket only becomes interesting if it starts moving in ways that suggest the bodies underneath it are wrestling, or making love, or smothering, or trying to escape each other…  What gets our attention is the promise of struggle among equals – a good fight with an uncertain outcome.  If your story can’t deliver that, you have no story. And whether you like it or not, you are a central character in this drama, so employ your perspective fully and honestly, grappling with flaws, fears, strengths and all. Don’t let your focus rest on the surface.

Revision tip: Rack focus is a film-making term for shifting depth of field within a continuous shot. It can be used in writing, too. Employ time and age to rack focus. When I was 7, I used to love going to work with my dad at the UN and seeing him proudly and confidently giving daily briefings in his commander-in-chief mode. Fifteen years later, soon after his retirement, I was with him as we drove up to the guard gate and he gave his name, and the guard had no idea who he was – and everything in my father deflated in an instant.  If writing a memoir, I might juxtapose those two experiences – shifting my perspective to show  just how tragic and vulnerable this proud man could be – and how my role as his observer had inevitably changed.  If we live long enough, we trade places with our parents.  We all do.

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