“How did you decide what viewpoint to use for your first novel?”
I was more than a little bemused by the question, because that is one of many supposedly vital writing decisions that I don’t remember making, let alone angsting over the way the questioner obviously was. I was even more bemused when I figured out that the questioner wasn’t talking primarily about which character should be the viewpoint (though that came into it of necessity), but about whether their first novel should be first-person, some variety of third-person (tight-third, camera-eye, omniscient), or multiple viewpoint (with extra room for angsting about how many viewpoint characters there should be, who they should be, and whether the type of viewpoint should be consistent (i.e., all POV characters should have the same variety of third-person or first person, or whether some of them should be camera-eye and some first-person and some…)
At this point, I held up a metaphorical hand (email emojis just don’t feel the same) and said, essentially, “Whoa, whoa, stop. What is with all these ‘shoulds’?”
Whereupon I was treated to a long harangue on the properties of different viewpoints, and why they might or might not be the “best” choice for a first novel. First-person, I was told, was supposed to be easier to write, especially for character-centered writers, but it might be off-putting for editors. Tight-third was harder to do, but it was better for plotters, even though it was common. Camera-eye was best for pantsers (say, what?) but so was first-person (apparently there was a tie vote for “Best Viewpoint to Use If You Are A Pantser”). Omniscient was supposed to be good for getting literary respect, but it’s really hard. And then there’s multiple-viewpoint…
There was so much wrong with all of that that I spent half an hour just staring at the screen and shaking my head. Every last bit of it takes the enormous, messy landscape of books, readers (under which I include editors, agents, and reviewers), and writers, and tries to section it off into tidy little boxes with clean edges and no overlaps. First-person may be easier for some writers, but it isn’t easier for everyone. Most of the character-centered writers I know have written the majority of their work (including first novels) in some variety of third-person, not first; several plot-centered writers of my acquaintance wrote their first novels (and, in some cases, many subsequent ones) in first-person. No editor I know will turn down a good story because it’s written in the “wrong” viewpoint, or buy a mediocre store because it’s in the “right” one. I’ve known at least two, possibly three, writers for whom omniscient was their natural habitat, and writing anything else was hard. I know readers who love omniscient/first person/multiple viewpoint, and others who hate those viewpoints enough to avoid anything written in them.
“But then how did you decide?” wrote my correspondent, and I could almost hear the wail.
The answer is, I didn’t. When I started writing my first novel, there was no internet and how-to-write books were few and far between. I didn’t know anything about viewpoint except what I’d learned from observing all the books I read. So I knew a lot of what could be done, but I had no idea at all of what should be done. I started writing my first novel in third person because it felt right. The viewpoint slid around because I didn’t know the difference between sloppy omniscient, head-hopping tight-third, and multiple viewpoint, but it wasn’t truly horrible because I’d read enough to have absorbed the idea that the story followed just one or two of the important characters around. I didn’t agonize over which character was the viewpoint, because I knew who the story was about. The scenes that weren’t mostly her viewpoint were plot-important stuff happening in places where she wasn’t (and couldn’t be) present.
In short, when I sat down to write, one viewpoint felt like the way I wanted to tell the story. So that’s what I did.
That kind of merciful ignorance isn’t easy to come by these days, and it’s a two-edged sword at best. Most of the ten-years-later cleaning up that I did on Shadow Magic was tidying up the viewpoint – making it a cleaner tight-third multiple viewpoint instead of the sloppy omniscient I started with. And doing that was a lot of work. It might have made things easier, if I’d known more about viewpoint when I started writing. On the other hand, it might not have – I made the conscious, deliberate decision to write my second novel, Daughter of Witches, from a single viewpoint, and forty years later, I still get pangs, remembering how hard it was and how often I almost gave up. Sloppy omniscient/multiple seemed so much easier.
From this distance, though, I can appreciate that in my first novel, I was learning about plot and pacing and moving things forward. I don’t think I had the mental bandwidth then to do that and figure out how to do a proper tight-third viewpoint at novel length. What I did for viewpoint in my first book was good enough to be going on with while I figure out other things. If I had known more about viewpoint then, I probably would have angsted about it, but I didn’t know enough to worry that I was screwing up that aspect of the story. I just did it.
When one does know more, it’s harder to ignore possible problems and mistakes and just get on with writing (this is, I think, why most of the English majors I have known have had a terrible time writing their first couple of novels – they know too much about what could be going wrong). About all one can do is make the conscious decision that perfection is not the goal. Telling the story is the goal.
I was so set in my limited third-person ways by the time that A Diabolical Bargain showed up that the length surprised me but the point of view went without saying.
My first novel and its sequels were first person because they *had* to be. They were inspired by, homages to, and answer-backs to first person works. I even tested third-person with them and the answer came back “Nope!”
Everything else I’ve written is in third person, including short stories written prior to my first novel. Third person just seems natural to me – and I prefer it as a reader too. So I’ll only write in first person if there’s a *strong* reason to do so.
This has left me with a hardened-arteries opinion about aspiring writers attempting first-person: “It’s a trap! It may look easier or more natural, but it isn’t! If you must write in first-person, do so only because you must, and not because you believe it to be some sort of ‘easy’ or ‘beginners’ mode. That’s a trap!”
My first book was in first person for half a dozen revisions… until I realized that there would be a sequel, and that the sequel would never work in first person. I revised the whole thing into close third and it worked just as well. Since then I’ve written some in first and some in third. I think each story has its best fit, and sometimes it’s trial and error until you find it.
“That kind of merciful ignorance isn’t easy to come by these days,….”
I laughed out loud and said to the dogs, “Oh yes it is!” I was so ignorant that I was finished with a very rough draft before I realized that my main character wasn’t even the protagonist. I recall asking about point of view here b/c I had no clue in what POV my story was told. My favorite ignorant thing was realizing, as I tried and tried to write a blurb, that if there was such a thing as high concept, there must be low concept and sure enough, turns out a defining feature of low concept stories is that they are not easily explainable. What a relief that was!
The book is at the designers right now, and I have no idea how it will be received by a niche in the world. My worry, as I work on the second, is that I’m not as ignorant as I once was. Will that turn out to be a good thing– make all of the rewriting smoother? Or a bad thing– make me too conscience of what I’m doing wrong as I try to hammer it out and make my way to the end of the story?
“Telling the story is the goal.” I’m writing that down.
Was it a story where it was useful to split up the point of view and the protagonist?
I’m not sure if it was useful or not, it just turned out that way! I was doing an exercise analyzing what happened in each chapter and why, and it hit me that though the MC (Missy) takes charge after decisions to act have been made, she was not the character to instigated the decisions. It was almost always another (Aubrey) who had said or done something that forced the issue and moved the story along.
Took a lot of rewriting to straighten that out. But in the end it worked out. Aubrey is the newcomer to the pack (talking dogs) and over the course of the story, she is the one who goes from being a nameless, sweet but ill-spoken stray who doesn’t even think she needs a proper name to a full-fledged member of the pack. None of this is said ‘out loud’ it just happens. Does that make sense?
Thank you for “low concept”. Finally, a way to explain my first novel! 😉
“I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty…”
I write all my novels in first person. Blame Edgar Rice Burroughs, and A Princess of Mars, they must have made too deep an impression. 🙂
I don’t much care for first person, and yet some of my favorite books are in first person. As I writer, I’m definitely in the third-person camp, and yet a non-trivial percentage of what I write comes out in first person — including about half of what I’ve sold. So not only do the boxes not have clean edges, but a single reader or a single writer may hop around from box to box, blithely disregarding the strictures of categorization.
“It felt right” pretty much sums up every writing “decision” I’ve ever made. 🙂
I like epistolary works but I’ve never even tried to write one.
“Telling the story is the goal.” The most lovely and necessary thing. I think writers (or maybe just me) get frightened and overcomplicate their tales with too many “should”s, when really, what they first & foremost need to do is to tell that story in the best way possible, the way it needs to be told, by whatever means necessary to get that done.