As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.
First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. I’ve always hated them. But Ma thinks they’re good for what ails you, so whenever I’m sick, I get pickled beets.”
A lot of people jump straight to first-person when they start writing, because it looks easy. For quite a while, first-person was so over-used by beginning writers that it got a really bad reputation as something only an amateur would try. There are still traces of that around, some places.
But first-person isn’t as easy as it looks, and there are a lot of possible varieties. “Plain” first person is the most common — something written as if the reader is riding along in the narrator’s head. There’s the subtly different form in which the narrator is writing everything down immediately after the fact (or years later). Then there’s the as-told-to, where the first-person narrator is telling the story to someone (possibly the reader; possibly another character) and the reader is listening in. Diaries, letters, memoir, stream-of-consciousness – all different formats requiring slightly different approaches, but all first-person.
The thing that’s most difficult for a lot of writers to grasp about first person is that they are not the putative narrator. When I say “I did this or that” in normal everyday life, I mean me, the person currently sitting here typing. But when my first-person narrator says “I did that,” the “I” doesn’t mean me-who-is-typing. “I” means the character.
This is so obvious that to most folks it goes without saying. But if one doesn’t say it or think it or pay attention to it, one is likely to find that habit takes over. All my life, “I” has meant me-who-is-typing, and that’s a lot of habit to overcome. It’s no wonder that a lot of first-person narrators sound (and think and act) a lot like their authors. (It is also no wonder that a lot of readers leap to the conclusion that anything written in first person is autobiographical, or at least reflects the writer’s opinions and errors of knowledge, rather than the character’s — but that’s a rant for another time.)
It can help to pick a first-person narrator who has a strong voice of their own — one that is unlike the author’s natural voice. It can also help to pick a character who is significantly different from the author in some way — age, sex, ethnicity, ability/disability, etc. But these things only help if the author thinks about them and the ways they’ll affect the character’s voice and opinions and attitudes; when the author doesn’t think, you get the young black woman protagonist who sounds oddly like a middle-aged white author (and who more than half the readers don’t even realize is black until nearly the end of the book. If then.)
A strong voice helps because first-person is written in the voice of the character — in a lot of the varieties, the narrative is supposed to sound like dialog, like the viewpoint character telling you the story. A question always comes up when the viewpoint character has an accent or uses dialect or pidgin as their normal speech pattern, because it is a writing truism that too heavy a hand with dialect or phonetic respelling can make something almost unreadable (the poetry of Robert Burns, anyone?).
But dialog in any book isn’t an accurate transcript of the way people really talk. Dialog leaves out the ums and ers and most of the sentences that trail off into nowhere and a lot of the digressions and speech tics that happen in real life conversations. It’s a model of the way people talk…and first-person narrative is even more so.
When you’re writing first-person, you are inside that character’s head (or nearly) all the time. People don’t sound to themselves as if they have an accent. Inside their heads, that’s just how everyone talks. I’m not the one with the accent; it’s my friends from the deep South, from New England, from Scotland who have regional accents. The French I speak in my head sounds just fine to me; it’s everyone else who knows instantly from my accent that I’m a native English speaker. So a writer can skip most of the phonetic respelling aspects of doing accent in narrative, which instantly makes everything a lot more readable, and stick with word order and idiosyncratic word choice to convey the narrator’s speech patterns. (This also works well in many cases for the dialog of characters other than the narrator who have accents.)
I quite enjoy both reading and writing first person and yeah, it’s not that easy. When I do it, I usually do choose someone who is completely unlike me because it does make it easier to stay away from I-who-is-typing.
A converse pitfall into which I’ve tumbled in the past, is that of thinking oneself too far into a very strong first-person narrative voice, whose agenda is not mine as the real-world author.
The protagonist of one of my favourite Unfinished Tales is a fair raconteur and writes a good memoir – in his world, it would be pure dynamite. When I hit his voice in the course of a flippant Usenet posting, and found the gates of story flung open in consequence, I was delighted.
I was somewhat less delighted several months later, when I discovered that though I was trying to write a Subverted Fantasy Trilogy, he was at best writing something a lot more like Cider with Rosa Lugburz. The angle of attack is all wrong for a reader who lives outside the fiction.
I know what the problem is – I created the guy as a narrative viewpoint, and I got his narrative agenda for free. The one is essential, and the other is essentially a pain in the posterior. But I still don’t know how to get one without the other.
My latest first-person narrator is a hard person to write about because she’s highly educated and uses more formal language than my past heroines. I keep staring at my computer going, `I should’ve stuck with impoverished peasants. Why, oh why, did this story have to be about a Princess?’ It’s amazing how much the narrator’s education and station in life affects their voice.
Gray – Keeping viewpoint characters under control is always hard, if you get really into their heads. It’s just easier for a lot of us to get really into their heads when writing first-person. Getting yours to do what you want…well, a lot depends on your process. If it were me, I’d probably do a fair amount of plot-planning in advance, so as to be able to steer “what happens next” in the right direction with some reliability, and then reconsider all the digressions during a very difficult and protracted revision phase. Some folks can’t work that way, though; if you’re one, I’m not sure what to suggest.
Chicoy – You’re right – education and social class affect a character’s syntax and word choice and speech patterns a lot. Impoverished peasants aren’t really any easier than princesses in that regard, though. It’s the distance from your own natural voice (and from whatever social class of character you’re used to writing) that makes it hard. Which is all to the good, in my opinion; I am very much in favor of stretching!
My latest writing fad has been tight third-person, which is basically first person in disguise. It’s very stream-of-consciousness. I haven’t decided if I like it better or worse than first person yet. Personally, the hardest viewpoint to write for me is the one where the author is basically a camera in the middle of the scene reporting what happens. There are a lot fewer chances to get inside the character’s head, so I had to describe their thoughts and emotions by posture and movements while keeping up the narrative flow. (ie, i get too wordy sometimes). It was hard.
My favorite first-person viewpoint story is told by this 16yr old kid who discovers hes a Prince. That was a lot of fun, except he’s a nerd and he likes history so there’s pages of his kingdom’s history as he learns it. It’s sort of like a history book told from first person. *I* think it’s interesting.
Pat @ 4 – I had an outline. The protagonist kept subverting it. Since it’s in large part a story about a guy who can regularly out-stubborn and out-invent all the unsolicited narratives in which very powerful people keep trying to cast him, it was very difficult to stop him doing the same thing to mine. At least, without making him another and far less interesting character.
As for revision… suffice it to say I’ve tried everything up to and including having the local equivalent of Tolstoy novelize his memoirs in-world. She is fascinated, and she has the right agenda, but it doesn’t work – and not just because I ain’t no Tolstoy.
There’s not really a lot of point in going into deeper detail on that particular work, but a couple of more general thoughts are coming out of this:
1) There’s a distinction between making the character do what I want (in the story) and making them do what I want (in recounting it). In the former case, I can sort of manipulate them by making different things happen around them – plot control. The latter is much harder to manipulate without changing who they are.
Therefore, it seems to follow that by changing my vision of why my viewpoint character would be telling the story afterwards, I ought to be able to monkey with the manner of the telling. H’mmm! I’m not sure how they’d dodge that.
2) I also now wonder if I’m not blaming the wrong thing. Maybe the granularity and handwave-level at which my plot and larger world make sense, is just much coarser than the one at which my narrator makes sense of life. In that case, the problem would simply be that I couldn’t have both that sort of world and that sort of viewpoint character – that it is, frankly, too insubstantial to take his weight.
So he necessarily reacts by only engaging properly with those aspects of his world which have enough ‘there’ there… Oh dear. That has a horrid plausibility about it. Perhaps I need to start building that world anew, this time from him outwards.
Implicit frame-story manipulation of first-person telling – check. Providing first-person narrator with the right sort of footing for the kind of viewpoint I want him to have – check.
I must go away with these tools and think about what I could do with them. Thank you. Even if the tale in question remains stuck, this has been extraordinarily useful.
Acco_aqualung – Camera-eye is hard to pull off, especially the longer it goes. Oddly enough, changing it to work the other way can be much harder than you’d think…as I discovered when I was novelizing the Star Wars scripts. Every viewpoint type has advantages and disadvantages, and I’ll get to all of them eventually.
Gray – Happy to have been the occasion of usefulness. I think that many times, just the act of articulating a writing problem so that someone else will really understand it is what makes the solution clear. I mean, I didn’t say anything much, really. You did it all yourself.
Pat @ 7 – What you say about the articulation of problems is very true, so far as it goes. Nonetheless, I think that when somebody has been the occasion of usefulness sufficiently often for sufficiently many people, they are in some danger of being convicted of usefulness on their own account!
Gray – OK, fine, be that way! 🙂 At least I can reasonably claim that you will have to do all the work of actually writing the stuff!