Viewpoint as a Fix

“Viewpoint fixes everything,” I heard a writer claim at a convention some years back.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “viewpoint” and how you expect to use it to “fix” things.

“Viewpoint” in fiction can mean either the viewpoint character (the narrator, through whose eyes the reader sees the story) or the viewpoint type (whether the story is in omniscient, tight-third-person, stream-of-consciousness, etc.).

Who the viewpoint character is has an enormous impact on the story, even if all the events stay exactly the same. Every character has his/her own problems and background that affect the way they see and react to the main story. It’s easiest to see in short fiction, because the events are generally focused on a single plot thread, but it happens in longer work, too. One of my writer-friends refers to it as “the viewpoint character wrapping the story around themselves and taking off in their own direction.”

Writers have long considered this a highly desirable thing – “It means the characters have come to life,” they say. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Sometimes, a viewpoint character running off with the story means that the story the writer wants to tell isn’t the story that is most important to the character. Sure, the limo driver will be unhappy that her employer’s diamonds were stolen, but what really matters to her – her story – is the effect that suddenly being a suspect has on her custody battle for her three-year-old. That’s what her life revolves around, really. If she’s the viewpoint character, the “win” at the end of the story will be getting custody, getting a new (better) job so she can support herself and her child. Getting her name cleared is just a preliminary requirement for the two things that really matter, and doesn’t necessarily require that she solve the theft.

Of course, a writer who wants the limo driver as the detective will come up with ways of forcing her into that role, but this often feels artificial. The writer may want the main story to be about the theft, with the custody battle as a subplot and/or motivation, but for the character, solving the crime will be a pointless victory if she loses the custody battle. (Unless, of course, the limo driver doesn’t actually care much about the child and is fighting mainly to annoy her ex … but that would make her extremely unsympathetic to most readers, and thus not a terribly good choice for POV character.)

There are a couple of ways to handle this sort of problem. The most obvious one is to change the viewpoint character to one who agrees with the writer that solving the diamond theft is the “win” – nothing else in this story is more important. In a mystery, that usually means someone whose job it is to investigate – the police, a private detective, or a journalist – but there are other people who might have reasons to put catching the thief and getting the diamonds back at the top of their priority list. The insurance agent, perhaps, or a close relative of the diamond owner to whom the stones represent some important family history. In other words, the viewpoint character needs to be someone whose “win” condition is the same as the writer’s.

A slightly less obvious fix can result from changing the type of viewpoint. The custody battle is personal and emotional, and a first-person or tight-third-person viewpoint would emphasize that. A camera-eye or omniscient third-person tends to be less personal and can distance the reader from the central character’s emotions, which might be enough to make solving the theft feel like more of a major “win” compared to the custody battle. Omniscient has the added advantage that the author can tell the reader things the viewpoint character doesn’t know or see, which might include information about the other side of the custody battle. If the reader knows that the limo driver’s ex is about to give up the fight because their new girlfriend hates kids, getting custody won’t be much of a “win” because it’s too easy, even though the limo driver doesn’t know this and is just as panic-stricken as ever. Finding the diamonds becomes more important because the reader knows it’s harder.

Using a multiple-viewpoint structure can have some of the same effect as omniscient without distancing the reader, but it has to be handled carefully. I recently read a novel in which the first five chapters each had a new POV character. The net effect was confusing and disorienting, which I don’t think was what the writer intended. The other difficulty with multiple-viewpoint is the same one we started with: each and every POV character has their own story, and they will wrap their scenes around themselves if given half a chance. If one secondary POV does this, you can call it a subplot; if five of them do it, the novel can start to lack coherence and the plot becomes murky, at best.

The biggest problem with changing the POV character or the type of POV you’re using, though, is that the kinds of problems that viewpoint can fix often don’t show up until the last half of the story. That’s not so bad in a 5,000 word short story, but if you are 70,000 words into a novel, changing the viewpoint is seldom a trivial task. Fortunately, it is also seldom a necessity at novel length. More often, switching viewpoints can be an immensely useful diagnostic tool for the novelist.

Rewriting a problematic scene in stream-of-consciousness, as a letter, or as if your normally-tight-third-person-POV-character were telling it to their grandchildren can give a writer a better handle on how the character sees events. Rewriting first-person into tight-third or omniscient can force the writer to think about what is going on that the first-person narrator didn’t notice or think to mention. Writing a key scene from the POV of a problematic secondary character makes one think about what things look like to them, what their reactions really are, and how they justify their actions.

Nobody really likes doing a lot of extra work, which is what this kind of reworking can feel like. It isn’t extra work, though, not really. It’s more like all the practice sketches that great painters do, trying out different angles and compositions before they commit to a final version.