OK, let’s deal with some questions on Point of View today:
Karen wrote:
Sell your Honda Civic – why? Don’t you know those things run on wishes for centuries? I just hope it wasn’t a hatchback. There’s a black market on them.
So, how many miles did you bury the thing at?
Randy sez: That’s the most “interesting” question on POV I’ve ever had. 🙂 The old Honda ran for 185,199 miles. We were sorry to let it go. We brought my younger two daughters home from the hospital in that car after they were born, and they are now 17 and 13, so it’s been in the family a long time. But it was time.
Christophe wrote:
I’ve heard people talk about close third person POV. I was wondering what the different kinds of POV were in terms of “closeness”. I didn’t see this discussed anywhere so far, not even in Sol Stein’s book. Also, are there certain POV things one should never ever do? (pitfalls so to speak)
Randy sez: I don’t know if there are any standard definitions of the various degrees of closeness when writing POV. But you do have choices, at least in third person.
At one extreme, you can put the camera outside your character’s head and watch him without telling us anything of what he’s thinking. At the other extreme, you can get WAY inside and give us a running stream of consciousness.
I like getting well inside the character’s head, but I try to vary the distance from the character to make things interesting. You can control how close you are to the character by the intelligent use of interior monologue.
With interior monologue, you have several options:
1) You can do what I call shallow interior monologue, in which you paraphrase what the character is thinking, but without working hard to make it sound like the character’s actual thoughts.
2) You can get a bit closer and paraphrase the character’s thoughts, but now using words and thought patterns that are very much the way the character thinks.
3) You can go all the way in and show us the character’s verbatim thoughts (usually in italics, but for longer stretches, it’s better to do this in a normal font.)
Let me give some absurd examples of this with a character we’ll call Jim-Bob, a car thief who is right outside in my driveway trying to figure out if he can steal my new car. In each of these examples, I’ll do SOME interior monologue, interspersed with other stuff.
1) Shallow interior monologue:
Jim-Bob crouched behind a tree in the famous author’s front yard. The Honda sat in a pool of darkness, waiting to be stolen. Only an idiot would park a brand new car out in the driveway with the keys in the ignition. Jim-Bob crawled toward the car.
[Sentence #3 is shallow interior monologue.]
2) A bit deeper interior monologue:
Jim-Bob crouched behind a tree in that dad-gum author’s front yard. The Honda was just beggin’ to be took, layin’ there in the shadows. It took some kind of fool to park a hoity-toity new car right out in the driveway with the keys just janglin’ in the ignition. Jim-Bob crawled toward the car.
[Sentences #1, 2, and 3 all use words taken from Jim-Bob’s vocabulary. Sentences #2 and 3 qualify as interior monologue. They are close to Jim-Bob’s verbatim thoughts, but we can’t know for sure if they are.]
3) Deep interior monologue:
Jim-Bob crouched behind a tree in that dad-gum author’s front yard. That Honda is hollerin’ my name. Best go git it before it decides to holler fer somebody else. Jim-Bob crawled toward the car.
[Sentences #2 and 3 have now been sharpened up so they are definitely Jim-Bob’s verbatim thoughts, and we show this by using italics.]
Interior monologue is a powerful tool for varying the degree of closeness to your character.
Excellent examples, Randy. Thanks. Never thought interior monologue had such distince nuances to it. I used to just mix and match without reflecting on how close I was getting into my character’s head. This opened my eyes a lot!
distince = distinct if you’re typing too fast btw
I’ve been looking at interior monologue in books and in my wip a lot lately. I appreciated an observation Randy made somewhere (where was that?) about someone labeling some text as narrative when it was actually interior monologue. My ears perked up at that. Figuratively of course.
I just cut down & rewrote a page that I had thought was IM, but probably reeked a little of narrative/telling. I tried making the character’s “observations” sound more like they were coming to her in real time, adding some “show” instead of “tell” about her general, overall impression of another person. It may stink even more now, I don’t know. I’ll let it simmer a while and go back and hack on it again.
I like the way W. Dale Cramer handled his third person, single POV character in “Summer of Light”. It seems pretty close; you almost have to do a double take to see if it’s first or third person. Which may be why the guy gets away with lots of contractions. The character’s fairly sarcastic attitude is a steady voice all throughout the book. (And pretty dang funny. I like the way the character mentally Re-Names things/people he doesn’t like, then it/they are referred to that way from then on. The chainsaw chapter had me giggling out loud, and I don’t giggle.)
Is there any rule about how interior monologue fits into MRUs. I imagine that if it’s the actual thoughts you’d want to put it in a reaction, but if it’s distant enough could it also go into a motivation?
My editor keeps telling me that I drop into omniscent point of view, which is “telling” Ii guess, and that the voice changes. Can you help me learn to spot those changes?
Also, I have read that the reason newbie writers are told to stay with one point of view is that it is easier to focus on the main character, and its one less thing to learn while learning to write the first novel.
Charlotte,
I too used to have (and may still have at times) trouble in dropping out of first or third person POV and into omniscient POV. Upon re-reading old stuff, I noticed I tended to do it witout knowing, like it sneaked up on me.
I think that the main thing you have to keep in mind is that if you’re using first and third person POV, you should ONLY write about what that character knows, sees, feels, hears, etc… As soon as you write about something that your character couldn’t possibly know, see, feel, hear, taste or smell than – BAM – you’re out of that character’s POV and into omniscient.
Again, as always, the way I see things.
My current pet peeve: dishonest interior monologue. If I don’t want to let the reader know (yet) much about the character’s true nature, I try to view him/her though other eyes but stay out of their head. But in the novel I recently finished, the writer (we’ll call her DD) has you spend quite a lot of time in Andrew’s head, showing you all the nice friendly things he thinks about friend Richard. Then the kicker at the end of the book is that during this time, Andrew was actually busy trying to kill Richard, steal his wealth and seduce his wife.
Now that’s cheating, and I’m annoyed. Reading the other books, I don’t trust any of the information DD gives me this way, which breaks some of the concentration as I read.
Thanks for those examples, Randy. I haven’t been reading the blog for a little while (only because of other commitments) but I’m glad I did tonight.
A great resource for point-of-view definitions/camera closeness information is Orson Scott Card’s “Characters & Viewpoint.”
Also go back and reread Randy’s discussion on dialog from his newsletter a little while back. There’s a good example of closeness in the Dilbert/Bossbert point of view versions of the dialog.
What ML Equatin said reminds me of an article in the latest issue of “The Writer.” It said to avoid keeping information from the readers to create a false sense of suspense on purpose. As with ML, the reader will never trust that author again.
I keep in mind something Stephen King wrote in his book “On Writing”: Never lie to your readers. They can always tell.
Just finished reading “Hide and Seek”, by James Patterson. (My first Patterson, because he was featured in a recent newspaper article.)
It’s written with alternating POV: first person singular for the heroine, and third person singular for the villain (and mostly at Randy’s level 2 for interior monologue).
The result, for me, was feeling closer to the heroine (which was good; it helps you to root for her) and somewhat more removed from the villain, though one is left feeling uncomfortably close to his thoughts at times.
To keep a character’s real character and motivation from spoiling the surprise (shock) of the ultimate revelation, maybe it would be better not to go into
that character’s POV or head. Instead, maybe it would work to stay in the first character’s POV and let
his/her perception–which can be flawed based on what the tricky character chooses to reveal–present the facade. This would let the actions or the dialog of the “evil” character plant hints of either good or bad, rather than having him think “good” thoughts when his intents are evil.
Speaking of omniscient POVs, I suspect one of the reasons that beginning writers are discouraged from writing multiple POVs is that when using interior monologue, you need a distinct “voice” for each character. It’s easy for them to think like you would phrase things. I’m struggling with that in my WIP. I have several characters and finding a unique voice for each of them is proving difficult, especially the young characters–I don’t think I have ever thought like a child, or at least I don’t remember it. 🙂
However, as a reader, I really prefer the closer IM 3rd person POV. You almost need it to get emotionally involved with the characters. I think a lot of the literary fiction you read in school lacks that and that’s why those books are so hard to read. The narrator (author) is trying to be literary and fails to make you care.
A friend told me that editors really hate italics and we should only use them sparingly. That makes writing internal monolouge difficult.
It’s actually harder to write in only one POV. You have to be more vigilent because it is easy to slip into what everyone is thinking. I’ve read books where I knew what everyone in the whole village thought! And the book was just released last year in CBA. Very frustrating for us writers who are trying to write tight and write well.
I understand your point and examples, but is it okay that I liked number two best? I loved the hoity-toity slang and thought it was fun, and more entertaining than number three.
Jim-Bob is my hero.
No, actually, he’s my cousin.
Yep-I have a cousin named Jim Bob, and he WOULD talk like that (and probably WOULD try to steal your new car if he could figure out how).
Actually, he reminded me of the sainted Sgt. Rizzo in M*A*S*H.
Great examples!
That was an enlightening post. Thanks Randy, I am learning a lot from you.