Sunday, September 2: The A.D.D. Detective
POINT of VIEW
by Leigh Lundin
One of the techniques an aspiring writer has to master is ‘point of view’ or PoV: who is telling the story.
Stories, poems, songs, movies are almost always told in one of three ways which we call voice.
- 1st person ("I" pronoun)
- 2nd person ("he, she, they" pronouns from one person’s view point)
- 3rd person omniscient ("he, she, they" pronouns from an ‘above it all’ god-like view point)
We know many by their voice.
- Such authors as:
- A. Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, usually wrote in first person, but occasionally in third.
- Dorothy Sayers often wrote in third.
- Agatha Christie wrote in both.
- Baroness Orczy appeared to write in the third person, but upon occasion revealed the narrator in a first person pronoun.
- Teodor Józef Konrad Na??cz-Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad, belied his Polish roots by writing beautiful prose comfortably in whatever voice the situation required.
- Additionally,
- European kings and queens were noted for using first personal plural; hence the term, ‘royal we’.
- In current times, Presidential candidate Bob Dole was reknown for talking about himself in third person.
Cyber-sex notwithstanding, virtually no one attempts second person beyond the rare avant-garde (and likely doomed) experiment. An unusual example of second person appears in Darby and Grace Slick’s song, Somebody to Love, recorded by The Great Society and subsequently popularized by Jefferson Airplane.
Tears are running ah running down your breast,
And your friends, baby, they treat you like a guest.
Don’t you want somebody to love.
Don’t you need somebody to love.
Wouldn’t you love somebody to love.
You better find somebody to love.
We consider first person singular the most intimate, but there are exceptions. Not only did Dashiell Hammett write his Continental Op series in the first person, we never learn the protagonist’s name. I have done the same for my own reasons: no need for a name arose, so I didn’t bother assigning one.
This troubles some readers. Perhaps it’s like having a coffee with a delightful stranger, and after a stimulating conversation, we discover we never learned their name and perhaps feel slighted.
For quite different reasons, the man-with-no-name Westerns and noir thrillers succeed. Told in third person, the anonymity lends an air of mystery. In the film Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (For a Few Dollars More), this is brought into dramatic relief when we learn the tragedy behind Lee van Cleef’s character.
State of Affairs
A few years ago, I read a Washington insider’s thriller set mostly in D.C. with a finale in a western mine. The plot was fine enough, but the point of view was a mess, a combination of third person and two different first person PoVs. Worse, one of the first person characters was killed next to a dumpster, giving an awkward telling of a death by the person who was dying.
I discussed that novel with author Susan Slater at the time. She speculated that if it wasn’t an oversight by an overworked editor, that perhaps it was part of a trend toward looser writing where action and emotion are paramount at the expense of literary construction.
Writer/editor/teacher Sharon Freeman tells me in contrast, romance writing is highly structured. Although other genres consider first person writing the most intimate, it’s apparently not encouraged in romance novels. Indeed, I’m led to understand that the subgenre called contemporary romance is almost codified around third person. Writers in that field lose points (or respect) if they insist upon writing in first person. I don’t know why this should be so scandalous, but romances aren’t my field of expertise.
The Mystery
The trick of first person writing is not to presume or presuppose what other characters may think or feel. For example, a first person author cannot legitimately say about others, "James thought about killing him and Sally felt bad about it," because the narrator doesn’t really know what’s in James’ or Sally’s minds. Instead, a writer can say, "James appeared to be thinking about killing him and Sally looked depressed about it."
I am fortunate to write in a genre that allows whatever works best in the interest of both story and reader, and to have editors who nurture balanced freedom and structure. In a free market, the readers ultimately decide and both writers and editors strive to forward their interests.
Personal Problem
In one of my early stories, I encountered a PoV quandary. For the most part, the tale was told from the position of the protagonist. However, the final scene of the story– almost entirely dialogue– took place in a garage not only outside the protagonist’s viewpoint, but literally out of her sight. Realism and propriety prevented the heroine being present at the end.
I didn’t want to use third person omniscient because it felt too removed, but when I tried two voices, switching from first person to third at the end, my instructor frowned and suggested I could do better.
A seasoned writer could no doubt have dashed off a grand finale in a flash of brilliance, but it took me a while to come up with a solution. The wrap-up still takes place out of the protagonist’s view and remains virtually 100% dialogue. Now, however, as the heroine exits the garage, her sister punches the intercom button and our protagonist (and we) are able to listen in on the dénouement, which remained untouched.
Although the PoV ‘rules’ initially frustrated me, solving the problem brought satisfaction. I’m convinced that readers can sniff out shortcuts, and my instructor wouldn’t let me take one. For those of us who are still learning to write, it’s crucial we don’t shortchange our characters, our readers, or ourselves.
Among the arrays of books I enjoyed as a boy were the Scarlet Pimpernel stories by Baroness Orczy. In researching this article, I discovered her works, similarly to Doyle’s and Poe’s, have been fondly turned into eBooks at Blakeney Manor. They fund the projects with T-shirts, mugs, and, er, thongs available in their eStore.
If like Blakeney Manor, Criminal Brief should offer T-shirts and thongs, I respectfully propose the modeling not be done by James. Or Steve. Or Rob. Or me.
The POV question is always interesting to me. Just to see how it would work, I put my Mrs. Risk (witch) short story series in third person, restricting the pov to one character: the person in trouble. So the voice most heard in the stories came from that one person (usually someone not seen again in other stories), not the cast of regulars. I didn’t always succeed, but it was fun to do.
Leigh, one of the great mystery stories (in the large sense of mystery) was “A Rose For Emily,” and Faulkner wrote it in first person PLURAL. The narrator was a nameless “we,” representing in a subtle way the whole observing town.
I am reading D.C. Noir at the moment and it includes a rare story told in second person. Kenji Jasper’s story is called “First.” (Shouldn’t it be “Second?”) and while the “you” does feel like a bit of an affectation it succeeds in keeping the reader breathlessly close to the action and allows the narrator to give a real sense of doom that is so important in a real noir story:
“This was no longer about what you wanted. It was about what had to be done…”
The second person narrative voice is really just a variation of first person narrative, similar to the tactic of egomaniacs in speaking of themselves in the third person: nothing more than a bombastic rhetorical device. If you changed the “you” to “I”, you’d end up with exactly the same story. Even the sentences would be exactly the same, except for subject/verb agreement alterations. As I find with most stories told in present tense, tales told in second person POV are usually unbearably precious, self-conscious, and false. POV, like all techniques, has no innate value, but should exist to serve the story, and should never call attention to itself. This is especially true of unusual techniques, which can call attention to themselves by simply existing.
Angela obliquely makes a good point that there are other third person POVs than the omniscient one. Probably the most common one, particularly in mysteries where All Is Not Revealed, is the third person limited, where we share the attitudes of certain characters but not others. The most technically challenging is third person objective, where the narrator relates only what is visible and leaves it to the reader to interpret all internal action from what is externally observed. A good example of it is The Maltese Falcon. (Bill Crider has been justly praised for his mastery of this technique.)
Multiple first person narratives were a favorite technique of Faulkner’s, witnesseth whereof The Sound and the Fury. It is not a rare technique in mystery fiction. Probably its most famous incarnation is in Akira Kurosawa’s landmark film, Rashomon, concerning the investigation into a crime of robbery and murder in medieval Japan. Noble Prize laureate Orhan Pahmuk uses multiple first person voices to great effect in his murder mystery, My Name Is Red, which takes place in the 16th century Ottoman Empire. (Neither Kurosawa nor Pahmuk had scruples excluding the narratives of the dead, either.)
James, the second person has one advantage over the first: if you are trying to suggest that the main character is going to end up dead (as I ssuggested when I talked about the sense of doom above) the second person conveys it more effectively. There are impossible narrator stories that end with the main character dying (my first story in AHMM was arguably one of them) but second person makes it seem like a more likely outcome.
But you’ve got the skill to pull it off, Rob–and you illustrate my point of how technique must serve the story by pointing out a specific circumstance where the second person narrative is appropriate and effective. In most circumstances, though, it’s distracting and unnatural.
I usually loathe present tense fiction, too, but not always–the trick is to use the present tense with an anecdotal, colloquial tone. Cf.:
(a) “I walk to the store. Before I arrive, I watch an expensive car speeding down the residential street. It almost hits a dog, and I think what a careless jerk the driver must be. I’m glad there are no children playing on the street as he passes.”
(b) “So I’m walking to the store, and suddenly some jerk in an expensive car comes barreling down the street and almost hits this poor dog. I mean, this is a neighborhood. Kids play here.”
Both are present tense. Example (a) is stilted and affected, even though it’s constructed of short declarative sentences. Example (b), though, is perfectly natural because of its conversational tone.
Likewise, second person POV requires a highly attuned ear. It is very, very hard to justify and even harder to pull off.
Present tense versus past tense crossed my mind as I was writing this article. I find reading extended passages in present tense tiring, although at least one major mystery writer uses it in her novels.
In college, I wrote a story that used historical flashbacks. It sounds counter-intiutive, but I believed I achieved some success by writing the flashbacks in present tense. Those passages were short, only a few paragraphs long. As a matter of practice, though, present tense just doesn’t “feel” right.
Just a note–the information on first person within the romance field is a bit outdated. There are first person romance novels and they are not thought of as “less than” those told in the third person. However, they are relatively rare because the modern romance novel focuses on the emotional journey of both the hero and the heroine, so telling the story in deep third POV often works best so that the writer can alternate between the two characters, who are both protagonists.
Just thought I’d add that, in case anyone was interested.
Romance’s cousins, chick-lit and women’s fiction, use the first person much more often, because in those books, the focus is on the journey of the female protagonist.
Meant to add that since the link regarding romance went to my blog on the topic, I thought I should elucidate! I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that romance is highly structured moreso than any other genre of commercial fiction. All genres have expectations that need to be met by the writer for the reader.
I’ve found that most romances use deep third POV, which is an offshoot of first person. Very intimate. Personally, while I love to read first person point of view, I prefer to write in third.
Funny, when I read “present tense” I saw “pretense tense,” which is close to the truth in my opinion.
Romance publisher Black Velvet refuses to even consider 1st person novels. I don’t know the rationale behind it and it seems a shame. That’s rigid in my (first person) view.