Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal VII(a)

It would be wrong to lie to you.

I wasn't all that excited about this week, which is about perspective. Or point of view (you'll see writer-y folk use POV if they love an acronym, which I do not, generally).

How does this differ from last week?! I hear you cry.

Good point.

My feelings are mixed every week. Dread, intimidation, self-doubt. Then a little fist pump at the end. I've put you through a lot.

Also, how is Person different from Point of View?

Nuance, mostly, which hurts a girl's brain of a Sunday. But here we go.

Loosely speaking (we'll get into fine details later), person is just which grammatical position is being used: first (I/me) or third (he/she/they). It tells us how the author is referring to their characters, but not whose head we are in, or where we are in time. (That's verb tense; we did that last week.)

There's second as well (you), which I'm rather fond of, but Le Guin is quite sneering about. ("Every so often somebody writes a story or a novel in the second person under the impression that it hasn't been done before.") Since I'm working on a story at the moment that has a heavy second-person lean, a) ouch! but also, b) I grew fond of the form after reading Fleishman Is in Trouble, so I feel I can save a little face before this particular accusation. Right? Right?

Anyway. Point of View is who will be telling the story, and their relationship to that story: if it's a character in the story, it could be the male or female lead, a secondary character who happens to be there. Or maybe a potted plant in the corner. It could be an omniscient narrator, maybe one who remains cold and removed, never telling you the characters' thoughts and feelings. Or, an involved author, who lets you into each of their creations' inner worlds as they see fit. (These last two are not interchangeable opposites, by the way; more nuance, hooray! We'll tackle it next week.)

I can tell, after all this, you're just dying to know why I wasn't excited for the exercise.

Well, it's really not my favourite decision when writing. It can jam you up in your head. You can realise halfway through that you've picked completely wrong. It's a cursed decision, poisoned chalice nightmare. And I hate it.

Also, readers have opinions. Strong opinions. Things fall in and out of trend. (See: the loathing of first person, and the decline and fall of the involved author after the Victorians "overused" it.) Everything is freighted with meaning and cleverness. Re: earlier potted plant joke, did you think I was kidding. I was not. I read a Flash piece once from the perspective of a painting. I've written one from the POV of a letter.

It's exhausting. Also jargony. Observer-narrator, detached narrator, involved, limited, and how come narrator is not the same thing as author, and oh god I have a headache.

I was not looking forward to learning, inevitably, that there was still more I didn't know.

Still, we beat on, boats against the current...

Exercise Seven: Points of View

Think up a narrative sketch of 200-350 words. It can be anything you like but should involve several people doing something. (Several means more than two. More than three will be useful.) ... Something should happen, even if only a cart tangle at the supermarket...or a minor street accident.

Part One: Two Voices.

First: Tell your little story from a single POV, that of a participant in the event... Use limited third person.

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

BUT WAIT! Lauren, you haven't explained limited third person. No, smarty pants, I haven't.

Limited means when you're trapped (perhaps screaming) in the mind of a single character. No omniscience here, folks. Or, as Le Guin more eloquently puts it: "Only what the viewpoint character knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, remembers, etc., can be told." And third person, as I grazed over earlier, means we're using he/she/they.

Behold!

Oh, didn't I tell you this was a matryoshka doll of an exercise? I didn't?

Well, let's open the next one.

Second: Retell the story from the POV of one of the other people involved in it. Again, use limited third person.

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

And... Remix!

When Le Guin sets a task like this, she's clear that she doesn't mean move the pronouns around. She means rewrite it. A change of host mind means a change of story. So, Charlie sees the rain differently. Sees the pistachio twists differently (by barely seeing the boy carrying them). Yes, he sees the staff differently too.

As I moved through these retellings, I saw they were becoming about the story of observation itself. So, since we're talking about perspective in craft, I reached to make it the theme of the pieces as well: the story in the eye of the beholder.

Take, for example, the only chance I was offered in these exercises to use the first person:

Part Three: Observer-Narrator

If there wasn't a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character's voice, in first or third person.

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

Not to be unkind to poor Poppy, but she's my potted plant. Silent but for a roll of her eyes. Until now. Now she gets her own relationships, her own history, her own little buried desires.

(Don't worry, I'm not making you read the entire thing all over again.)

Now that they're lined up together, you can see the effect of being trapped in one character's mind. You only get to know what they know, and while you can interpret the movements and exchanges of other characters, it's still only through the eyes of the narrator character: if they misunderstand, then so do you.

And the same actions, the same objects, shapeshift through different eyes.

To Meg, the rain is dour; to Charlie, it's raining money. No one really sees Joel at all, except Poppy, to whom he's an irritant. And all this is happening in 250ish words, in which you might be forgiven for thinking... nothing is happening at all.

This is the point at which I noticed I was having quite a lot of fun.

Can you think of a time you embarked on a task you didn't think much of, and found yourself having a ball? I'd love to hear about it, or see the writing that came from it!

Usually perspective is something I realise I've screwed up and have to start over, or feel it's pinching my toes, like I'm the ugly sister trying on the glass slipper. This time, actively playing with perspective, I saw what I'd been missing out on. All the little stories hiding in the margins of the ones I've been writing all along.

And how much you can do with less: the narrow beam of a single mind can light up so very much.

But we haven't even made it to detached narrator versus involved author yet, and the giant rewrite I had to do. I should probably save that for next week, even though I swore this one wouldn't be a two-parter; I've run out of road.

And I need a glass of wine. Maybe see you next time.

Goodbye for now

xx