Lemon Drizzle

There’s been a lot of talk about subjectivity in my groups this year. One’s own, as a writer creating stories we hope will compel, and also the subjectivity that lies within different narrative points of view. 

There’s a tendency, I think, when examining POVs, to consider the first person (stories told from an I… perspective) as the most subjective, the most personalised and up-close. And it is of course a very direct channel. It’s also true that first person contains the potential for self-delusion or blindness, which can be a useful tool for writers in terms of building tension between what readers see of the world surrounding the POV character, and that character’s thoughts and responses to their environment. 

But what I’ve been exploring more deeply with writers of late is the inherent subjectivity in every point of view. And particularly in the voice of that seemingly neutral, removed storyteller called the omniscient narrator. Philip Pullman, in his wonderful book on writing, Daemon Voices, makes the excellent point that this title ‘omniscient’ is not a very accurate one, since to ‘demonstrate the narrator's omniscience we would need a text that did literally speak about everything, and that would take longer than the universe has been in existence’. Pullman goes on to say that ‘the narrator clearly knows many things, though, and should really be called multiscient - a perfectly respectable word’. And it is an apt word, because the narrator certainly knows a multitude of things about the particular story they are telling us.

That knowledge isn’t objective, though; it’s biased. Because that omniscient narrator, that ‘disembodied voice’, as Pullman calls it, is another character in the book the writer is creating. A character ‘invented by the author’, just like all the other characters. They might sound like the author - we tend to presume that Tolstoy’s ideas about happy families are his own - but real-life people, even authors, are a bundle of contradictions, emotions, opinions, endlessly shifting in different contexts, whereas the omniscient narrator in a story is a curated voice of authority, one that has been created and fixed for this purpose, one that has been finely tuned by the author to manipulate the reader’s absorption of said story. They are pretending to be impartial, all-knowing. But the very fact that their words have been chosen for them means they are not. 

And this is good! This is freeing! The omniscient narrator can do so much: they can flit in a moment between one place to another, hundreds of miles away; they can time-travel; they can give us one character’s deepest fears and another character’s greatest joys. But the important thing to remember is that everything you write is a choice, every word or thought you put into this mouthpiece is underpinned by that character’s opinions, who they are and what they want to say about the people and the actions of this story - and those opinions are underpinned by what you, the author, want to say, i.e. your theme, the thing you have a burning need to tell us which got you started on this long, arduous process of writing a story in the first place.

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What I am trying to do in saying all this is to encourage you into subjectivity. 

Use it, take a deep dive into subjectivity; that of your omniscient narrator, or of whatever point of view you employ. Because the deeper the individual bias, the deeper you take us into the specificity of that person’s experience, the more engaging that writing becomes. Who wants to read a neutral, dry voice in fiction? (Unless this is all your character is capable of and you are taking it to an extreme…). And there’s no such thing. That neutral dryness is a stance adopted by someone specific, your created narrator, perhaps. Do you see what I’m saying? What readers want is to feel they are really seeing a character, stripped bare, their weaknesses, their strengths, the mistakes they make in judgments, their moments of wisdom…their particular take on the world. Give us that subjectivity, really sit in it and explore. And you will end up with richer, more compelling characters.

Slight proviso: this does not mean I am saying every story needs masses of interiority. Compelling subjectivity in a character is just as possible in the kind of spare, minimal writing of a Raymond Carver story. Subjectivity also resides in their actions, the actions only this person would take because of the specific way they see the world. And there’s subjectivity in descriptions - the things one character sees and smells and hears which others in the exact place might not. (And that includes your omniscient narrator.)

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Lastly, I would encourage you to let yourself, your own subjectivity, into your writing. Who you are, what you know about in this world, in this life you are having. Because that is your gold. 

And by this I don’t mean, necessarily, the old adage: write what you know. At least not in terms of facts and settings. Go and research whatever you want to write about. What I mean is use your emotional stuff, your feelings about life, and people, your opinions, justified and not. Plumb your biases, and insert them in characters, even if you know they’re misguided. Use the stuff you have absorbed throughout your life, good and bad, wise and stupid, optimistic and despairing. And let it soak through your writing, through these stories that might not on the surface have anything to do with the actual life you are living or have lived, yet they are the stories you have for some reason chosen to write. Poke some holes in the cake and let who you are, what you know, what you have seen, drizzle through. 

I’ll end with a beautiful quote from Rick Rubin, which comes from an interview in which he’s discussing his beautiful book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

‘Something I say in the book is that the audience comes LAST. And I believe that. I’m not making it for them, I’m making it for me.  And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience. So much of why, if you go to the movies, so many big movies are just not good, it’s because they’re not being made by a person who cares about it. They’re being made by people who are trying to make something that they think someone else is going to like. And that’s not how art works. That’s something else, that’s not art, that’s commerce. So if we’re making art, it’s almost like a diary entry. So could I be concerned that someone else might not like my diary entry? It doesn’t make sense. It has nothing to do with them, my diary entry has nothing to do with anyone else. Everything we make as artists are essentially diary entries.’ 

Show us who you are. Happy Writing.