Says Who?

Says who?

The power of a story and its ability to connect with a reader is most often due to the unique subjectivity of a certain point of view. It is this point of view which lifts the story from being solely a factual record of events to one that contains some kind of belief about a moment and its meaning (a character’s, and in an overall sense the author’s, filtered through the characters). This can be confusing when a writer is first beginning to create stories. What is factual and what is point of view? What is my opinion/observation and what belongs to the characters? Can I include them all? (Who is the narrator, anyway?)

The answer is you can do anything you desire - it’s a story. But you need to take your readers with you. And it’s useful to be aware of the choices you are making - not necessarily in the first draft when you should just let your imagination play and gush out whatever it wants to - but in the process of revision. I remember my agent once telling me, when I was a new author, that the single most common reason for her rejecting manuscripts was a wobbly point of view. A foggy sense of who was telling her the story. The voice of the storyteller. So let’s take a look at some examples of the elements in our prose that constitute opinion over fact. 

The following is a steal from the George Saunders Story Club, which I will now plug excessively, with absolute, impassioned sincerity. If you really want to be inspired, on a bi-weekly basis, RUN and join this club. George is just…the best. And I hope he won’t mind me reproducing here a section of one of his emails, because I can’t imagine a better way to illustrate the effect, the choice, inherent in Point of View.

The following extract is from a story called The Incident, by Lu Xun, a leading figure of Chinese literature of the early 20th century. The story is told by a first-person narrator. The annotated score-throughs are George’s, and what he has done is mark the parts of the sentences that are ‘additions and embellishments’ to an objective, just the bare facts, version. 

We were just approaching S—— Gate when someone crossing the road was entangled in our rickshaw and slowly fell.

It was a woman, with streaks of white in her hair, wearing ragged clothes. She had left the pavement without warning to cut across in front of us, and although the rickshaw man had made way, her tattered jacket, unbuttoned and fluttering in the wind, had caught on the shaft. Luckily the rickshaw man pulled up quickly, otherwise she would certainly have had a bad fall and been seriously injured.

She lay there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped. I did not think the old woman was hurt, and there had been no witnesses to what had happened, so I resented this officiousness which might land him in trouble and hold me up.

"It's all right," I said. "Go on."

He paid no attention, however—perhaps he had not heard—for he set down the shafts, and gently helped the old woman to get up. Supporting her by one arm, he asked:

"Are you all right?"

"I'm hurt."

I had seen how slowly she fell, and was sure she could not be hurt. She must be pretending, which was disgusting. The rickshaw man had asked for trouble, and now he had it. He would have to find his own way out.

But the rickshaw man did not hesitate for a minute after the old woman said she was injured. Still holding her arm, he helped her slowly forward. I was surprised.

As George says in his Story Club email, our natural inclination is to believe the narrator.  But he is not necessarily telling us the (objective) truth; whether he knows it or not, he’s shading things a bit, interpreting them for us.  He’s lightly ‘coaching’ us (George’s term) on how to understand these events. The narrator seems to be making the case that the fall was not serious (with that “slowly fell”) and that the old woman was to blame (she left the pavement “without warning” and the accident happened “although the rickshaw man had made way.”)  And the narrator’s description of the woman as old and poor (she has “streaks of white in her hair” and is “wearing ragged clothes”) serves also to lightly disqualify her and her injuries from serious consideration, if we are to believe the narrator. And we do, especially at the beginning. 

Here’s the text again, without the scored-through phrases:

We were just approaching S—— Gate when someone crossing the road was entangled in our rickshaw and fell.

It was a woman.  Her jacket had caught on the shaft.

She lay there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped.

"It's all right," I said. "Go on."

He set down the shafts and helped the old woman to get up. Supporting her by one arm, he asked:

"Are you all right?"

"I'm hurt."

Still holding her arm, he helped her slowly forward.

So in this version the narrator’s opinions have been redacted – not only his opinions, but also the particular aspects of the woman’s appearance he noticed (her tattered jacket, the streaks of white in her hair). These descriptions are part of point of view, because someone else living that same exact story, seeing this same woman, might very well have noticed and told us about entirely different things. 

So what is the point of point of view? Besides that it’s a part of the delight of strong imagining, because we want to have opinions and judge people and situations…

Structurally there’s more to it, though. Because point of view affects a reader: who can I believe? Who will I choose to believe? We have entered into that wonderful contract called Suspension of Disbelief, and what reason do we have to doubt? But from hereon in, it is point of view that tips a reader toward and away from the characters, from belief to doubt, from certainty to wondering. Does she really want what she says she does? Is that a good idea? Can I trust this person, because they are pointing out things that make me feel I shouldn’t? Why is the narrator telling me this? What’s his agenda? Do I understand more than she does? 

This ‘dance between reader and narrator’ (more GS), is what keeps a story compelling. Until the final shift, in which a reader decides once and for all what is true and what they believe this story is saying. 

Lately in my groups we have been using this process: the scoring-out of anything that is subjective from a few paragraphs, followed by a look at the result. In every case so far, the writer, including this writer, decides to adopt at least some of the excisions.

But this is NOT to say subjectivity should be removed from our storytelling - of course not. It is the beating heart of any story. It is what connects us to a character. We want gorgeous, opinionated, judgmental, biased, particular observations, to which we can relate or with which we disagree.

But as with any craft, what is useful is to know and understand this subjectivity. To grasp when one is writing a particular viewpoint, and recognise it as so – no matter how strongly it may align or deviate from one’s own.

Surely the starting point of writing with compassion.

Thanks, George. (Again.)