Different Points of View
03/09/08 07:42 Filed in: Writing
I'm experimenting. I'm working on a Phillip Gold
short story and I'm writing it in the third-person
format — you know, "Gold stood there, looking at his
toes" — rather than in first person: "I stood there,
looking at my toes". This is the first time I've
tried such a thing. It seems foreign to me, odd and
different. So yesterday, when I found a half hour to
work on the story, I had to fight the inclination to
rewrite what I have into the more familiar
first-person approach.
What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.
And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.
The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."
The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.
So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.
And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."
I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.
But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.
What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.
And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.
The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."
The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.
So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.
And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."
I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.
But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.