The occasionally perilous pitfalls of POV

Monday, May 31st, 2010 | Posted by: Craig Lancaster

When I started writing The Summer Son more than a year ago, I began with a first-person point of view. The idea for the story came from a personal place, and I found that I wanted to steer the protagonist, Mitch Quillen, from inside his own head.

My resolve didn’t last. Fairly deep in the story, I started to lose my way and began casting about for a way back to the proper path.

Here’s a snippet of an instant-messenger conversation I had with my friend Jim Thomsen as I contemplated a switch in POV. By the way, some not-so-benign language coming; the sausage-making isn’t always pretty:

Me: Why I hate my brain: I’ve just about talked myself into two big changes to my novel in progress: a story layer that will require some rewriting at the front and, more time-consuming, a change from first person to third. Fuck.

Jim: That’s me, times 20. What prompted the switch in voice? Or IS prompting it?

Me: Well, here’s the thing: Every time I was tempted to not do either thing, I asked myself: “Craig, will it improve the story?” The answer is yes. So, really, I have no choice.

Jim: You gotta trust that still small voice.

Me: I’m 52,000 words in, and I just feel like I’m not “seeing” it well enough as the person. I need the step back. I’ll probably lose a little something in the switch, but I think what I’ll gain in descriptive powers and in not making the character quite so navel-gazing will be well worth it.

Jim: That’s my issue with first-person. I don’t have the discipline to keep from getting lost in my own bullshit.

Me: Well, I need this guy to be reflective. But it sounds whiny in his voice. I think that layer: “Mitch thought back to what his mother said all those years ago” vs. “I thought back to what Mom said all those years ago” will help that tremendously.

Back when this exchange took place, in early June 2009, Mitch was whiny to the point of being unappealing as a lead character. What I was proposing was switching to third-person omniscient, a point of view where there is an all-knowing narrator who reveals that knowledge in the service of the story. My hope was that I could find a way to communicate Mitch’s angst without putting all of the revelatory burden on him.

Unfortunately — or, I should say, fortunately — that resolve didn’t last long. As I went back to the beginning of the manuscript and started retrofitting the POV, I discovered that I was being carried too far away from the emotional action. Some powerful moments early in the story lost their punch when I stepped back. The flaws I sensed — which were all too real — didn’t lie in POV but in how I was operating within the constraints of first person. Being well on my way to a completed first draft, I put my head down and finished it.

Jim diagnosed some of the problems when he read the first draft. From an e-mail he sent me:

I know you feel contented with your choice of writing in the first person, but here’s one reason to maybe reconsider that: I think that a first-person style essentially enables your need to let too much of the story take place in Mitch’s head instead of to him and around him. It makes it too easy to let Mitch talk at us about what’s happening in lieu of you showing us what’s happening … and I think this happens because you’re at times too autobiographically close to elements of the characters and the story to be able to get the necessary distance and detachment … Writing in the third person, I feel, helps force that necessary distance and detachment on you — and allows you to keep the majority of the story on the ground and moving, which is just where and how it belongs.

Jim Thomsen, story consigliere.

By compelling me to think about this suggestion, Jim led me, indirectly, to my solution. The problem wasn’t point of view; it was, simply, that I was too lazy with the story on the first draft. In the absence of revelatory action, I wrote lengthy, story-stultifying expositions. By not giving Mitch enough to react to and deal with, I opened the field to his endless ruminations on his lot in life. I needed to find a way to make readers care about him and his story without begging for it.

In short, I had to discover what the book was about. I had nearly 80,000 words, but I didn’t have that.

So, you may be wondering, what is the book about? I have an answer: Beyond the plot points, the book is about truth. Not absolute truth (two plus two equals four), but the truth that we deduce from the way we see the world. It’s a unique view, one that belongs only to us. The Summer Son is what Mitch sees, in his memories of a violent summer nearly 30 years in his past and in the aging, distant father he confronts in the here and now. Mitch has good reason for seeing things the way he does, but the limitation of our unique point of view is that we don’t always see things as others see them. There’s another story, one that runs concurrent to Mitch’s assessment of his past and present with his father, and as that story is revealed, Mitch’s life absorbs seismic shifts.

I had to find that story. It took at least three major drafts and untold numbers of refinements (and the loss of about 10,000 words). Beta readers whom I trust to be straight with me helped uncover pieces of the story that completed the picture, and to them, I am eternally grateful.

The question now, one that won’t be answered until the book emerges and begins to be read, is this: Did I succeed?

I look forward to hearing your answer.