Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom About The Craft of Fiction Writing
In his craft book, Alone with All That Could Happen, David Jauss discusses some of the most frequently taught elements of fiction writing craft with a fresh perspective that examines them more deeply and, in some cases, contradicts the conventional wisdom. His first topic is point of view (POV).
Point of view has always been considered the first, most important choice that an author will make in crafting a story. Whether a story is told in the first person, second person (for particularly confident writers), or the third person will influence every other element of the story and how the reader interacts with both the fictional characters and the author him or herself. Discussions on the uses and the advantages and disadvantages of each of these points of view usually focus on the most easily and taught and explained feature—who is talking and whether or not they are omniscient—but rarely touch upon the deeper and more complex feature of distance: the distance between the narrator (be it first person or third person) and the characters, the distance between the reader and the characters, and the distance between the narrator and the reader. Distance is often subsumed under the top of omniscience, and, while they are related, they are not synonymous with one another. Omniscience is usually considered a feature of third person POV and within that context broken down into the scope of omniscience: limited or unlimited. There is also the question of how omniscient a particular narrator is at any particular point in a story.
Distance and omniscience can also change during the course of a story. No story is all one thing or another, even the ones we categorize as such. Jaus uses “Hills Like White Elephants” as an example of this. Hemingway’s story is often used as a classic example of direct observer POV. The third person narrator (perhaps a fellow traveler eavesdropping from a nearby table) makes no obvious attempt read the minds of the couple being observed, yet their omniscience is displayed throughout the story that is noticeable to only the most perceptive reader. That omniscience is revealed by the visual cues that the narrator chooses to record. The story is mostly dialogue, like a play, but the narrator provides a few, well-placed stage directions that give us a view into the characters’ inner lives: the gestures, the body language, the pregnant pauses, the woman staring at the floor beneath the table. The precise thoughts of the characters are contained within Hemingway’s iceberg, but their nature and the narrator’s understanding of them is revealed simply by the narrator’s choice to record them. It’s a wonderfully subtle effect that the reader may not even be consciously aware of, but it is the key to how the reader experiences the story and why it is so enduring. Finally, at the end of the story, the narrator, with a single word pierces through the wall between us and a character’s thoughts: “They were all waiting reasonably for the train.” The oddness of the subjective word reasonable in this context shows us that it is the character’s interpretation and not the objective narrator’s.
In another example of shifting omniscience, Jauss uses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to show how the Nick, the first person narrator of the the novel, occasionally gives us glimpses into the mind of his characters, and furthermore, characterizes their thoughts, even though in the opening paragraph, Nick assures use that he is trustworthy, reliable, and non-judgmental
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
Nick largely honors this commitment, but at certain critical points in the story, he not only takes brief trips into Gatsby’s thoughts, he subjectively rather than objectively reveals them. Fitzgerald very clearly establishes specific voices for all of his characters. Nick, the narrator, is very self-aware, reflective and poetic. He naturally uses simile and metaphor. Gatsby, on the other hand, is none of those things and, in fact, one of his downfalls is his lack of reflection and unawareness: “Can’t repeat the past,” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
With these two personas well established, Fitzgerald is able to manipulate how the reader perceives and experiences the story. In the passage that Jauss quotes, Nick describes Gatsby’s first kiss with Daisy, using his own metaphor-enriched poetic language rather than Gatsby’s artificially mannered but unsophisticated constructions:
…One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees–he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
As Jauss has shown, the question of distance and how it can be manipulated can have a far more profound effect on a story than simply determining who is talking.
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