Your story, well-told, becomes a world in which you hope a reader will live for a time. When a reader enters a fictional world that generates clear mental pictures and engages all the senses, the pages turn, and time melts away. Even after the back cover closes, the reader is reluctant to let that world slip away into unreality.
Many different factors meld to create such an experience. Key elements are careful, specific word choices, strong sensory images, and good dialogue. A realistic world also hinges on a central authority within the work who is telling the story.
In a different literary era, it was acceptable for an omnipotent storyteller to relate events. He relayed the actions of all people involved in the story, read their minds, and could move between scenes miles or even oceans apart in seconds of time. It was clear that the author was telling the story, much like a parent might relate a bedtime story to a child.
Today, however, readers have come to expect a different experience, as outlined at the start. A reader would rather be drawn into the story related by an individual who is involved in what is happening. When the author becomes “visible”—when it becomes evident that someone is telling the story—a reader will jolted out of his involvement, becoming aware that an author is involved. This is often referred to as author intrusion. Noah Lukeman (The First Five Pages, Simon & Schuster, 2000) writes: “Viewpoint and narration comprise a delicate, elaborate façade, in which one tiny break or inconsistency can be disastrous, the equivalent of striking a dissonant chord in the midst of a harmonious musical performance.
Simply described, author intrusion is any portion of the text that would not normally be related by the person who is telling the story, or that is related from an unknown point of view. It can also include points of view within a work that shift too abruptly or inappropriately.
Oakley Hall (How Fiction Works, Writer’s Digest Books, 2001) explains: “The author’s decision as to how the point of view, the central authority, the consciousness of the fiction, is to be handled can be paralyzing difficult, or so easy as to be automatic.” He points to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby and Huck Finn as “automatically central” first-person point of view narrators. Tom Sawyer is a third-person point of view intelligence. Sometimes the novel necessitates multiple points of view. Oakley cites Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as an example; Lukeman refers to Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale as a story that employs multiple viewpoints to great advantage.
So how do you decide?
The last item was the deciding factor in the novel I completed for National Novel Writing Month in 2004 (still undergoing the painful process of revision). Initially it appeared that the story belonged to a teenager who had lived her entire life in New York City Her parents died suddenly and she found herself part of her mother’s sister’s family on a farm. The story initially appears to be hers because of all the characters involved in the story, she appears to have experienced the most drastic change in her life.
However, the idea behind the story is that difficult change is not always physical; a forced change in perspective can be just as trying as a catastrophic event. This necessitated that the viewpoint character be the teenager whose life is impacted in a variety of ways by the arrival of her orphaned cousin.
When it’s not clear who the best viewpoint character of your story is, the best solution is planning and experimenting before you start writing. Don’t be afraid to spend time exploring characterization, structure and theme. Once you have a clear idea of who is telling the story and why, it will help you avoid small problems like inconsistencies in viewpoint within your text, to larger and more painful issues, such as the dreaded realization that the whole work needs to be re-done from a different point of view in order to provide information that is vital to the story.
©2006Dekat
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Last Modified: May 17, 2006