Playing God

Every piece of writing has to have a viewpoint. Somebody, or something, has to tell the story, and the choice has profound implications for the way a reader engages with your text. The point of view you select is crucial. It’s the window to your literary world, and if it’s pointing in the wrong direction nobody’s going to want to look through it.

Let’s start off with the holiest perspective: the god’s eye view. It’s one of the great advantages of being a writer: you can create a world all of your own and assume absolute, godlike power over it. The third-person narrator can be everywhere, seeing everything, an omniscient voyeur peering deep inside the mind of any character and poring over their most intimate thoughts. Like a giant laboratory assistant, this narrative voice selects the most salient details from the lives of its lab rats and lays them out for inspection. Just look at Dickens for excellent examples of the god’s eye view at work.

But don’t get too carried away, your almightyship. The most problematic disadvantage to the omniscient third person is a lack of engagement with the world it’s describing. You can be so busy hovering over the landscape, picking out details, dropping in and out of people heads, or floating through houses like an errant spirit that you lose focus, and forget to engage with the characters. In the same way, a narrator faced with such an enormous landscape, and so much scope, confronts a real nightmare trying to decide which things matter to a reader, and which things don’t. Like a kid in a candy store, you don’t always know what to go for first.

Back in the early days of the novel, authors often favoured an omniscient third-person approach because it allowed them to state their mind whenever they felt it necessary. This didactic, intrusive style sometimes worked – take the learned intrusions of George Eliot and the cosy asides from Jane Austen. But the presence of a third-person narrator who offers an opinion on everything that is happening can become a bore. In certain texts it’s OK to venture off on an erudite digression, but don’t lecture people on how they should read your work. It’s far better to take a subtle approach and gently steer people towards your way of thinking. You can push readers in the right direction with clever narration and characterisation, but you can’t boss them around.

One clever way of getting round this is to use your third-person narrator ironically. Yes, it’s that word we all hated at school, but it’s a great method for subtly adding opinion and humour to your work. The key thing to remember is that the best irony is implicit, and only hinted at. If you start explaining why it’s ironic, it stops being clever and just becomes annoying.

To cut a long story short, irony occurs when there’s a discrepancy between what a character or narrator thinks is true and what is really true. This can be with dialogue: ‘“I never eat more than one dish for lunch,” she muttered proudly as she finished her third course’; with beliefs: ‘She stepped confidently into the alley. Nobody would attack a little old lady, she thought, especially in the middle of Glasgow’; with expectations and results: ‘Saddam laughed to himself – the Americans would never invade Iraq’; or with appearance and reality: ‘He stepped forwards. The old rope bridge looked perfectly safe’. These are pretty obtuse examples, but it shows how irony can be used to make a point without rubbing your opinions in a reader’s face.

Show and tell

The first commandment of writing: show, don’t tell. By showing you’re letting the reader project something of their own experience into the writing. Showing is sharing – always the nice thing to do.

What would be more exciting: visiting Disneyworld and riding on every roller coaster twelve times, or listening to a friend going on about when they visited Disneyworld and rode every roller coaster twelve times? Unless you really hate riding roller coasters, I’d guess the actual experience would be more exciting than hearing about it from somebody else. The same applies to writing, whether prose, poetry or drama: show, don’t tell.

If we were to conduct a survey into what words most frequently appeared in workshops and creative writing seminars, we’d probably end up with ‘show’, ‘don’t’ and ‘tell’. It’s so common a phrase now it even has its own abbreviation. But why should we SDT? Aren’t writers supposed to tell stories? Yes, but we want to make readers feel like they are part of our literary world; to become immersed in our text, not just think they’re hearing it from an old man at the bus stop. When writing, we want to transport readers, convince them that this world of words is the real thing: we don’t just want to tell them that the heroine is in danger, we want to make the reader feel that danger, hear her pounding heart, sense the killer’s breath on the back of her neck, try and fight the panic of imminent danger. People don’t always believe what they’re told, but they do believe the evidence of their own senses. Likewise, people don’t always engage emotionally with the characters they hear about in stories, but if they’re put in that person’s shoes, they can’t help but empathise. That’s where SDT kicks in.

No, it’s not an insurance term: it’s telling when you really should be showing. If you start explaining to the reader something that you should be dramatising, you’re not giving a scene the impact it should have: ‘She wanted to tell him how much she loved him’ – yawn! And it doesn’t help if you resort to abstract terms either: telling your reader that a character is ‘madly and deeply in love’ is no substitute for actually showing how that person feels: ‘She was trembling, her stomach in knots. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his fingers on her spine. She wanted to fold her body into his, so whenever he went away next she’d always be there – warm, ready.’ You have to set your imagination to work full time to show things in a way that is moving and believable. Yes, telling is much easier, but if you can’t invest your words with any humanity or any depth, if you just tell the story from a detached viewpoint, you risk a reader shutting off and thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner, or what kind of bathroom cleaner to buy next.

By telling, you’re assuming a reader needs things spelt out as simply as possible. You have to have faith in your reader’s imagination: don’t try and explain everything in a scene, credit a reader with enough creative power to fill in the blanks, to contribute something of her own experience. To truly make readers feel like they’ve been transported to your world, you need to let them bring part of their own life to the text: telling everything – setting, character, plot – in minute detail denies them this and makes the text the author’s empire, a world that leaves no room for them. Showing allows readers to project part of their own experience into the story – it becomes a story for them, rather than one simply told to them.

There may be trouble ahead

The most memorable fictional characters all face up to some kind of conflict – from global threats to personal dilemmas – so learn to treat ‘em mean if you want to keep the readers keen.

Practically all characters in fiction are driven by the conflicts they face and the choices they make. We're not just talking adventure novels and horror tales. Conflict is at the heart of all good writing, it’s what drives it forwards. Novels, screenplays and poems are all journeys undertaken by their main characters. This journey forces them to make choices, many of them extremely difficult, and through these pressurised decisions your characters show their true colours.

It’s vital to know your characters intimately when you are writing, otherwise the way they face up to conflict may seem unrealistic or insincere, and they won't develop. It doesn’t matter if your characters make wrong decisions, only that their choices are realistic and human. It’s this lack of predictability, the anticipation and surprise of expectation and result, which keeps the readers hooked.

You may already have a plot in mind, and be ready to throw your characters into a melting pot of conflict and difficulty. But even if you haven’t yet settled on a story, or are waiting to see where your characters will lead, it’s a good idea to work out where the conflict lies. All good characters are plagued by an internal conflict (and remember, even the smallest, most domestic conflict can seem immense in the eyes of whoever is suffering it). You’ll probably find that the characters you have in mind – even if they are only outlines – are troubled in some way. Without conflict, how can your character even have a view of the world?

Your characters must have a history. Do you know the key events of their past, the ones that made them who they are (the bullying at school, the betrayal of or by a loved one, the death of a parent, the birth of a child)? The conflicts your characters will face may well be something to do with an event from the past, and having a clear idea of what your character has already endured and experienced will help you generate realistic scenarios. Even if you’re focusing on plot, your characters’ reactions to events will be largely determined by the events of their past, so it’s vital to look back as well as forwards. Remember, it’s how your characters deal with the world that makes writing interesting, so give them motivations and reasons for acting the way they do in the face of adversity. You might not use any of this ‘research’ verbatim in your writing, but time spent investigating your characters’ pasts will give you a much clearer idea of who they are, and enable you to keep their behaviour consistent throughout.

As your characters face up to the pressures of the story, they will change. This may be planned (the nerdy cinema usher becomes the hero during an alien invasion, perhaps), or it may come as a surprise. Don’t be shocked if your characters respond to a difficulty in a way you hadn’t expected – when faced with a conflict on the page they may just take action in their own way. The more you know about their past, the greater the sense of freedom and motivation the characters will have, and the more realistic their response. A poorly thought out character will always obey convention, or will defy expectation but in a way nobody will believe. In other words, he will become stereotypical. A character with depth and with a past, however, will surprise you and delight the reader by revealing herself in a new light.