Often a writer has to ponder general
rules about fiction. Readers might be disgruntled more often and without referring to these words and phrases - stereotypes, derivative, formula plot, point of view.
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The novel was originally written with the omniscient
narrator. The idea, I have thought, was
that the author was like God in knowing, but that characters had free will. So
someone above might want to follow the characters for the whole story. Then
third person and limited point of view told a story from the character
perspective, listening in to the human side. Characters could hold the spotlight as in a
play or film.
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The first person point of view, or first person narrator, is
traditionally the human storyteller. “Call me Ishmael…” is a witness who loses
himself in the events of Moby Dick.
The “I” is infrequent. A servant tells
about Wuthering Heights. She is at the edge of it, an observer that the
reader easily forgets.
Today there’s much preference for the first person
narration. Often it seems, the
storyteller becomes what is termed an
unreliable narrator. Other characters
tend to bounce off of their relationships to “I.” They’d better get in good with the one talking!
An agent wanted me to read some contemporary first person
narrations because he thought I might rewrite The Swan Bonnet that way. I
usually don’t write in the first person, and when I do, the person is close to
my identity. The Swan Bonnet was researched and a historical book, so I wasn’t
keen to rewrite it that way. It’s hard for an author to accomplish first person
in a historical novel without being found out to be living in the 21st Century, I’ve noticed from my reading.
First person adolescent narrators had me thinking about stereotypes. When characters are
stereotyped, they serve the author. And
when they are put into formula plots, they do things for the author. That makes the author an authority that most
would like to avoid. Characters are made
to behave so that the novel works, and then made to unthinkingly perform
actions. So I began to see that these
rules were really about giving each character their humanity.
While revising a children’s novel, I pondered stereotypes and narrator
focus. It is the only children’s novel I
wrote with a boy protagonist. The novel is about a dog like the dog in my
childhood, and I wanted the boy and male dog parallels. What revisions I
had. First of all, I had to think about
the boy’s actions instead of seeing them from his mother’s or his sister’s
eyes. I did a whole rewriting of the
book, shadowing the boy. The dog story was the core that kept me revising.
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Then when I thought the book was about done, I knew it
wasn’t. What was the problem? I made the
boys around the main protagonist do what I wanted. When I thought about them, the
plot changed and entire scenes had to be rewritten. I had to stick with what a
minor character would do in order for me to accept the book myself.
At a recent library book sale, I picked up an antique book, Peter, Pippa and Puck. It was from the early 20th century
and I was taken with the photographs in it. I’ve always liked photos in
children’s books. A British woman told a real story about a dog. I enjoyed
reading some of the book, and noticed that her dog dilemma was similar to that
in my book. There it was. A writer has to tell about a dog, because that
dog is not like other dogs, and it ran off and did something different from the other dogs, I
heard.
