MODULATING POV & TENSE
what does it buy you?
Today, we’re going into the Suzy Vitello craft archives with a process-oriented post. We’re going to address this question: how does the combination of POV and tense create a reading experience? And, how do POV and tense decisions affect pacing, distance, and reader engagement.
NERD ALERT! GET YOUR CAFFEINE! OK, HERE GOES.
Three years ago I wrote a multiple first-person POV novel, and here’s the beginning of what was the first chapter of my earliest draft, in the voice of the character I thought was the main POV character at the time.
MORGAN
Some October in the Near Future
On the bright fall day of the earthquake that everyone knew would happen and yet nobody saw coming, if you believed in restitution, in vengeance, and you weren’t much of a God person, you might think that Earth herself had decided to exact revenge on the people who’d poisoned her. Stripped of her rich, textured balance, her clean waters and pure air. Why wouldn’t she retaliate? You might buy into the notion that Mother Earth had, at long last, pushed her middle finger up in rage, thereby causing buildings to implode, bridges to collapse, whole hillsides to slide off into whatever, or whoever, lay below.
Clyde, my father, the opinionated man I’d grown up with, would say revenge had nothing to do with it. Clyde, a stickler for pragmatic empiricism. For cause and effect. If his brain had still been functional the day of the Big One, I imagine we’d have had an argument about the gross misuse of the term, revenge. He would have had a field day, decrying the Philistines, Earth Firsters, Social Justice Warriors and Fundamentalists who all had different theories on the coincidence of a physical catastrophe that coincided with massive social collapse. I, as always, would be the voice of devil’s advocate. Arguing that, maybe, in the grand scheme of things, you do get what you deserve.
Clyde poo-pooed most good versus evil doctrine, but there was one area where his moral stance was a line drawn in the sand, and that was family. Had he known what I’d been up to the
night before, he might very well have sided with earthquake-as-punishment. At least for Christopher and me. And had Julia known? Well, let’s just say she’d be rolling in her grave, in a cemetery that soon would be gurgling caskets, as the Earth, in all Her majestic shape-shifting, liquefied.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
That morning when I woke up, a couple hours before the 9.2 subduction zone earthquake, Christopher was still asleep next to me, his sloping rockface of a forehead aimed at my shoulder. Every once in a while it wrinkled with the onset of a dream. Maybe not an actual feature length dream, but those random jolts of neuro-matter just before the alarm goes off. A parade of unwelcome visions, judging by the grunts bursting out of semi-pursed lips. What was he dreaming about? He seemed troubled. But then, he was in the midst of a messy separation. From my sister. Don’t judge.
The salty aroma of our comingled bodies filled the room. The guilt of that smell mixed with a decade of grief, reminding me of the trip to Hawaii the whole family had taken right before learning that Julia had cancer. The last time we’d all been together and happy. Well, happy enough. What would Julia think of this trespass? I could almost hear her voice, the vaguely Netherlandsy accent, Why can’t you girls get along? And then she’d take Olivia’s side.
A stab of sunlight pierced the fog out the bedroom window of Christopher’s rented apartment. I chewed on my index finger’s nail, gnawing it into the quick. The coffee began its auto-glug down the hall. My niece, Melanie, would be awake any minute. Now would have been the time to sneak out, but had I done that, things would have been different. Melanie, likely,
would have gone to school. A school that, two hours later, would be rubble. In that moment though, as low cloud and bright sun fought behind the thin pane, all I kept thinking was I’d broken a Commandment. Not the Bible one about coveting—that other Golden Rule. Do unto others. The phrase ground into the edifice of the Princeton Building downtown. What sort of person sleeps with her sister’s husband? Even though I’d heard from a mutual friend that Olivia was getting ready to test the waters in the dating world and, even though technically Olivia and Christopher were still husband and wife, this separation seemed like a final chapter for them.
“You are such a compassionate person,” was how this all started last night. I was a sucker for a thinly veiled come-on, and then there was the matter of the half-liter of Bulleit rye we’d slurped down. All that sexual tension over the years rolled up as tight as the pinner I’d unwisely added to mix of intoxicants.
___________
Two years after that draft, the ensuing novel, now called FAULTLAND, is in third person, with fewer POV characters. The same chapter is now the fourth chapter for reasons I will go into below.