Hello writers, readers and friends. Today I’m going to give you a taste of a class I’m teaching over at LitReactor this week: Multiple Viewpoints. But first, retro day! Watching my 2-yr-old grandson while (trying to) work in homage to all the years I spent single-mothering with toddlers at my elbow. (He’s itching to push the “up” button on my desk at the moment.)
Back to this (admittedly fragmented) post. Which I should preface with a warning: nerd alert!! I’ve been teaching this POV class for nearly a decade, and each go-round I find some new, fascinating example of an author executing perspective from an interesting angle.
Today, I’m posting the opening lecture of my 10-day class, and if you want more, there’s still time to sign up if you email me at suzy @ wordsinahurry (dot) com .
POV CLASS, LECTURE ONE: THE PROS AND CONS OF HEAD-HOPPING
If you’ve had a couple writing classes, chances are you’ve been warned to avoid head-hopping. You’ve been schooled to avoid the impulse to dash from the perspective of one character to another, willy-nilly and sometimes within the same paragraph.
I’m offering the head-hopping lecture right up front because when we discuss bouncing our narrative around from brain to brain, we also hit on the exegesis of narrative design and character development. So, right from the get-go, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of this mercurial habit. Well, okay, *SPOILER*, mostly the cons.
Because head-hopping seems to be such a universal conundrum, I think it might be a good idea to really unpack the narrative impulse to hop around, and its psychological impact on the reader, and the best place to start is with the formality of a third person omniscient narrator.
First, I think many of us grew up reading fiction that sets the narrator up as an all-knowing guru with a rather formal stance.
Take a look at this truncated opening of a familiar old chestnut, for instance (I’ve left out a lot of dialogue in favor of highlighting the narrative shifts in POV):
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast.
The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
Others, of the older fisherman, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had seen.
“Yes,” the old man said. He was holding his glass and thinking of many years ago.
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. A classic, right? Pubbed in the early 1950s, it’s often used as a terrific example of omniscient third-person narration. What do you think? The writing is clear and spare—typical Hemingway. There is plenty of authority in The Old Man and the Sea nothing superfluous. And yet, Hemingway switches filters three times in this opening—first, the onlooker boy, then we switch to the chorus, the “others,” and then, boing! we’re treated to what the old man is thinking.
When editors and writing instructors pull examples of head-hopping such as this, they will often cite Austen or Hemingway, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky as writers who get away with it, because, you know, they’re masters and so forth. And, because they set the particular narrative stance up right out of the gate.
Well, I’m a little the emperor is naked in that arena, I’ll admit. I concede that the aforementioned “masters” are still popular, but, well, they’d be hard-pressed to publish any of their books today with this whiplashing arrogance. Even with updated settings and circumstance. Head-hopping omniscience, once the standard, now reeks of dust and fuss. But why? What’s at the root here? Perhaps it’s as simple as this. The psychology of story intake, of reading, and of attention, has changed dramatically over the past, er, 75 years, and our story-telling approach has shifted to accommodate it.
Third person omniscience was the conduit for novels back when the landscape of a book superseded the psychology and personalities of the characters. Readers were comfortable with distance, with formality, the same way your grandmother wore pearls to Sunday dinner and had her hair shellacked into place at the beauty parlor each week. Readers looked to the authorial voice as their guide into story.
Here is an example of a third person omniscient narrative that still holds up, however. Thanks to Greta Gerwig, Little Women is, once again, part of the zeitgeist. Alcott’s book is evergreen for a few reasons, but for the purposes of this class, we’ll look at how the four sisters as a cumulative are greater than the sum of their parts—and yet everyone knows that Jo is the main character. Although Jo is in nearly every scene, there are a few where she is not present.
In the opening scene, the narrator moves through the sisters, but notice the slight nod toward Jo’s perspective.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
"We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, "We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never," but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.
We’ll revisit Little Women down the road, but let’s now jump a century-and-a-half and look at another narrative choice. In this one, we see a sort of inverse of Alcott’s method as the author conflates multiple characters into one:
THE MEN OF BRAVO are not cold. It’s a chilly windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for the late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. There was one man in particular who attached himself to Billy, a pale, spongy Twinkie of a human being crammed into starched blue jeans and fancy cowboy boots. “Was never in the military myself,” the man confided, swaying, gesturing with his giant Starbucks, “but my granddaddy was at Pearl, he told me all the stories,” and the man embarked on a rambling speech about war and God and country as Billy let go, let the words whirl and tumble around his brain.
So that’s the opening of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, a shortlist for the National Book Award several years back. Billy Lynn received lots of attention and praise for the startling fresh premise (the commodification of contemporary soldier “heroes” who find themselves immersed in a landscape of fan culture), and the ambition of setting the entire novel in a solitary afternoon.
But what’s most interesting to me is Fountain’s POV decision. He tells this story in a quasi-close third person narrative, bleeding out just a bit into the psyche of “Bravo” as a singular character, but filtered fairly closely through Billy. Had Fountain written this book fifty, sixty years ago, he may have chosen to head-hop amongst the viewpoints of the other Bravo members. Or had he lesser chops, the impulse may have been to tell the story first person, Billy, and spare himself the trouble of a POV this complex.
But in the end, Fountain’s choice recognizes the contemporary reader’s demand for intimacy (even though, in interviews, Fountain claims to write only to please himself), and mitigates that with his writer’s love of language and irony, and comes up with, in my humble opinion, a brilliant compromise.
In Billy Lynn you get precision, intimacy, texture and the perspective of both a somewhat naïve, youngish protagonist and a more sophisticated puppet master (Fountain) who somehow manages to ride the line of intrusion, but never quite crosses it. No need to hop from head to head, because Billy represents Bravo.
Let’s look at another book that filters a third-person perspective through a central character. Check out this passage from Sally Rooney’s Normal People:
One night in May, Marianne’s friend Sophie threw a house party to celebrate the end of the exams. Her parents were in Sicily or somewhere like that. Connell still had an exam left at the time, but he wasn’t worried about it, so he came along too. All their friends were there, partly because Sophie had a heated swimming pool in her basement. They spent most of the night in their swimsuits, dipping in and out of the water, drinking and talking. Marianne sat at the side with a plastic cup of wine, while some others played a game in the pool. It seemed to involve people sitting on other people’s shoulders and trying to knock each other into the water.
Instead of head-hopping in and out of Marianne’s perspective, we’re filtering our view of the party through her, but at a slight syntactical distance.
Here’s a fake version of the passage experimentally altered to demonstrate what head-hopping from Marianne’s to Sophie’s POV might look like:
One night in May, Marianne’s friend Sophie threw a house party to celebrate the end of the exams. Sophie’s parents were in Sicily, yet again. Connell still had an exam left at the time, but Sophie had begged him to come, so he did. All Marianne’s and Sophie’s friends were there, and Sophie suspected it was because she had a heated swimming pool in her basement. Marianne was consumed by watching the guests who spent most of the night in their swimsuits, dipping in and out of the water, drinking and talking. Marianne sat at the side with a plastic cup of wine, while some others played a game in the pool. It seemed to involve people sitting on other people’s shoulders and trying to knock each other into the water. Sophie was impatient with Marianne, and thought she should join in, too.
Confusing, right? Do you feel thrown around the scene? That’s what happens when a scene is crafted in such a way that it tries to cover too many bases. It’s like being in a noisy restaurant when everyone at your table is talking at once.
That said, recently, I read Jami Attenberg’s new novel, All This Could Be Yours, and she makes a bold choice to smatter a peripheral POV from “extra” no-stakes cameo characters throughout her book. At a reading a couple years ago, she was asked why she did that, and she said that it offered a unique glimpse at her various characters, akin to a rogue camera angle, or something like that. Here’s an example of one of these hops featuring a chapter navigated through the POV of main character Alex.
She felt wild, angry all of a sudden, and stopped in a bar for a drink, ordering a Pimm’s Cup to go from a handsome, white-jacketed bartender with a shaved head and oversize glasses. As he served her the cocktail in a plastic cup, he called her “ma’am,” and she felt old and said, “I’ll give you a big tip if you don’t ever call me ma’am again,” and he thought I don’t know how not to say ma’am, just like you don’t know how not to give me shit about it. But out loud he said, “How about ‘miss’ instead?”
Oh, Jami, you upstart, you! Couple of things on this: 1. She does this with a fair amount of consistency, establishing the pattern early in the novel. 2. She doesn’t hop into and out of main characters heads—the only time she employs this is with no-stake cameo characters who never appear again. 3. Hello! She’s Jami Attenberg and writes with tremendous authority.
In most writing, however, it’s best to stick to one POV per scene—or at least, per paragraph. So why does this matter, this adherence to one point of view at a time, and clear demarcations, via chapter break, asterisks or white space, before switching to another character’s POV? Just because it’s not in style, mayn’t we still choose to tell a story via a classic omniscient, godlike narrator who blows in and out of characters’ brains willy-nilly? Why yes, yes we can! And, if we are extraordinary writers with balls to spare, and authority bursting from our pores, we might even succeed.
(THE LECTURE GOES ON TO OFFER MORE EXAMPLES AND AN EXERCISE AT THE END. INTERESTED IN MORE? STILL TIME TO SIGN UP FOR THE CLASS, EMAIL ME at suzy @ wordsinahurry (dot) com IF INTERESTED.)
Interesting. I am going to have to read Ben Fountain and Jami Attenburg. Love their styles.