Whose Point of View?

Today, in a rainy, windy Canterbury, I’ve been working on a really crucial scene in my new book. It’s one of those scenes that a book absolutely turns on. But, despite the fact that I’ve known it was coming since I started the book, it’s been excruciating to try and get into. Industrial quantities of tea has been consumed, much creative thinking has been done whilst ironing shirts has been (does anybody else think about their writing whilst ironing – seems to free something up in me…) and many false starts have fallen to the delete button.

Why all this angst? Because I’ve had to decide whose point of view it’s going to be told in. As I think I’ve mentioned here before, the new book has three narrators. As each has a very different voice and outlook on the unfolding story, the decision as to who gets to tell this central scene is really important. Because they share the same story but their take on it is very different.

The book I’m reading at the moment – Ben Elton’s High Society – also has many narrators, but they’re all telling their own interweaving stories. Not sure whether that’s easier or more difficult but it looks easier from where I’m sitting.

High Society is about the legalisation of drugs. I’m fascinated by the way Ben Elton approaches the idea through the personal stories of an MP throwing the hat of his career into the legalisation-ring, a drug-addicted teenage prostitute with a history of abuse, a pop-star with all the substance abuses of a Pete Doherty and a policeman with a family to protect. I haven’t worked out yet where Elton stands on the subject of drug legalisation (just as it was difficult to work out his stance on film violence in Popcorn) as all his characters speak with such conviction from their various standpoints, but I’ll be interested to see how he navigates towards the end of the book and who tells which bits!

Characters in search of an Author

To return to things that are better not said to an author, started here, I think the second most irritating (apart from questions about money and fame) is ‘do you base your characters on real people?’

This is such a common question that people obviously think it’s sensible but, really, it’s not.

Firstly, if you were any good, people would recognise themselves and be miffed if they weren’t presented as absolute saints. And who wants saints in any book they’re reading – as we’re always told, goodness is very hard to make engaging.

Secondly, it’s almost impossible to know anybody but your nearest and dearest as well as you need to know people you’re writing about. You need to know all sorts of arcane little details about them, even if those details never appear in the book. Who was their first kiss with? What food do they like best? How would they cope on a desert island? Which music would they take and why? If you don’t know them that well, they’ll only ever be cardboard characters, people you’ve put in the book to move the action forward.

So why the very prevalent belief that we all base our characters on people we know? Maybe it’s because readers see similarities between characters in books and individuals they know and therefore assume that they must also be similar to people the author knows.
Or maybe it’s because people who don’t write simply cannot imagine a scenario in which people who have no objective existence would start saying and doing things inside their own head.
But that is what happens!
Characters have a physical and emotional reality which, sometimes, feels more real than that associated with actual, living people. My characters don’t ‘take on’ a life – that would imply that at some stage they were lifeless – they simply spring, fully formed, into my mind. Ta-dah! Here I am! It doesn’t feel as if I’m making them up, or making up things about them (though, to retain any vestige of credibility, I must acknowledge that that must be what actually happens) – my perception is that I spend time finding out what they’re like.

So, far from basing my characters on real people and making them behave accordingly, I let them be who they are and watch what they’ll do. Because, sure as eggs is eggs, if I try and make them do something they didn’t want to do, they’ll only sulk.

I know there is a prevailing opinion amongst the kind of writers who write ‘how to write’ books that you shouldn’t spend too much time perfecting each chapter of your novel as you go along. ‘Just get it all down then play with it later’ seems to be the general view.

I don’t know about anybody else but I do know that doesn’t work for me. Not even a little bit, as Son No 1, the Ultimate Frisbee Freak, would say.

I can’t just plough on if things aren’t flowing, if there’s an unevenness further back in the story which I’ve neglected to smooth. It’s as if the flow is running away from me with a momentum and a direction all of its own. Suddenly, the story isn’t the one I thought I was telling - my characters get moody and sulky and say things I’d say instead of sounding like themselves; events don’t glide effortlessly into place, they stumble and trip along.

You know how sculptors say that the shape is there in the wood/stone/whatever and they just have to reveal it? I feel like that about my books – the story’s sitting there in the interface between my subconscious and reality and I just have to see it clearly. Too much of the conscious mind, the making it happen, and it dies.
Weird.

I remember, years ago, before I started writing, listening to interviews with writers who would say things like ‘I wanted my character to do x, y and z but he wouldn’t let me do that!’ and I’d shout at the radio ‘You absolute twit! You’re making it up! You're in control!’
Little did I know.
But humble pie doesn’t taste so bad when the truth is so much more piquant, so much richer, than my thin little assumption.

Today, having reached roughly the mid-point of the new book, I have spent most of the day back in the first hundred pages, working out where the historical strand should have come in. It’s currently introduced on page 157 and it’s holding everything back, like a slow family at the barrier-end of a busy railway platform.

Hopefully, now I’ve listened to the story properly, it’ll all flow nicely again tomorrow and we’ll be out of the station and singing along the tracks.