The Word Cloud

Complete fascinating article (at least, if you're a technique-geek like me). It shakes out and dust down a few orthodoxies about point of view etc., and finds them wanting...

http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/djauss01.htm

Thanks, Emma, just what I was looking for as I am educating myself about point of view at the moment and this is a most comprehensive and insightful essay. Needs a disclaimer though: Do not attempt to read in a stolen five minutes of peace.

Great essay, expounding our favourite tool, Psychic Distance, and confirming our evangelical zeal.

Loved this line: Imagine a film in which the camera stays the same distance from the characters, never moving back or in. Boring, right? The same is true for fiction.

It's a cracker, isn't it. Though you're right, Charlie, it's not short.

It's interesting that he doesn't really mention Psychic Distance as a labelled concept, but a lot of it is about that. And it does clarify something which is harder to explain - psychic distance in a first person narrative.

It does all come a lot clearer once you wrap your brain round the idea that in a first-person narrative the "I" has two personae - as character-narrator, and character-in-action.

I'm just about halfway through David Jauss's essay on POV. I agree, it's fascinating stuff and so refreshing to hear it said that we don't necessarily need to be restricted by the so-called rules of POV that have been drummed into us. We can be free to 'mix-and-match' as it were, provided it's done with all due skill and excellence.

But can we? Really? Jauss wrote this in 2000. At that time we're told his most recent fiction was published in 1996. Haven't times moved on since then, and more particularly, publishers' expectations/demands? And even if established writers might still 'take such liberties', or as I'd prefer to call it, 'write with such freedom of technique', can first-time authors ever hope to have their work even considered seriously by an agent, if they employed such a style? I'd so love to think we could, but in reality is that not wishfull thinking?

The key is in these words: provided it's done with all due skill and excellence. If it is, then the writing will sparkle and it's clear that the reader is in a safe pair of authorial hands. I don't think a book would be turned down because POV had been used in these ways. If it's good, it's good. But easy to pull off, it ain't. And it has to be intrinsic to the book's identity ie not just a way of an author showing how clever they are. If it's the former, you would probably be so swept along by the story that you wouldn't even be aware of the methods the author has used unless you're looking for them.

I have exactly the same thoughts as Tony. While I am sure you're right, Debi - how does a newbie manage to convince an agent/publisher that he/she is a safe pair of hands with excellent skills and technique?

I read the Hemingway part of the article - I am a huge fan of his - he is an idol. But, I wonder if that particular extract that hinged on one word was enough to demonstrate 'due skill and excellence'?

My gut feel, if it was a newbie writing some of his earlier short and probably experimental stories - he wouldn't have got very far in this day and age with his constant head-hopping. It's blatant...
kind regards
stephen

'...how does a newbie manage to convince an agent/publisher that he/she is a safe pair of hands with excellent skills and technique?'

By your words. By your story. When an agent looks at an MS, they're not thinking in terms of 'have they broken any rules?' They're looking for stonking good books and so are publishers. On the list of the 12 best debut novelists chosen on the Culture Show recently, I don't think there's a single one that stuck to the so-called rules. In fact, in the programme that I watched, that was what attracted the judges ie the ways in which the authors had played with form and structure. And these were all new authors, published in the last 2 yrs. The programme is no longer available to view but the info and links on this page are interesting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zf9c0

Yes - thanks Debi - very useful. What you intimate is true. Has to be, or newbies wouldn't get a look in.

The other point to make, I think, is that this article isn't about writing fiction that sells, it's about writing good fiction. The two goals are related, but they're not the same. The art of bringing the two goals together is to master technique to the point where you're writing so well that you can instinctively do what the more rule-bound would say you 'can't' do in ways which make the fiction work better than if you hadn't. As Debi says, when an agent or editor reads an MS they're reading for the big picture, for whether the writing is supple and expressive and vivid, whether the story is compelling, whether the plot surprises but is satisfying, and so on. You can squabble with your editor once you're under contract, about whether 'reasonably' is allowed in.

The other thing I'd say is that if you want to try something non-standard, make sure you educate the reader in what you're doing. Make sure you do whatever it is enough, soon enough, and specially at the beginning clearly enough, that the reader gets 'into' reading the right way - the way which means it does make sense. If you read Joyce or late Woolf, say, with eyes and mind trained solely on Jane Austen, say, you might be a bit boggled. If you come to 'Hills Like White Elephants' accustomed to having Dickens or Flaubert tell you what people are thinking and feeling, you might be completely baffled by it, and not just by not knowing what they're talking about: what's happening, at the emotional level, in this story? How on earth am I supposed to know that? Any story needs the right kind of reading, and the first pages are where the reader learns how to read it - not just straightforward things like "Who's this story about? Where's it happening?", say, but also "How is it telling me this? How should I read it? What kind of putting-together do these words need for me to get the full picture and pleasure of it?"

I'd also say, don't try any non-standard things purely because it seems to get you out of an awkward corner; don't try privileged/omniscient first person just because it seems to be the best of both worlds - a catchy first-person voice with the storytelling convenience of third, say. This is the reason for people saying what I don't ever say because I don't believe in rules: 'you must learn the rules before you can break them'. You can't use a comma expressively till you've absorbed how commas work - their correct use, in other words. Equally you can't do relatively radical things like the Bowen example, or the Satre, until you really know how and why they work and have steeped yourself in how the great writers do it, and absorbed that, (the way we've all absorbed the basics of how storytelling works without even noticing). Only then, as will commas, will these non-standard things happen as a natural outcome of what you're wanting to say, as someone who really knows how to use commas will find they fall on the page in the right places for how they want the speech to sound, and can trust that the reader will hear the speech that way too. And that's when they'll work.

Thanks for the further input, Debi and Emma; very useful. It seems, just as we must search for exactly the right noun or verb, rather than using the frst one that comes to mind (probably propped up by an adjective or adverb), we should use absolutely the best technique in any given scenario - not just the most convenient (e.g. onniscient 1st person), and not the strictly applied, relevant 'rule', but what makes the writing come alive and resonate in the reader's mind without him consciously noticing any technique at all.