Point(s) of view
There is advice aplenty on which viewpoint to choose for a story, but nothing beats trying out different perspectives yourself. Maybe any problems with the novel weren’t about the viewpoint, but about the writing.
When I look back on writing my first novel, I recall days spent plotting out the story and working out the rising and falling action. Other than struggling with the protagonist’s name, however, I was always sure who the viewpoint character would be and how I’d tell her story.
When the novel begins, Maggie McAuley is very, very dead.
“I don’t care what they say, it isn’t ever a good day to die, and whoever said that a tunnel of white light and a ‘Hey, I’m looking down on my body!’ was a great way to start the morning had obviously never experienced it.”
Drowned in a surfing accident, Maggie’s spirit is found by two ghostly residents of the coastal California town where she lived and died, Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Ulysses S. Grant.
And since, surely, ghosts don’t know how to be ghosts when they first cross-over, the novel follows Maggie through her struggles to deal with her loss of life and to learn how to function on the other side of the divide.
“From where I stood in the middle of Ocean Street, an iridescent blush painted the renovated stone and stucco buildings of Santa Pasa’s revitalized downtown. The air was crisp with salt and ozone and promise. I didn’t expect any of the promises would be kept.”
After a lot of positive comments (and polite rejections), I wondered if the first-person viewpoint might be a problem. Since we can only see what Maggie sees, it takes a while to introduce all the characters. I’d tried a prolog to introduce the antagonist, but it felt tacked on. So, as an experiment, I began rewriting Once Dead in third person.
In the first-person version, we see Santa Pasa through Maggie’s sense of loss.
“I’d lost track of time somewhere, and the half-dozen coffee shops within a stone’s throw of mid-town had already shed their morning addicts. A new crop was slowly forming as café tables and chairs appeared on the broad sidewalks.”
In the third-person version, we meet the antagonist first.
“Sergeant Daniel C. Tucker, United States Army of the Potomac, Second Division, 1st Vermont Heavy Artillery, deceased, stood in the middle of Ocean Avenue and glared at a town he no longer recognized. If there was a hell on earth, Santa Pasa was the epicenter. He cursed the town that had killed him with all the vividness he’d learned slogging through Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and the Wilderness.”
What Maggie saw was the brightness she had lost.
“At the north end of Ocean, two young women in fashionable sweats were racing their jogging-strollers for the juice bar at the end of the block. All in all, it was another spectacular northern California morning, and I’d already be slipping into a bikini or a wet suit and heading to the beach if I hadn’t actually been lying flat on my back under six feet of dirt.”
What Tucker saw was the darkness that had taken everything from him and his burning desire for revenge.
“Two women — he was fairly certain they were women because he could see their breasts shamelessly bounce — ran together down the street, not in proper ankle-length dresses, but some type of tight-fitting pantaloons and a sleeveless top showing more skin than a man in his undershirt. They passed him without so much as a glance, pushing some type of wagon in front of them that held small children. Whores. Whores with babies.”
It was an interesting experiment, providing multiple viewpoint characters, with complementary perspectives on the afterlife. In the third-person version the afterlife had been a welcome escape for General Grant.
“Ulysses S. Grant, former General-in-Chief of the U. S. Armies and 18th President of the United States, paused at the corner of Ocean and Cooper Streets. Over the decades since he’d taken up residency here with Samuel Clemens, Santa Pasa had remained a constant: a peaceful pool of tranquility in a world of unrest. True, the liberal politics were not to his liking, and he had never understood tie-dye clothing, but the comfortable summers and the mild winters helped him forget the great conflict that still pained him.”
In the original version, however, we see how heavily the afterlife weighs on Maggie’s soul.
“When I pinched myself, it still hurt, but however much I might feel like a material girl, I was pretty sure I was still dead. I might think I was breathing, but I wasn’t. There wasn’t a single person on the street who could see or hear me. My family, surfing buds, fiancé, best girlfriend: all inaccessible. It had been fun for maybe all of two minutes. For the rest of the past couple of weeks it had been pretty much a blur and a bummer.”
Eventually I stopped the experiment. Changing “I” to “she” wasn’t hard, but with every edit, the melancholy of the protagonist’s spiritual existence faded. Maggie’s singular, sad—although eventually hopeful—view of life after death was much weaker when told from the distance of third person, and the changes that sweep over and through her felt richer when experienced with her, rather than to be told about them.
It was time to try writing a different story.
