Elements of fiction writ.., p.25
Elements of Fiction Writing,
p.25
Where the light-penetration version tells us that Nora studied Pete’s face before she realized he was lying, the deep-penetration passage says that Nora could read Pete’s mind. We know, of course, that Nora can’t really read Pete’s mind; that’s just the way it feels to Pete. With deep penetration, the viewpoint character’s attitude colors everything that happens. Unlike first person, however, we’re getting the viewpoint character’s attitude at the time of the events, not his memory of that attitude or his attitude as he looks back on the event.
FIGURE 5 shows another alternative: the cinematic point of view. In this version of limited third person, we only see what the viewpoint character is present to see — but we never see inside his or anyone else’s head. It is as if the narrator were a movie camera looking over the viewpoint character’s shoulder, going where he goes, turning when he turns, noticing what he notices — but never showing anything but what the eye can see, never hearing anything but what the ear can hear:
When Pete arrived, Nora wasn’t there. He sighed and immediately sat down to wait. Fifteen minutes later Nora showed up. She was wearing a vivid blue dress, and she turned around once, showing it off. “Do you like it?”
Pete looked at the dress for a moment without expression. Then he gave a weak little smile. “Terrific.”
Nora studied Pete’s face for a moment, then glared. “You always want me to be frowsy and boring.”
The cinematic narration gives no attitude, except as it is revealed by facial expressions, gestures, pauses, words. We learn that Pete is used to Nora’s lateness only because he immediately sits down to wait instead of looking for her or calling to see where she is. We learn that Nora’s dress is new only by implication, when she turns around once and asks if he likes it. The cinematic narrator can’t tell us that Pete thinks the dress looks like blue neon, nor are we told that Pete feels like Nora can read his mind.
The dividing lines between cinematic, light-penetration, and deep penetration narratives are not firm. You can drift along with light penetration, then slip into deep penetration or a cinematic view without any kind of transition, and readers usually won’t notice the process. They’ll notice the result, however.
Deep penetration is intense, “hot” narration; no other narrative strategy keeps the reader so closely involved with the character and the story. But the viewpoint character’s attitude is so pervasive that it can become annoying or exhausting if carried too far, and the narrative isn’t terribly reliable, since the viewpoint character may be misunderstanding or misjudging everyone he meets and everything that happens.
FIGURE 4: Limited third person: deep penetration
FIGURE 5: Limited third person: the cinematic view
Cinematic narration is cool and distant, but it shares some of the virtues of the camera — you can believe what you see, and if you misinterpret the gestures and expressions and words of the characters, that’s your problem — the narrator never lies. The complete lack of attitude, however, can become frustrating. The real camera shows real faces and scenes, and even the most explicit and detailed cinematic narration can’t come close to the completeness and detail and vigor of action unfolding on a screen.
I’ve found that the best results come when you find a comfortable middle ground and then let the needs of the story determine how deeply you penetrate the viewpoint character’s mind. In some scenes you’ll get “hot” and penetrate deeply, letting the audience feel that they’ve become the viewpoint character. In some scenes you’ll “cool off,” let the audience retreat from the character and watch things passively for a while. In between, you’ll use light penetration to keep us aware of the constant possibility of seeing into the viewpoint character’s thoughts, so we aren’t startled when things get hot again.
You’ve got to be aware, though, of the full range of possibilities. I’ve seen many student stories — and more than a few published stories as well — in which the writer unconsciously got into a rut and stayed cool when the story cried out for her to get hot, or stayed hot when the action wasn’t intense enough to need deep penetration. I’ve seen many other stories in which the writer kept using he-thought/she-thought tags when we were so deeply into the character that even such tiny intrusions by the narrator were distracting and unnecessary.
No one level of penetration is likely to be right for a whole story. Some writers attempt use of cinematic narration as a consistent strategy for entire stories in the mistaken notion that fiction can be improved by imitating film. The resulting fiction is almost always lame, since there isn’t a writer alive whose prose is so good it can replace a camera at what a camera does best: taking in an entire moment at a glance. It takes a writer too many words to try to create that moment — after three paragraphs it isn’t a moment anymore. The ironic thing is that cinematographers and film directors have struggled for years to try to make up for their inability to do what fiction does so easily: tell us what’s going on inside a character’s mind. How they struggle with camera angles and shadows! How the actors struggle with words and pauses, with the gentlest changes in expression, the slightest of gestures — all to convey to the audience what the fiction writer can express easily in a sentence or a phrase of deep penetration into the viewpoint character’s mind.
I suspect, however, that one reason some writers resort — often inadvertently — to the cinematic viewpoint is that they don’ t know their viewpoint character well enough to show his attitude toward anything. They start writing without first inventing their characters, and instead of inventing and exploring them as they go along, they avoid their characters entirely, showing us only the most superficial of gestures, telling us only the words the characters say. The result is writing like this:
She sat down beside him. “I’m so nervous,” she said.
“Nothing to be nervous about,” he answered soothingly. “You’ll do fine. You’ve been rehearsing your dance routines for months, and in just a few more minutes you’ll go on stage and do just what I know you can do. Didn’t I teach you everything I know?” he said jokingly.
“It’s easy for you to be confident, sitting down here,” she said, gulping nervously at her drink.
He laid his hand on her arm. “Steady, girl,” he said. “You don’t want the alcohol to get up and dance for you.”
She jerked her arm away. “I’ve been sober for months!” she snapped. “I can have a little drink to steady my nerves if I want! You don’t have to be my nursemaid anymore.”
Talk talk talk. The dialogue is being used for narrative purposes — to tell us that she’s a dancer who’s going on stage for an important performance after months of rehearsal, and that she has had a drinking problem in the past and he had some kind of caretaker role in her recovery from previous bouts of drunkenness. Attitude is being shown through the dialogue, too, by having the characters blurt out all their feelings — and in case we don’t get it, the author adds words like soothingly and jokingly and snapped. The result? Melodrama. We’re being forced to watch two complete strangers showing powerful emotions and talking about personal affairs that mean nothing to us. It would be embarrassing to watch in real life, and it’s embarrassing and off-putting to read.
But with penetration somewhere between light and deep, we get a much more restrained, believable scene, and we end up knowing the characters far better:
Pete could tell Nora was nervous even before she sat down beside him — she was jittery and her smile disappeared almost instantly. She stared off into space for a moment. Pete wondered if she was going over her routine again — she had done that a lot during the last few months, doing the steps and turns and kicks and leaps over and over in her mind, terrified that she’d forget something, make some mistake and get lost and stand there looking like an idiot the way she did two years ago in Phoenix. No matter how many times Pete reassured her that it was the alcohol that made her forget, she always answered by saying, “All the dead brain cells are still dead.” Hell, maybe she was right. Maybe her memory wasn’t what it used to be. But she still had the moves, she still had the body, and when she got on stage the musicians might as well pack up and go home, nobody would notice what they played, nobody would care, it was Nora in that pool of light on stage, doing things so daring and so dangerous and so sweet that you couldn’t breathe for watching her.
She reached out and put her hand around Pete’s drink. He laid his hand gently on her arm.
“I just wanted to see what you were drinking,” she said.
“Whiskey.”
He didn’t move his hand. She shrugged in annoyance and pulled her arm away.
Go ahead and be pissed off at me, kid, but no way is alcohol going up on that stage with you to dance.
In this version there are only two lines of spoken dialogue and nobody gets embarrassingly angry in public. Furthermore, you know both Pete and Nora far better than before, because you’ve seen Pete’s memories of Nora’s struggle with alcohol filtered through his own strong love for her — or at least for her dancing. We also know more about Nora’s attitude toward herself; the “dead brain cells” line tells us that she thinks of herself as permanently damaged, so that she is terrified of dancing again.
The scene still isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better now because we were able to get inside Pete’s mind and see Nora through his eyes, with his attitude toward her, his knowledge of their shared past.
Yet the second scene wasn’t all deep penetration. While Pete’s memories were deep and hot, the incident with the drink is cinematic and cool. We aren’t told why Pete lays his hand gently on her arm — we already know about her drinking problem and we can guess. No r do we need to be told that she’s lying when she says “I just wanted to see what you were drinking,” or what he’s feeling when he answers with a single word and refuses to move his hand. We already know enough about their relationship that we supply our own heat for the scene. And yet we can drop back into deep penetration with the last paragraph, without even needing “he thought” to tell us we’re back inside Pete’s head.
Mastery of different levels of penetration is a vital part of bringing your characters to life. This is where you have the most control over your readers’
experience, where you have the best chance to determine how well readers will know your characters and how much they’ll care.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A PRIVATE POPULATION EXPLOSION
We’ve come a long way through this book, from invention of your characters to analysis of their role in the story, from making your characters sympathetic to letting your readers see inside your characters’ minds.
Good characterization isn’t a simple recipe to follow — there are too many possibilities, too many variables for any writer ever to put down a story and say, “There. The characterization is finished.”
As long as your mind is alert to possibilities, your characters will grow and develop and deepen and change with every outline you make and every draft you write.
And as you become more aware of what’s possible in characterization, the more experience you get in storytelling as a whole, the better the decisions you’ll make and the fuller and more believable your characters will be.
If you’re serious about storytelling, you’ll write many stories and people them with hundreds of different characters. Even though all the characters are created by your own imagination, you still come to know them just as your readers do, except that you’ll know them better and care about them even more.
Sometimes, looking back on something you wrote years before, you’ll find one of your characters doing or saying something that will astonish you. How did I know she’d say that? you’ll wonder. How did I ever know that that was who she was?
You’ll realize then what your readers already know: that the people in your fictional world are worth knowing. Because you took the time and trouble to discover them, develop them, and present them skillfully, your readers will know those fictional people of yours far better than they’ll ever understand the people of flesh and blood around them.
If your fictional vision was a good and truthful one, your characters will help your readers understand their families, their friends, their enemies, and the countless mysterious and dangerous strangers who will touch their lives, powerfully and irresistibly. And you, looking back, will join them in saying a resounding Yes to the people in your tales.
Yes. I know you, I believe in you, you’re important to me. Yes.
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Orson Scott Card, Elements of Fiction Writing
