This week, we are going to focus on Voice and Point of View.
Let’s take a look some examples of muscle-y good writing, with an eye to how they use voice, language and point of view, to do amazing things. Get inspired and play around with these.
“I think of Jamie and silliness pops out of the ground in the form of a California hazelnut, bearing its tasseled foliage on each slim branch. Amid death and groaning wooden power and the wet complexity of moss and fungus and vines–from the same solemn pit, silliness pops up to dangle its tassels.” –Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (p. 127 hardback)
Wow! This reminds us of what language can do. Notice the earthy closeness to things–to nouns (hazelnut and moss, fungus, vines, tassels). This is a metaphor: she’s going deep into the metaphor of a tree to show complexity–hardship and silliness. Mine your own metaphor, full of earthy nouns. She’s writing in first person but not limiting the power of her narrator’s communications. Feel free to imitate her whole approach, almost like a glorified Madlib: I think of _____[noun or proper noun] and [concept] [great verb] in the form of [concrete object], [then show us the complexity of that object as it mirrors that of which you are thinking.]
OR: Read this passage aloud, get inspired by the pure sounds, and write wild and free without worrying how it works.
Here’s another one:
“The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks. They all got on, sitting in the lighted car which was far from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held.” –Another Country by James Baldwin (p. 85 paperback).
Listen to that: “the great scar of the tracks” and “choked with people” and “the isolation cell”! This is third person omniscient description, but it grips you with mood. This shows you the power of language. He doesn’t tell us how to feel or even how it feels to ride that train; he gives us a riveting description whose language contains all the feeling. Here we are not inside the head of any of the characters. Describe something from your book in objective third person, sticking close to actual description, but using strong language to build mood. Notice again that nouns do a lot of the work: scar, cell. Verbs, too: “filling,” “choked” and “transformed.”
And finally, this:
“But the child was light as a feather in his hands and the lightness took his breath away. The baby wore a seek-sucker sunsuit that left his tiny arms and shoulders bare, and Billy covered these with a cupped palm as he rested the child against his chest. The flesh was as sweetly warm as if the hand of God had just formed it.” –Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (p. 88 hardback)
How does she get away with not one, but two clichés in the first sentence? This is a close third person point of view. These are Billy’s thoughts, and we feel his wonder, feel these clichés coming alive for him for the first time. We can almost hear his Irish brogue. Then the narrator goes right into more description, so that we are not lost in the clichés. We see what Billy sees, and then again we hear his voice in the third sentence, filtered through the close third narration. Try writing in close third, bringing the way the character would talk and what the character would notice right into the language of the narrator.