Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

We who write fiction have no team of actors or musicians to do our bidding, so it’s easy to forget that our work, too, has a composition stage and a performance stage. We are both composer and performer. Or rather, we are both storyteller and writer. The actual writing of the story, along with the creation of the text, the choice of words, the dialogue, the style, the tone, the point of view — that is the performance, that is the part of our work that earns us the title “writer.” The invention of the characters and situations and events, along with the construction of plot and scene, the ordering of events, the complications and twists, the setting and historical background — that is the composition, the part of our work that earns us the title “storyteller.”

There is no “right” way to arrange the two roles of storyteller and writer. I often work for years on a story, inventing, outlining, mapping, constructing, before I feel that I’m ready to write it down. Writer Larry Niven tells his stories aloud to his friends, letting each tale grow and take shape with a live audience to help guide him. I know other writers who can compose only while performing, like an actor improvising a monologue — they have to be writing the story in order to bring ideas to mind, discovering and shaping the characters and plot as they go along.

No — better than they know any living person. By the time they finish your story, readers want to know your characters better than any human being ever knows any other human being. That’s part of what fiction is for — to give a better understanding of human nature and human behavior than anyone can ever get in life.

Motive is what gives moral value to a character’s acts. What a character does, no matter how awful or how good, is never morally absolute: What seemed to be murder may turn out to have been self-defense, madness, or illusion; what seemed to be a kiss may turn out to have been betrayal, deception, or irony.

You “know” a lot of things about people you’ve never met, just from what others say about them. The same process works in fiction — your readers will form attitudes and opinions about characters they haven’t “met” yet, just by what other characters in the story say about them. When you finally bring the character into the story in person, readers think they already know him; they already have expectations about what he’ll do.

It is also one of the most startling and effective devices in fiction to take characters out of one setting and put them in another, where different facets of their personality come to the fore. The

That honeymoon with the readers lasts about three paragraphs with a short story, two pages or so with a novel. Within that time you need to give the reader some reason to read on. You need to answer the three challenging questions that all readers unconsciously ask throughout every story they read. When each question is adequately answered, readers go on with the story. When a question isn’t answered well enough, doubts begin to rise to the surface. Question 1: So What? Why should I care about what’s going on in this story? Why is this important? Why shouldn’t I go downstairs and watch TV? I’ve seen this kind of thing happen in stories a thousand times before. If this is all the story’s about, I’m through with it. Question 2: Oh Yeah? Come on, I don’t believe anybody would do that. That isn’t the way things work. That was pretty convenient, wasn’t it? How dumb does this author think I am? Give me a break. This author doesn’t know anything. I’m through with this story. Question 3: Huh?

Because if your story really does matter, if your made-up tales have any real value at all, then it truly is an act of charity, of brotherly love, to open up that story to as many people as can possibly receive

My experience is that I have never done well writing a story from one idea or developing a character from one source. Only when I put together two previously unrelated ideas or characters do they come to life; it is in the process of connecting the unconnected that my stories grow. This may be true for some of you, also.

A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed — or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration. It’s as if you begin the story by pushing a boulder off the top of a hill. No matter what else happens before the end of the story, the reader will not be satisfied until the boulder comes to rest somewhere.

First-person and omniscient narrations are by nature more presentational than limited third-person — readers will notice the narrator more. If your goal is to get your readers emotionally involved with your main characters, with minimal distraction from their belief in the story, then the limited third-person narrator is your best choice.

limited third person is the best. It combines the flexibility of omniscience with the intensity of the first person. It’s also an easier choice for a beginning writer, partly because it doesn’t require the same level of mastery of the language, and partly because it will simply be more familiar and therefore feel more “natural” to writers who have grown up in a literary community where limited third person predominates. (This is also the best reason for avoiding present tense; except for the academic/literary genre, present tense is very uncommon and so feels surprising, distracting, and “unnatural”; the more common past tense feels natural and invisible. Ironically, this makes past tense feel more immediate while present tense feels more distant; most readers are more likely to feel that a past-tense story is happening “now” than a present-tense story.)

Once you’ve decided to write a limited third-person narration, you still have a choice to make: how deeply to penetrate the viewpoint character’s mind.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.