The Narrow Character Focus

The dh mentioned the current trend towards revenge films, you know, Liam Neeson (hmm) as action star, manfully pursuing vengeance for his daughter's abduction, and Harrison Ford going after those who killed his wife, and Uma Thurman killing everyone something about her wedding (sorry, I could never actually watch that pair of films, not really needing to know how many different ways there are to kill other people).

Anyway, he said that something that made films of this genre seem thin is that the perspective is often so narrow, that we as viewers(readers) are meant to identify entirely with the protagonist and never question his goal or his motivation or take a wider view of the situation.

It's hard for a writer, I know, because we have to identify with the protagonist, and we certainly want the reader to do that too. But the reader is NOT the protagonist. The reader has and should have a slightly wider view, or rather, we ought to provide that wider view. It might be just the question of whether, say, the hero has perhaps gone too far in his vengeful actions, or a hint that perhaps the other guy might have another story, or just a sense that this might be disproportionate.

The protagonist doesn't actually have to consider this or express ambivalence for the reader to feel that. Another character, for example, can provide the other dimension (and it is dimensionality this adds-- depth is created by adding a different perspective). Spielberg's film Lincoln does both of these. Lincoln himself admits that his action in emancipating the slaves during the war might have been extra-constitutional, thus he is showing the other side of the question. But then, in regard to his own family, it takes his wife and son to add dimension to his refusal to let his son serve in the army. His wife (paradoxically) in providing his justification (keeping their child safe) forces Lincoln to remember that many parents haven't had that security. And Robert, the son, by showing his opposition forces Lincoln to say something that appalls even himself-- that every father wants to protect his son, but only Lincoln has the power to send thousands to their deaths and also the power to spare his own son. So in this case, the other characters are the ones who bring out the extra dimension.

In that case, the question is resolved when Lincoln reluctantly allows his son to serve, showing his complex moral progress.  If he'd been okay with this from the start, the question would never have been raised. It's the opposition or the conflict which provides the dimension.

So I guess-- it's important to get the reader to identify with the protagonist. But to offer a fuller reading experience, we might add to that by at least hinting at a more complicated dimensionality, that the world of the book is not confined merely to the one character's reality.

Alicia

Innovating

Murphy's comment is worth highlighting, and I'm going to copy just a bit, but go and read it-- it's the first comment in my just previous post.

Before I ever commit to testing these boundaries though, I’m given to wonder: How accepting is a reader likely to be, when a mainstream fiction writer breaks from traditional form? I mean, personally I feel that any art form - be it (paintings, movies or books) that invites an individual to explore themselves - their meaning and overall place in the creation of their own history, is to be admired – but like Kaufman’s work....how well would it be received? Sure, you will have an audience but, is it the right audience? Who are you actually writing for? More importantly, what is the voice that you want the world to hear? If it’s your voice, as the narrator, is what you have to impart to the reader, more important than the words your characters may have to speak for themselves? ...In the end would the truth of your fiction be better received this way? - It is certainly something to think about.

So let's say that you want to use popular fiction tropes and stories-- you love the thriller plot, or you read a lot of mysteries, or you can't write without a romance-- but you also want to innovate-- you want an unhappy ending, or you want the murderer to be someone you didn't introduce earlier, or....

First, if you are considering innovating with your current story, how? What convention are you spinning away from, and why?

Then do you think there's a way to make this acceptable? To reach readers, you have to get by editors (who can be more wedded to convention than readers are!). So... what works, to innovate without rejection?

Alicia (who actually did get all the grading done, only to find that several of the grades had turned into negatives... gotta love technology)

Unemployed Protagonists

I'm noticing a new trend in my inbox lately. An awful lot of manuscripts are starting with the protagonist getting fired. I can't decide what I think about this trend.

On the one hand, this would seem to be a good, emotional starting point. It's inherently dramatic -- drama is rooted in change and in conflict, and losing your job encompasses both. An event is in motion, and that event creates change in the protagonist's life. And people hardly ever accept the reasons for which they're being terminated as good or legitimate reasons, so there's always a tendency to fight back. Conflict.

It gives the heroine an instant problem to solve. What will she do? How will she continue on in her life? Jobs are hard to find these days. Will she lose everything, or will she manage to survive?

It provides the added opportunity for a little bit of character set-up. The reasons for the termination are backstory -- that is, they happened before the present moment of the storyline -- but their presentation comes about naturally through an active scene. "Joe, when you went to that convention and sent a strippergram to Acme's lead buyer, you might've thought it was funny, but he didn't. We lost our biggest account because of this. I'm afraid we have to let you go."

And, sad to say, this taps in to our current cultural zeitgeist. Nationwide, we've been in net job loss territory since May of this year. Unemployment is always a serious problem for the people and families dealing with it, but lately, it seems to be on the public radar a little bit more than usual. I know there are a lot of pundits out there who want to talk about "mental recession," but leaving politics aside, it doesn't really matter for fiction purposes whether these things are born from facts or from perceptions. When people start paying attention to a topic, that topic finds its way into creative works of storytellers. So job loss is topical, and it's entirely possible that a lot of people out there in this current climate would want to read stories that deal with this precise problem.

But, with all that said, I'm still not sure that getting fired is a good opener for story. There are two basic patterns for when people lose their jobs. The first is when it's part of a mass layoff or layoff for economic or similar reasons unrelated to the person's job performance. The second is when an individual is being fired for cause. The main difference between these two scenarios is that under the first, the employer is not going to refill the job -- the job itself is being eliminated, and the person is just a casualty. Under the second, the job will have to be refilled. It's not the job that's been eliminated, but the individual.

The first is inherently more sympathetic. It falls under the category of bad things that happen to good people, and might actually enhance the amount of sympathy a reader feels for the protagonists -- although, of course, much depends on the way it's written. I think we can probably all agree on the increased sympathy factor, though if you have other ideas, I'd like to hear about them in the comments.

But this is not the scenario that's been popping up in my inbox. What I've been seeing instead are stories about people who are terminated for cause, but the reasons for their termination are either incorrect or unfair. If incorrect, the story then becomes about proving that the big bad employer was covering something up, made a mistake, or failed to get an inept manager under control before that manager committed the ultimate blunder. If unfair, the story then becomes about lawsuits and revenge.

In either case, though, I'm out of step with the protagonist right from page one. The protagonist was not a victim of the economy, not a sympathetic bystander. Our dramatic question is not, "How will the protagonists survive?", but, "Was the protagonist fired for good reasons or bad?" And I think that's a far less compelling dramatic question.

But I could be wrong. That does occasionally happen -- I know, I know. Shocker. ;) Maybe the dramatic impetus provided by this big, compelling problem is enough to propel the reader through the first chapter and get them deeper into the plot. And the deeper they read, the more bonded they become to the protagonist. That's just the way it works.

I'd like to know what you all think about this. If the protagonist is fired because of job performance issues, are you going to want to read a story that's essentially about whether the job performance was correctly assessed?

Theresa

Openings examples from comments==

I'm going to use the openings supplied by commenters as examples of how different openings lead the reader into anticipating a different type of story... even if the basic elements are the same.
Here's my scenario:
Let's start with an easily adaptable plot. Sarah, a young woman, goes to the funeral home to deal with the necessities of burying her Uncle Wally. She realizes somehow he was actually murdered, though everyone has assumed the cause of death was natural or an accident.

So here are some commenters' takes on that. I'm just going to use the first line or two of each to show how even from Line 1 you can get the reader's anticipation up.


This is Keri's:
Sarah Smith gasped and turned around after walking in Uncle Wally’s house and finding him face-down on the floor with a knife in his back.

I "diagnosed" this as romantic suspense, but it could just be suspense (no romance) or it could be a fairly standard mystery. Why suspense? Because Sarah is the one who discovers the body, and it happens very early. A mystery might have the "sleuth" discover the body, but that tends to happens -after- a set up of the setting and situation-- several pages, maybe even several chapters (the English mystery often puts the murder in Chapter 3 or so) in.

Also notice that Sarah is closely related (niece) to the victim, which again is more of a feature of the suspense novel. Suspense, as its title implies, is meant to be a more emotional experience, while mysteries are more intellectual... so the more emotional experience of the close relative being killed is "suspense-y".

I would also point out that naming a character early conveys personal importance on her. That is, naming Sarah Smith in the first line suggests that she's going to be the sleuth.

NOT naming her until later would indicate to the reader than she is not going to be the main character-- maybe she'll be the victim, or maybe the murderer, or maybe a secondary character... but if she's not named on first reference, that's usually a sign of secondariness.

If the character is named by her -role- (The waitress fiddled with the spoons), that sends a signal that the role is the only important thing about her.

Now obviously, you can play with expectation here... but you should probably know what the expectation is. When you are a reader, for example, you might find a bunch of names in the first couple paragraphs confusing because you're subconsciously searching for the protagonist-- the one you're supposed to identify with. So when you re-don your writing hat, don't forget the experience of the reader. Don't feel like you have to name the doctor and the cop and the neighbor, especially if they're never going to appear again.

So Keri using Sarah's name and Uncle Wally's (AS Uncle Wally, not as Wally Magnuson-- that is, identifying him from her perspective) tells us that these two will be important... but that Sarah (both names, plus of course we're in her point of view) is the main character.

One little editing note-- if I were editing this, I'd point out that you have reaction (her gasp) before the cause (seeing Wally dead) in the sentence. How can you rewrite that so that you get a more logical sequence but still have the "surprise" of the murder at the end of the sentence?

We think chronologically, or at least, when we assemble our thoughts in a logical way, the order we use for time sequence is usually chronological-- first this happened, and then that. So a reader is going to be just a bit stopped there because the sequence in the sentence defies the chronology. It's not a big problem, but you want the first sentence to be perfect-- because readers can so easily put a book down at that point, as they've got no investment at this point. Don't give them a reason.

Also notice that the focus on action rather than perception (her gasping then telling us what she's seeing) is presenting this from the outside, from the camera eye. The great advantage books have over movies is that books can be INSIDE the character, while even the most deft camera operator has to remain OUTSIDE. Telling the action rather than letting the reader FEEL the experience of being Sarah is a point of view choice-- you're choosing "objective POV" rather than the more personal, interior "deep-third-person". That is not unusual in the first paragraph of a book, but it tends to put it more in the "thriller" genre than either suspense (which is all about the reader sharing the character's experience) or mystery (which is about the reader sharing the sleuth's thoughts). So if you want this to be about Sarah as a potential victim (suspense) or the sleuth (mystery), I'd suggest a closer point of view from the very beginning.

So you could fix both of these problems by going inside her and narrating her experience rather than just her action. Start with some emotion or thought word that places us squarely in her POV, then narrate from the inside, like--

Sarah Smith wanted to turn around and walk away without knocking. She didn't want to meet her Uncle Wally. She had enough troublesome relatives already. But she reminded herself that family was family, and knocked.

The door wasn't locked. It wasn't even latched. Just her knock was enough to make it swing open. Sarah was confronted with Uncle Wally's front hallway-- and there, framed in the sunlight from the open door, was Uncle Wally, face-down on the floor with a knife in his back.

Much longer, notice-- deep POV is always (almost) longer than objective. But notice that it's her experience from the inside, so from the beginning, the reader experiences HER in real time.

Must run-- more later.

Alicia

"Seems"

Alicia says--
Just a short note here, when we're fussing about fussy things. I'm heading out of town, so might not have too much to say.

Want to pontificate on the word "seem". That means, as Archibald MacLeish said of a poem:

A poem should be equal to
Not true

"Seem" means not true, or at least, "not is". When we write, "The postman seemed late," the astute reader is going to think, Aha! The postman isn't really late! He's... dead! Or he's in the house ready to murder the narrator!

That is, the word "seem" is a clue that "all is not how it seems"-- a clue that there is more to the story, that whatever "seems" to be true is not entirely or comprehensively true.

So just be aware that if you use "seem" in your narrative, you're suggesting that the reader perk up and take notice, because whatever "seems" is going to be undercut or proven false or something rather soon.

Now if you don't mean that, if the postman really IS late, use "IS". "The postman was late." The reader will just register the information as factual and not start anticipating something you don't mean.

So that's just another example of how to deal with the sophisticated reader, I guess. You can't get anything past that reader-- she's spending every page looking for little clues you've dropped into your narrative. Don't raise expectations if you don't mean to -- readers like this will be quick to express their disappointment!

"Seems," by the way, is one of those slack terms we -- oh, lord, I almost put in my own favorite slack term, tend to. ... one of those slack terms we tend to drop in to water down our point so that we don't have to actually COMMIT. These are good terms to delete or replace in revision.

(What's wrong with "tend to?" Well, it implies that we don't actually do whatever verb follows that, we just "tend to" do it. "It" isn't something we did, or are going to do, rather it's something that, presumably if the wind is blowing in the right direction, we might do sometimes. Not all the time. Not THIS time necessarily. We're just more likely to do it than not to do it. And that says nothing about this particular time. In fact, this particular time we either do it or we don't do it... so I have to avoid copping out with "tends to.")

Another "wriggle word" is "decided"-- He decided to take the plunge. The question is, well, did he? Did he take the plunge, or just decide to? If you use "decided to" and then don't go on to tell us that he did in fact take the plunge, we're going to assume that somewhere between his decision and the doing something happened to intervene. He decided to take the plunge, but then his old girlfriend came back to town and he got distracted. There's many a slip twixt cup and lip, as they used to say, and "decided to" is like an invitation to the gods to come "twixt" and spill the wine.

The focus in most popular fiction is on the action, not the decision-- the decision is most important when it leads to the action, or when something intervenes. It's definitely not enough to have the character "decide" to do something, because we all know how impermanent and inconclusive decisions are. (I almost typed "tend to be"-- I tell you, it's a narrative tic!)

So... I'm contemplating more about how we inadvertently misdirect readers and set up expectations we don't mean. Later I'll do a post on how opening chapters so often do that.

(BTW, I think it's fine to ADVERTENTLY-- is that a word?-- misdirect readers. As Robert Frost supposedly said, "I want readers to understand me. I just want them to understand me wrong." We just need to know what we're doing, and fix what we don't want to do.)
Alicia