Selective Perspective
One of my favorite people ever, my good friend Daryl, returned last night from a week-long vacation in Seattle and the surrounding area. On the way out, he took a route that is well familiar to me - the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited (New York to Chicago) and Empire Builder (Chicago to Seattle) trains.
There was a period of time during my first two years of college when I'd been flying back and forth between New England and Montana 3 or 4 times a year, and I was getting sick of planes. I had a lot of down time for most of my vacations, my hometown of Havre has always been a major railroad hub, and it cost about the same amount of money as flying, so I took the train back and forth a few times. It's sort of like the difference between the subway and the bus - when you're at ground level and moving on a particular path, you can see everything you pass between your point of origin and your destination. You get a better sense of how much ground you're covering and precisely which ground. Taking the train cross-country is something I think everyone should do at least once, if only to give you a sense of exactly how vast things are, and how much they can vary from place to place along the route between where you start from and where you're going. We Americans don't generally take enough time to relish the journey over the destination.
Now, Daryl and I, fundamentally, have very similar temperaments - it's part of the reason we get along so well as friends. (Daryl is nicemodernism personified - in fact, he co-invented the concept.) We come from similar backgrounds, and we like to do many of the same things. But the objects and views he chose to document along the Empire Builder route are not often the things I would have chosen or expected. It's fascinating to me to see what caught another person's eye along a route that I know so well.
His photos, particularly the ones taken in and around my hometown, make me take new notice of things that it never occurred to me to notice, like the old dairy ads on the sides of buildings; the grain silos; the water towers with the town name emblazoned across the side; and the Northcentral Montana uniform of ball cap, tucked-in button-down shirt, and worn-out jeans that every male over the age of 15 wears every day of his life. Even my parents, who met Daryl's train for the 20-minute rest stop in Havre, look different through the lens of his camera.
The analogy to fiction writing is obvious - the person telling the story is as important as the story itself. Point of view has always been my favorite thing to play with and ponder.
Shifting POV is the reason I can't get enough of Jodi Picoult's books (even though I'm aware that the plots often employ very similar devices from book to book), and the reason As I Lay Dying remains one of my favorite books, and the reason one of my favorite films is Laetitia Colombani's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which tells the same story twice, back to back, from two different points of view.
As I was finally digging into the really meaty parts of the story I'm trying to tell now, I realized that certain segments would be much better served if told from a different point of view, to deliver the immediacy of an incident one character wasn't present for. For awhile, I pondered writing the whole thing in third-person, but I want not just the immediacy, but the limitations and biases that come from one perspective at a time. The particular challenge with this, and the reason very few people do it well, is in using this device to really demonstrate the different things different people would notice about a situation, and the different things they'd be willing to reveal to a reader. You have to crawl into a lot of different skins almost simultaneously. You practically have to write out the entire story as many times as you have narrators.
Needless to say, it is a colossal pain in my ass. But in a good way, given that I'm actually doing it. Any time I'm putting words on paper is time well spent.
Clearly, Daryl, you don't need to take me out to dinner in return for feeding your cat while you were gone, because you've definitely given me more than enough food for thought.
There was a period of time during my first two years of college when I'd been flying back and forth between New England and Montana 3 or 4 times a year, and I was getting sick of planes. I had a lot of down time for most of my vacations, my hometown of Havre has always been a major railroad hub, and it cost about the same amount of money as flying, so I took the train back and forth a few times. It's sort of like the difference between the subway and the bus - when you're at ground level and moving on a particular path, you can see everything you pass between your point of origin and your destination. You get a better sense of how much ground you're covering and precisely which ground. Taking the train cross-country is something I think everyone should do at least once, if only to give you a sense of exactly how vast things are, and how much they can vary from place to place along the route between where you start from and where you're going. We Americans don't generally take enough time to relish the journey over the destination.
Now, Daryl and I, fundamentally, have very similar temperaments - it's part of the reason we get along so well as friends. (Daryl is nicemodernism personified - in fact, he co-invented the concept.) We come from similar backgrounds, and we like to do many of the same things. But the objects and views he chose to document along the Empire Builder route are not often the things I would have chosen or expected. It's fascinating to me to see what caught another person's eye along a route that I know so well.
His photos, particularly the ones taken in and around my hometown, make me take new notice of things that it never occurred to me to notice, like the old dairy ads on the sides of buildings; the grain silos; the water towers with the town name emblazoned across the side; and the Northcentral Montana uniform of ball cap, tucked-in button-down shirt, and worn-out jeans that every male over the age of 15 wears every day of his life. Even my parents, who met Daryl's train for the 20-minute rest stop in Havre, look different through the lens of his camera.
The analogy to fiction writing is obvious - the person telling the story is as important as the story itself. Point of view has always been my favorite thing to play with and ponder.
Shifting POV is the reason I can't get enough of Jodi Picoult's books (even though I'm aware that the plots often employ very similar devices from book to book), and the reason As I Lay Dying remains one of my favorite books, and the reason one of my favorite films is Laetitia Colombani's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which tells the same story twice, back to back, from two different points of view.
As I was finally digging into the really meaty parts of the story I'm trying to tell now, I realized that certain segments would be much better served if told from a different point of view, to deliver the immediacy of an incident one character wasn't present for. For awhile, I pondered writing the whole thing in third-person, but I want not just the immediacy, but the limitations and biases that come from one perspective at a time. The particular challenge with this, and the reason very few people do it well, is in using this device to really demonstrate the different things different people would notice about a situation, and the different things they'd be willing to reveal to a reader. You have to crawl into a lot of different skins almost simultaneously. You practically have to write out the entire story as many times as you have narrators.
Needless to say, it is a colossal pain in my ass. But in a good way, given that I'm actually doing it. Any time I'm putting words on paper is time well spent.
Clearly, Daryl, you don't need to take me out to dinner in return for feeding your cat while you were gone, because you've definitely given me more than enough food for thought.
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