One, Two or Many

I mentioned last week that I was reading Linwood Barclay’s Elevator Pitch, in preparation for talking to him as part of our upcoming Summer Festival.

And – it’s big.

It’s not super-long – I’m going to guess it runs to something like 150-160,000 words – but it has a scale that goes beyond mere length. It’s a thriller that encompasses the whole of Manhattan. The mayor. The son. The journalist. The daughter. The terrorist. The terrorist’s boss. The cop. The victims. The families. The ambassador. The FBI agent. And more.

I haven’t counted the number of points of view, but the total is probably two dozen or more. So disposable are the POVs, you get whole (entertaining) chapters written from the perspective of someone that the reader, not the character, realises is about to die.

The book is a big, fun, entertaining read. Though the thriller thrills as it should, it’s never nasty. There’s no gratuitous violence. No voyeurism of pain. A kind of compassionate humanity lives over the whole book.

But it’s the POVs I want to talk about.

Most of you will be working on a book with a single viewpoint, or maybe two or three carefully judged ones. You’ll agonise over whether one of your characters should be allowed her own POV, or whether she should have her little bit of fictional consciousness squeezed off the page altogether.

And then Linwood Barclay just manufactures points of view as though they didn’t matter. He’ll pop someone in a lift (= elevator, oh my American friends), give us three pages of insight into that character’s immortal soul, then splat that character from existence.

What’s going on? Why do you have to curate your characters with all this astonishing care, when Linwood Barclay can just manufacture and discard POVs with wild abandon?

Well.

Big question.

(And OK, I realise in my head I was doing that “well” in a Sven-Goran Eriksson voice. The guy used to be manager of the England football team, and he turned “well” into a two-syllable, very considered, Swedish-accented word, whose role was to live at the front of every sentence. If you were in a car with him as navigator, every time you asked for directions, he’d have said, “Well,” with such depth of thought that you’d have sped past the turning before he had time to give you an actual answer. So, now that you know that part sounds like in my head, we’re going to do it again.)

Well-ll.

Big question, but it resolves quite easily into three rough choices.

Utterly intimate

If you want to be utterly intimate with your main character and you want your reader to share that intimacy, you need a single viewpoint. It doesn’t matter too much whether that viewpoint is delivered first person or third, what matters is that the reader is living completely in that character’s shoes.

I do it myself. I’ve written about three quarters of a million words about my little Fiona Griffiths and every single one of those words is written from her point of view. Never once do the novels peep even for an italicised page or two into another mind.

The big win in this approach is depth and intimacy of characterisation. And it’s no coincidence that the element readers immediately foreground in my novels is the character. Yes, they’ll talk about the plots, but only after they’ve dealt with the character.

The big loss in that approach is that you risk a kind of claustrophobia. In my world of crime thrillers, for example, the strictly one-POV approach is relatively rare, because you have no access to dramatic action unless your character is there. That’s tough: it’s the most limiting, most difficult constraint that emerges from the way I’ve chosen to write.

My techniques for dealing with it are varied. They include: (a) locating my character at the point of drama more often than is actually credible, (b) making her a generator of drama in her own right, (c) giving her enough other points of interest – funny, crazy, romantic, interesting – that we don’t need non-stop drama, and (d) making those points of drama as long and intense as I can.

Epic, broad-sweep

The Linwood Barclay approach is the exact opposite. One of his point of view characters is the Mayor of New York, Richard Headley. The insight into RH’s inner world is so scant, it’s only just there at all. At times, it can be quite hard discerning whose point of view a chapter comes from.

That’s not bad writing. That’s careful, judicious writing.

Barclay knows that RH is not one of his primary characters, in the sense that readers aren’t hugely going to bond to him. So a dab of paint here and there is enough. He’s not an automaton. He’s in charge of this chapter. But you don’t really care about him, so I’m not going to go all-in with this character. With the characters Barclay does care about (and that readers care about), we have a much more detailed inner-life portrait.

The big wins of this approach are roughly twofold.

One, you generate a sense of scale. A Dickensian sense of an entire city, crawling beneath the novelist’s lens.

Two, you can jump to whichever piece of action is most dramatic, most involving. If you actually just traced the path of the book through one character’s journey alone, that character wouldn’t encounter nearly enough dramatic action to keep the reader involved.

And the loss?

Simply that none of Barclay’s characters register as intensely or in-depth as is possible with the one-POV only approach. They simply don’t get enough time on the page to generate that alchemy.

What you win in terms of scale and flexibility, you lose in terms of intimacy. In both cases, good writing allows you to claw back some of your losses, but the losses are real, no matter what.

Two or three

And then there’s an intermediate group of novels where there are multiple characters, but not in Linwood Barclays’s all-you-can-eat buffet kind of way.

There are romantic novels where he and she each have a hand.

Or historical novels where, the duke and the factory girl and (oh I dunno) the ship’s captain all have a role.

These are the novels that, from experience, generate the largest number of anguished emails. Roughly: “Hi Harry, I’ve just organised all my chapters into a spreadsheet and the ship’s captain has only 20% of the total page space, maybe less if you exclude the flashback where he worked in the ship’s chandlery, and I worry if maybe I should scrap the captain and given the girl the scene on the ship where the storm arrives, only then …”

And – I don’t know.

I mean: I haven’t read your books, so I don’t know. But you have basically two lamps to guide you. (And these are Lamps of Truth, so they’re good ‘uns when it comes to the whole guidance thing.)

Lamp the first: Don’t give your character a POV unless they have an actual story. That means a challenge, a crisis, a resolution. It means jeopardy. It means internal and external obstacles to victory. It means that all the plot ingredients needed for an entire novel are present, in miniature, for your point of view character too.

Lamp the second: Don’t give your character a POV unless you actually care about them. If you don’t, the reader won’t.

*** 

This whole business of POVs causes more anguish than almost any other, I reckon. And in the end, these general rules, while helpful, are only guidelines. Before you email me with one of your duke / factory girl / captain emails, just remember that I DON’T KNOW. The guidelines are helpful in terms of clarifying your thoughts, but the final decisions and judgements can only be made with a specific manuscript to consider.

That is all from me.

I will e-see loads of you at the Summer Festival next week and over the next few months. The rest of you will just have to sob bitter tears of remorse that you didn’t get your tickets in time. (Or – alternative thought – you could just go and get one. Details below.)

That’s it from me. And I don’t think that my trio of duke / factory girl / ship’s captain is a very good one. What trio of characters do you have? And which one do you worry should be for the chop …? Chime in below and let’s all have a Heated Debate.