Make A Scene (34 page)

In Richard Lewis's novel
The Killing Sea,
two teens are affected by the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004 in Indonesia. The life of Sarah, an American girl on vacation with her parents and brother, is changed drastically when her mother is killed in the tsunami strike and her father disappears. In the aftermath of the crisis, struggling to get back to a place where she and her brother can get help, she meets Ruslan, an Indonesian boy, and winds up helping him to find his missing father. All throughout the narrative, Sarah's grief for her mother is tangled. She has always believed that her mother didn't want to have her, and this thought haunts her. In the final scene, Rus-lan draws Sarah a picture of her mother as he imagines her:

And in the simple, graceful lines of her gently smiling face, in the eyes that looked right into her, Sarah saw all the love that her mother had always had for her, and how absolutely, utterly wrong she'd been to ever have doubted it.

While that is a lovely sentiment, the final sentence is the most powerful because it plants an image in the reader's mind, conjuring not only tears, but the waters of the tsunami itself that took her mother and father away:

Something gave way within her, and the raw waters of grief came rushing in.

I am a fan of images that symbolically and metaphorically speak to the journey the protagonist has undergone. Think about the themes of your narrative. Is it about loss, healing, faith, forgiveness? It helps to make a list of images that come to mind for whatever your themes are, and then from that list, to select or create a final image that speaks to your protagonist's personal journey.

FINAL SCENE MUSE POINTS
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•The final scene is a snapshot of your protagonist in the aftermath or at the very end of the significant situation.

• Final scenes should reveal that your protagonist has changed.

• Final scenes are slower and more reflective.

• Final scenes do not require much action.

In fiction, point of view (POV) is the camera through which the reader enters your protagonist's world, sees what he sees, and shares in his feelings and perceptions. POV has a direct influence on the tone, mood, energy, and pace of a scene (not to mention your overall narrative).

In order to master POV from one scene to the next, you must use it with integrity and consistency, by which I mean that the reader should feel expertly guided at all times throughout your scenes, never confused about whose POV is being presented. If you've shown the scene of a murder through a shocked widow's eyes, for example, you don't want to suddenly leap into the point of view of the vigilante detective who is hunting the murderer down without legitimate reason and careful transition. Otherwise you'll leave the reader a little feeling a little whip lashed and out of sync with your story.

In this chapter, we'll examine the different kinds of POV in relation to what effects they create. We'll also talk about how to make POV leaps and transitions inside scenes, and from scene to scene, so that whatever POV you choose to use works for your scenes, not against them.

CHOOSING YOUR CAMERA

POV is not only the camera that shows what your characters see, it is also what determines how close the reader can get to get to your characters. The

distance between your characters and the reader defines the intimacy of the scene or story. The more intimate the POV, the more the reader feels as if he is personally experiencing what the character is. The more distant the POV, the more the reader feels like an objective observer on the sidelines. Your content will motivate your choice of intimacy in part. If you are writing about the lives of women in Afghanistan, like Khaled Hosseini does in his novel
A Thousand Splendid Suns,
then it will work to your advantage to bring the reader in close—through first person or limited third person, in which there is very little separation from the characters. Use this next section to choose the degree of intimacy you want, and the level of objectivity you need to tell your story.

First Person

First-person points of view reach out and grab the reader, like a small child standing in a room screaming "Me, me, me!" You can't help but turn to look. The "I" pronoun is very immediate, and it draws the reader emotionally directly into the characters' experience.

The following example comes from Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
Gilead,
in which a dying minister writes down his life story for his young son to read someday. The memoirs are peppered with actual observations of his life as he is dying:

I must try to be mindful of my condition. I started to lift you up into my arms the other day, the way I used to when you weren't quite so big and I wasn't quite so old. Then I saw your mother watching me with pure apprehension and I realized what a foolish thing to do that was.

If it's intimacy you strive for in creating characters, you can't get much closer than first person. You are literally inside the protagonist's head, which is very useful when you want to put the reader directly into your characters' shoes.

On the same note, the problem with first person is that if your character undergoes tremendous suffering, physical pain, or crisis, first person might be too immediate and painful. To provide objectivity and pull back from the intensity, you can use third-person limited, which we'll look at shortly.

Also, because first person is so immediate, your verb tenses will have a lot more power than in other points of view. The present tense, when conjoined with first person, is probably the most immediate experience you can give the reader: "I hold the gun up to Max's head." Whew ... that gun is liable to go off and poor Max may have only moments left. In the past tense, "I held the gun up to Max's head." Do you see how the past tense offers a tiny beat of distance?

Second Person

Second person is a narrative version of self-talk. The "you" pronoun is coming from the character, aimed back to himself. It is first person turned even more deeply intimate, because the reader is not only inside the person's mind and thoughts, he essentially
becomes
the character.

Here's an example from Aimee Bender's story "The Bowl" in her collection of short stories,
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

When you open the wrapping (there's no card), you find a bowl, a green bowl with a white interior, a bowl for fruit or mixing. You're puzzled, but obediently put four bananas inside and then go back to whatever you were doing before: a crossword puzzle. You wonder and hope this is from a secret admirer, but if so, you think, why a bowl? What are you to learn and gain from a green and white fruit bowl?

This POV is very intimate. Best used when the intention of the scene is to explore a character's feelings or attitude, or to draw the reader in incredibly close; but not so effective when you have a lot of action or character interaction unfolding in the scene at hand. The "you" second-person point of view plants the reader deeper inside the character's experience until the line between reader and character is blurred.

Second person can seem slightly humorous, even when the subject matter is not, because it's not a tense that we use in actual spoken conversation very often. When was the last time you heard someone refer to himself as "you"? Second person is an exquisitely self-conscious point of view, which can be fascinating and fun when the subject matter or the protagonist is quirky or the style is experimental, but otherwise second person feels as if the reader has just opened a window on a character's mind in the middle of a deeply personal thought process. As a result, it's not used very often.

Third Person

You'll recognize third person by the use of pronouns "she" and "he." There are two main forms of the third-person point of view—omniscient, which is more distant, and limited, which is more intimate. I find that writers have a tendency to interchange the two in confusing ways.

Third-Person Limited

Third-person limited is really one of the most straightforward and practical of all points of view. It provides enough distance, via the "he" and "she" pronouns, that the reader is not riding piggyback with the characters, but it also allows you to develop one character at a time, and never confuses the reader. If the character's point of view is in limited third person, the reader knows, "I am looking out through Snow White's eyes here." There is no guesswork or moving between characters' thoughts.

In the third-person omniscient POV, the camera can move wherever it needs to, into any character's head, to look out upon any facet of the scene at hand. This flexibility offers more options for drama and conflict, and is often employed in an epic or historical novel, where important information needs to be communicated outside of a character's perspective.

Omniscient Continuous

When you can see inside the head of more than one character, and hear multiple characters' thoughts in a back-and-forth kind of fashion, you're in the omniscient continuous, as I like to call it. When the camera pans from Snow White to Dopey, Grumpy, and Doc, and you can hear the thoughts and opinions of each one as they discuss what to do about that nasty old witch, you're smack dab in omniscient.

When you employ omniscient in scenes, it creates a sense of movement because you must jump from character to character, which also creates emotional distance. It's useful to be able to dance back and forth between characters' thoughts when a scene involves multiple characters.

Omniscient Instants

Omniscient instants, on the other hand, are bits of information inserted into third-person limited POV that offer up information in the scene that the characters can't know but which helps clarify details for the reader.

Here's an example in Ingrid Hill's novel of ancestors,
Ursula, Under,
which is a series of linked historical stories that trace back the lineage of a child, Ursula, who has slipped down a mine shaft and is awaiting rescue.

[Rene Josserand's skull] is still there today, undiscovered, four and a half feet into the rich earth, beneath leaves, grass, and clay, never touched by a gravedigger's hand. There are local post cards, but none of them says, "Paradise, Michigan, home of the tomahawked skull of Rene Josserand," because no one knows.

Since Rene Josserand—one of Ursula's ancestors—is long dead, and "no one knows" about his existence, then technically, there isn't a single person in the narrative who could deliver that information to the reader. Yet Hill chooses to tell it to us, since his story is integral to the life of the protagonist, Ursula, and ties up his storyline for us as best as she can.

Keep in mind that too many omniscient leaps will inevitably pull the reader out of the continuity of his reading. He might stop to ponder, "Hey, I'm not really supposed to know that" or even, "Who exactly is telling me this?"—and you don't want too much of that.