WWW: It's a Matter of Perspective

Yep, it's that time. Time for a writing exercise and thought exercise, all rolled into one. In this case, I thought I'd talk about perspective, also known as point of view (POV). One thing I love about writing is the opportunity to put on a different POV.

There are a dozen different ways to do POV and a dozen dozen rules for all that: first person, third person, third person omniscient, yada yada yada. Since I don't like the rules, per se, and they seem contradictory to the vast majority of the books I've loved over my life, I don't sweat it. I'm not an English teacher and, in fact, tested out of my college English, so I'm not going to teach you textbook writing or English. (Don't hate me, Shakespeare). In fact, I like to think of this as more like a coffee clache for writers as opposed to a "class"(except that I don't drink coffee). So, if you want the rules, you're in luck because there are gillions of people out there eager to tell you what rules you're breaking. I just won't be one of them as long as it works. Of course, that's a whole other blog post - maybe next week.

Nope, when I talk perspective, I'm telling you that writing is an opportunity to put on someone else's shoes, walk their walk and talk their talk. Not only to wander about in someone else's skin, but to give your readers an opportunity to do the same. If you do it right, you can expand both your horizons.

In my opinion, too many writers don't take the opportunity to take advantage of perspective. Many books are written from the perspective of a character, but it's just a vehicle for the story. They don't tell you what about that character makes the perspective worth while. They often scrub off the prejudices and thought processes, the unique twists that could give that perspective color and, through those eyes, color to the other characters.

The ability to make someone alive and sympathetic, particularly someone you would never otherwise have a use for, is priceless. The reason why the book Silence of the Lambs was a relative yawn fest compared to The Red Dragon was because of perspective. Thomas Harris took you into the world of a psychopathic killer, into his history, pinpointed what set him on his path and made you sympathetic to him when he fought his inner demon (literally) to try to break out of his pattern. That, my friends, is a feat.

In a book or a story, you have the opportunity to look at thing from another side (an alien or a minority), and you can twist them, too. There are good guys and bad guys in every subgroup, in every country, in every profession. You can spend a whole book on one perspective, make the reader comfortable with it, and then turn it around in the end to change the look and feel entirely. I have a children's book called I Wish I Were a Butterfly by Ed Young where a cricket bemoans its ugliness. In the end, the eyes of a friend convince it that it is not so ugly after all, so it starts to fiddle. And a butterfly comes by and says, "What beautiful music that creature makes. I wish I were a cricket."

That's what I'm talking about.

Ideally, I'd like to see people write painting a particular picture of someone we wouldn't normally get a good sense of, perhaps a criminal or an autistic child, a welfare recipient or a panhandler, an illegal alien or an executive from AIG in such a way that we could see things from their side, even if we didn't agree with it.

I'll put up my own example a little later.