The character (including the apparently omniscient author) is the looking glass through which an audience will see the world you offer them, be it real seeming or fantastical. The deeper and more interesting and complex that character, the more interesting and complex and profound will be the view they offer of the world.
Remember that the view of the world offered by the character/s is not the whole world and we should know that. By this, I mean that if, for example, the character is a fool, remember that world he sees is not foolish. It is no more the way he sees it than the world is exactly as we see it. A foolish character is simply the angle through which that world is seen. If the main character is a bore, the world is not boring, therefore whatever the bore says and sees is offering a flawed but nonetheless interesting view of the world. If the main character is a liar, then their view of the world will be flawed and refracted, but the world itself is not a lie or a deception.
The world you have created whether it mirrors the real world or is an imaginary world is not wholly seen and known by the character. It is only seen through the looking glass of that character’s mind.
One of the questions I am most asked is which works best- first or third person narrative: Is it better to have a character speaking for themselves or to tell their story through the eyes of a narrator who, even if they only show that one character’s point of view and is partisan to that view, is still seeing it from the outside?
My answer is that neither way of writing a story is necessarily better than the other. The best form is the one that will allow you to tell your story best. It always comes back to that. And of course there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches that need to be considered.
But having said that, I do think writers are instinctively more drawn to one form than the other, and that most stories will simply come to you in one or the other form. You can consider trying it the other way, but I do think that it is important to listen to your instincts- needless to say your instincts will be better honed and more likely right, if you have worked and practiced your craft faithfully and for a long time. After more than thirty books, I trust my instinct a lot, sometimes even to the point of letting a character who has started doing something I did not expect, go on, to see where they will lead me. Very often that character is the voice of my subconscious speaking, telling me to do something with my story that I have not yet figured out consciously.
A lot of writing happens in the subconscious, before it hits the conscious mind, which is why it is important to think a lot about something you mean to write BEFORE setting pen to paper. In fact I think it is vital to put off setting pen to paper for as long as possible, because humans being humans, the minute we write something down, it is set in stone and we don’t want to change it. While it is in our minds, it is fluid and therefore endlessly mutable, endlessly able to grow and develop and change.
Good characters also tend to take on a life of their own, which means they might not be the puppets you carved out with such dedication and love, so they will not always obey the story you are trying to write. I always regard it as a fantastic sign when a character begins to pull at the reins and fight me. It remember feeling shattered and really shocked in Ashling, when the misfits I had expected to win a major confrontation, actually lost. I thought I had failed, then I realized that I had created characters with such a strong pacifist ethic that they simply could not do the things their abilities would have allowed, that would be necessary for them to win. . They could have won, but they chose not to do the things that they would have had to do. For me it was a triumph because the whole series is asking if human beings could ever evolve ethically or morally, and in this moment, I saw that played out without my having set it up.
For me, writing is all about figuring things out, answering questions, understanding things better. For me, writing is a way to think. Maybe the only way…
For me, writing in first person comes very naturally because it allows me to engage deeply and passionately with the character, to become the character, and speak my story through their passions and preoccupations. My first book was Obernewtyn and that is in first person. I tell the story through the eyes of a misfit girl who is friendless, frightened and very strong. Some of her characteristics are mind- when I was fourteen, I was friendless, a misfit and frightened of the world, especially of the inimical authorities which might come to repossess me and my brothers and sisters and take us away from our mother. That was my mother’s fear, which we drank in through our pores as much as our minds. Elspeth’s fear is given life by my fears. But she is not I. She is stronger and more proud, she is less afraid of conflict or of being disliked. She is more likely to live by her ethics. I tend to empathize very strongly with people, to the extent of being unable to judge people because of the fact that I can imagine understand how they came to say or do what they did. When I can’t empathize, I tend to judge very harshly. Elspeth lacks empathy and lived very rationally and ethically. So, using first person, I was able to merge and ‘be’ her. I was able to experience the world I had created- an extrapolation of the ‘real’ world – thought the mind for a character with traits I wish I had, but only after deducting a trait I feel is very important- empathy.
I could have written her story in third person, and indeed it might seem as if that would be the natural approach to a story where I was trying to find out if I could believe that humans, having had the ultimate lesson, would be finally capable of ethical and moral evolution as a species. A passionate question, but perhaps a dry one that would not engage an audience, or me, hence the invention of a young woman character very like me in some ways and very unlike me in others, who would allow me to deeply engage with that imagined world, and which ultimately would bind a reader close.
First person narrative tends to draw a reader in deeply on an emotional level, so that they will tend to see the world and feel about it as the character does. It is a great way to draw the reader in. But, there are disadvantages too: a reader usually only gets to see the world through the mind and eyes from the point of view of one character. That means it is a limited view. This lends itself very well to an unreliable narrator, which will cause the reader to see a slanted and distorted view of the world. It would work very well if you wanted to get inside a racist character. You make them a sympathetic first person narrator with a love of children, strong honor and gentle intelligence, then somewhere in the story you show that all of those lovely traits are switched off when it comes to working with someone of a different race. Having forced a deep engagement between the reader and the character, you can then force the reader to experience the dark side of racism, from the inside. Why? Perhaps to enable us to see how the mind of a racist deviates or distorts in some specific ways, because before change can be effected, we must understand a problem.
The first person approach is limited but vivid. The third person narrative is wider and allows a broader vision, but emotional engagement is lessened.
Of course the limitations of both approaches can be subverted. With Elspeth in the Obernewtyn Chronicles, I wanted a vivid emotional connection with the character, hence the first person approach, but I was not just writing a story about one young women’s gradual change and growth in post apocalyptic world, I was trying to look at the grown of humanity as a whole, and that was a very large story that would have been hard to tell, using the mind and voice of just one character. But if the main character can enter the minds of other characters, I am far less limited than I was. I can have some of the advantages of the third person narrative without losing the specific advantages of the first person approach. And if I also have my character able to dream sometimes of the past or of the future, then I can even subvert the limitations of the lifetime of my main character.
And, if I want to subvert the limitations of third person, I might decide to look only through the eyes of one very sympathetic and/or compelling character, or set up a series of exciting and dramatic events that make the reader align strongly with a specific character.
There are many ways to subvert limitations – which is another way of saying that writers break their own rules all the time.
I am drawn more often to write in first person, however I also sometimes write in third person, and stories come to me in that way. Most often, it is short stories that come to me in third person, perhaps because I need a little distance to keep control of the form and the plot. First person is so close that I tend to play with plotting only after a story is written, when I already have seven thousand and ten pages!
To conclude, story is all about character and character should be dictated by what it is that you want to tell. For me, a book or story requires three elements- the first is an idea of some kind- The Gathering arose from the idea that friendship was like a gang and that it had rules and how great a price one ought to pay for it. Being a friendless teen fed very strongly into this. Greylands rose from the idea that grief turns the world grey, and that it is hard to turn the color back on. The fact that my beloved father and brother had died in car accidents fed into this story idea. So I am usually thinking about an idea for a long time before I write. Then usually some characters evolve- maybe partly I am trying to come up with them, and partly I am looking for a spark. With the short story The Phoenix, it was when I saw two kids – a tall girl and boy with a ripped tee shirt, at the end of a long stony desolate spit of a beach. It was very atmospheric place, and suddenly they were my characters in that place, and the boy was calling the girl Princess.
That is the final ingredient before a story can begin to be written: when one character speaks to another. That is when the story and the world spring to life for me.
Good luck!
