[MUSIC PLAYING]
Who are you writing this for?
And what do you want to tell them?
I think there might be a bit too much theory kicking around
in the world, that it has to be this.
It has to be that.
But the first thing is writing is a voice.
And so it's a way of recording the human voice.
Whose voice is it that is doing the talking?
And to whom are they speaking?
Because there's always someone.
So once upon a time, it was either
an omniscient third person narrator
who would tell you about the characters
and tell you what they were doing, and in some instances,
what they were thinking.
The he is she, you can either be a narrator taking a long shot.
And the omniscient narrator knows everything.
So the omniscient narrator can say,
little did Red Riding Hood know, but behind the tree,
there was lurking a wolf.
And there was nothing that would please him more than eating
not only Little Red Riding Hood, but also her grandmother.
And that's what he was scheming to do.
As the know-it-all narrator, you can say those things.
But if you're not going to be that know-it-all narrator,
you can go to Little Red Riding Hood.
She was happily picking flowers when out from behind a tree
stepped a gentlemen clad in a rather hairy tweed suit.
Oh, my goodness, said Little Red Riding Hood, et cetera.
So you're not necessarily telling all,
but you're seeing that encounter through the eyes of one person.
You can move it around in whatever way you wish in order
to tell your story.
We also have stream of consciousness that entered.
It's not exactly a first person narrative,
but sort of the flow of ideas that goes
through the character's head.
So who is talking?
To whom are they talking?
Are they talking to the reader?
Are they talking to somebody else in the book?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's no rule that says you have to have one point of view.
I think I've mentioned "The Sound and the Fury"
by William Faulkner before, in which there
are four different narrators and four different points of view.
And some of them are first person.
And some of them are third person.
And the perspective keeps getting
further and further away.
So the first person is--
you're smashed right up against that character.
You're right in their mind.
And then we move back a bit.
And by the end, we're seeing an overview.
We're seeing a long view.
The films and cameras really influence the novel
quite a bit.
So this would be a novel in which the shot moves back.
you're looking at the same thing but from further away.
[MUSICPLAYING]
How do you decide who's going to tell your story?
Learn by doing.
You pick a likely candidate and start off.
And if that is not going well, maybe you need to reconsider.
So if it's not going well and you started it
in the third person, try switching to the first.
If you started in the first person
and that's not going well, try switching to the third.
If that character isn't working out for you at all,
maybe you need to come at it from the point of view
of a different character.
Maybe you've picked the wrong narrator.
Writing "The Blind Assassin," I think
I had to start it three or four times.
And each time, I had to start over again
because I had picked the wrong narrator.
The first one I picked was a younger person telling
the story of this older woman.
Next came an attempt to approach her
through two journalists who were interested in the novel written
by her dead sister.
However, the two journalists started
having an involvement, which took over the story.
And theirs was not the story I was
really interested in telling.
So I defenestrated them.
I got rid of them.
And then I had the woman start telling her own story.
And that's when the novel really started to move.
You know how things are starting to move because you
start writing faster.
What I can tell you?
[LAUGHS] This is moving.
So instead of writing pages that you then throw out,
you start writing pages that actually
seem to be going somewhere.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When you've decided on your point of view,
you have to also make some decisions about what
that person is allowed to know, what they can legitimately
be expected to know.
Let's talk a bit about "Dracula" and how that begins.
So "Dracula" begins with a man on a train, kind
of an ordinary man.
He's taking a journey, going to Transylvania.
He's writing his journal.
He has a wife called Mina.
His noting the peasants and their silly superstitions.
And there's a great recipe that he would like
to give to Mina and blah, blah.
And he's babbling on in this fashion.
And it's really quite tedious because he isn't really
noticing much around him.
But it's very suspenseful for the reader
because the reader knows something
that the character doesn't know.
The reader knows that the title of the book is "Dracula."
So the man going along in the train
has no idea what awaits him, but the reader does.
So it is like the Alfred Hitchcock saying, when somebody
said, Alfred Hitchcock, how long can you hold a screen kiss?
And he said something preposterous like two minutes.
And they said, that's an awfully long time
to hold a kiss on the screen.
And he said, ah, yes.
But first I put a bomb under the bed.
So in many situations, the reader
knows more than the character.
And that's what creates the suspense.
In other situations, the character
knows more than the reader.
That's a different kind of arrangement.
Agatha Christie outraged everyone one point
in her career by having the first person narrator turn out
to be the murderer.
How dare she.
[LAUGHS] So all along, the first person narrator knew something
the reader didn't know--
namely, he was the one who did it.
So there's a lot of misdirection that
goes along with all of that.
So one question you can ask yourself if you're writing--
does the reader know more than the character?
Or does the character know more than the reader?
Or do they both know the same amount?
And so it's going to be one of those three.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's something very useful about writing the same event
from multiple points of view as an exercise.
Let's do this.
Let's say this stapler is having a romantic encounter
with this box, if you don't like people.
But then along comes the mother of the box--
the point of view of the stapler,
the point of view of this little box,
and the point of view this box.
Stop that.
Hi, honey.
Go away.
So is your story going to be better
from the point of view of the stapler
or from the point of view of the large box
with a big knob on top?
I'm choosing the stapler.