Make A Scene (35 page)

USING MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW IN SCENES

In order to discuss multiple POVs in scenes, we need to quickly refresh the concept of a scene (at its most distilled): a container of significant action in which a protagonist acts on a scene intention, and in which conflict ensues, leading toward climax and change. POV is the camera through which you choose to show the events in the scene to the reader. If you have one protagonist only, then that is the character who gets the camera. Use the POV descriptions in this chapter to decide what kind of effect you want to achieve, and to choose your POV accordingly.

Choosing POV gets trickier when you have multiple protagonists, or simply multiple points of view that you want to show in a given scene. If you elect to use a limited POV, you will never have to worry about jumping from head to head within a given scene. Your biggest concern will be when

and where to switch from narrator to narrator. But if you
do
want to be able to pan the camera through the thoughts of characters A, B, and C as event X unfolds, you will want to pay attention to this next part.

Changing POV Within a Scene

If you have more than one character within a scene whose points of view are relevant, then you'll need to use the omniscient POV. When your narrative tackles large issues: war, culture, race, identity—in which a complex or comprehensive look at a situation is required, omniscient POV is a good choice. Omniscient allows you to go beyond the personal—beyond the intimate experience of a small handful of characters—to include more history, cultural details, or perspectives that will add up to a more cohesive look at a subject.

Omniscient is also useful when you need to show more than one side of a story—and need to be able to jump back and forth between characters to offer alternate takes on events as they're happening, rather than later on in reflection.

However, you must make omniscient clear right away from the first paragraph in the first scene. If the reader believes that he has
only
been able to see inside character A's head, and then you suddenly leap into character B's head, the reader will feel confused and possibly irritated. And a word of warning: Too much jumping back and forth—or between more than three or four people in a given scene—
will
create confusion.

Here's an example of omniscient POV from the novel
Rosie,
by Anne La-mott—the story of a single mother raising her daughter after her husband's death. From the first scene in the book Lamott shows the reader that she is in the omniscient by providing information that comes as if from a god-like source, a source that knows all:

There were many things about Elizabeth that the people of Bayview disliked. They thought her tall, too thin, too aloof. Her neck was too long and her breasts were too big. The men, who could have lived with the size of her breasts, found her unwilling to flirt and labeled her cold. The women were jealous of how well her clothes hung on her.

Since this information is not being delivered directly through the camera of any one character, the reader is signaled immediately that it is omni-scient—the camera can move wherever it needs to go. Lamott maintains this POV throughout all the scenes, dancing effortlessly into the thoughts and feelings of her protagonists, Elizabeth and Rosie. In one paragraph she is in Rosie's POV:

Rosie Ferguson was four when her father died. As she sat on her mother's lap at the crowded Episcopal service, she knew that her father was dead but kept waiting for him to join them in the first pew, wondering what he would bring her.

Then in the next paragraph in the same scene, we're in Elizabeth's POV:

Elizabeth held Rosie on her lap, dimly aware that her daughter was trying to take care of her—Rosie kept patting her and smiling bravely—but Elizabeth couldn't concentrate on what was happening. It was too surreal. ...

Once you choose omniscient, you have to commit to it—you can't back down from it within the scene. Notice, too, that Lamott lets each character have a good paragraph of her own—the minimum amount of headspace I recommend you give each character if you're going to hop from head to head. Starting a new paragraph is a good way to signal to the reader that you're moving the camera again. Along those same lines, keep in mind:

•To keep a sense of cohesiveness, change POV at the end of action, not in the middle

• Change POV at the end of a line of dialogue—do not try to weave one character's thoughts into another character's speech

• Change POV when you want to offer another character's reaction to an event in the scene

A word of warning: When you're in the omniscient and can move into any character's head, be selective. The reader doesn't need to hear the thoughts or know the opinions of all minor characters. Stick to the point of view of characters who can contribute to plot information or deepen the reader's understanding of your protagonists.

Changing POV From Scene to Scene

Remember that a scene should largely take place in one location (unless the characters are on a moving vehicle or taking a stroll). Therefore, if you've got a chapter-long scene—that is, you're writing one scene per chapter—you automatically limit the physical location of the chapter.

When you have multiple scenes within a chapter, try to think of each scene within the chapter as a separate square of a quilt, or a piece of a puzzle that must add up to some sort of goal or understanding within the chapter. It's best to use multiple scenes in a given chapter when you want to:

• Look at one issue or topic from multiple angles

• Switch to multiple physical locations or in and out of present time

• Build up new plot information that the current scene won't allow, but that needs to come at that juncture in the story

• Introduce another character within the chapter

Author Jodi Picoult includes multiple scenes per chapter in her books because she writes about subjects that can be viewed from many different angles: suicide, rape, motherhood. Therefore, in a given chapter, when addressing a specific plot angle, she'll often give multiple characters a scene of their own, shedding numerous different kinds of perspective on a plot element.

For instance, her novel
Second Glance
is about Comtosook, a Vermont town where paranormal events occur when a developer threatens to build on sacred land, and where a long-hidden eugenics program designed to weed out unwanted genes is revealed to have been conducted in the early 1920s. The novel features multiple viewpoints. Each chapter is broken into a series of short scenes told from the points of view of as many as ten different characters that are being affected by the strange events. Note that although there are multiple scenes per chapter, each scene has only one point of view. To show that she's beginning a new scene, Picoult uses a visual cue—a break of four lines (sometimes called a soft hiatus) or a symbol like I or * * * or □—and identifies the point-of-view character within the first couple of lines. These scenes offer different pieces of insight into the plot that is being explored at that particular juncture. Here are three samples of scene launches that all appear within chapter two, in which people are trying to determine whether Angel Quarry is haunted, or whether someone is pulling a prank:

• Ross didn't know whom he blamed more: Ethan, for planting this seed in his mind; or himself, for bothering to listen. Angel Quarry is haunted, his nephew had said, everyone says so. .

•"What do you make of it?" Winks Smiling Fox asked, grunting as he moved the drum a few feet to the left. Where they'd been sitting, the ground beneath their feet was icy. Yet over here, there were dandelions growing. ...

• "Ethan?"

From his vantage point beneath the blackout shades, Ethan froze at the sound of his mother's voice. He whipped his body back so that it wasn't pressed against the warm glass windowpane. .

Each scene may be its own unit, but the three to six scenes within the chapter all play off each other and add up details for the reader. By the end of the chapter, the reader is pretty sure that, yes, Angel Quarry is haunted.

Using multiple scenes within a given chapter is a common and effective way to allow for a mosaic feeling—a feeling of little parts adding up to equal a larger, more comprehensive whole. But it comes with a caveat: When you have multiple scenes within a chapter, you will serve the reader best if each of those scenes has only one viewpoint—and not an omniscient one—since you're already forcing the reader to move around.

Changing POV From Chapter to Chapter

In many narratives, one chapter can be its own long scene. The benefit of this construction is that you don't have to get complex with your POV structure. One scene per chapter is undoubtedly the simplest and clearest structure to work with, and if you are new to writing, I recommend that you use this structure until you've mastered scenes and can move on to more complex

structures. When your whole chapter is just one long scene, you can focus on the protagonist's scene intention, decide what kind of scene it's going to be (see chapters twelve through twenty-one), and use your core elements one chapter at a time. This structure requires less work of you, and it also allows the reader to stay in one place and time per chapter. This structure will feel more straightforward to the reader, and perhaps also less textured or layered, but you can guarantee that you will tell a simple, clear story by using this method. One scene per chapter is an ideal structure when:

•You want to keep your characters in a unified time and place

•You're writing a dialogue scene, as dialogue takes up a lot of room

•You're writing a suspense scene, as it requires more time to draw out actions

•Your narrative has a linear chronology—it doesn't flashback in time

•You want to switch to a different type of point of view to achieve a different effect for another protagonist—for instance, protagonist A is narrated in the first person, but protagonist B is better served by third person limited

Consider that when a chapter is one long scene, you have time to devote to a particular protagonist, and you may consider using a limited point of view because, by nature of the length of a chapter, you have more page-time to delve into one protagonist's experience and reveal it to the reader.

DEVOTING EQUAL TIME TO POV CHARACTERS

Now that we've covered the idea of using multiple points of view, it's important to discuss how to let your protagonists share the time on the page. The most definitive way to tell the reader that you have more than one protagonist is to give each protagonist equal time in your narrative. You may devote an equal number of scenes, or give individual chapters to your protagonists, but you do need to be egalitarian if you're going to have multiple narrators.

A lot of authors adopt a simple formula such as this: Each point of view character narrates one chapter or scene, taking turns in order. Character A goes first, then B, then C. Then you repeat that pattern: ABC, ABC, ABC. In other words, you give each character a chance to narrate, then you start all over again. You might give each character a chance to narrate within a given chapter, so you have three scenes for every chapter, or you may devote whole chapters to one character each. You may find the need to do variations on this: AAA, BBB, CCC, for instance, or AA, BB, CC, so long as the time each protagonist gets is as close to equal as you can make it.