In an interview with the Toronto Star about her new book on Sept 14, Miriam Toews said,
"I usually write in the first person, so I almost have to become that person or that narrator. If the voice doesn't sound natural to me, then the writing doesn't work."
I have only read one of her books, A Complicated Kindness, but the narrative voice in that novel seemed to jump right off the page and resonate with me in a unique way. I could so easily picture this character living in the real world. It's always a challenge to write a compelling character in the first person because, as Toews says, the writer has to become the character. It's not enough to think up the character and just start writing, but rather the writer has to inhabit the character, thinking their thoughts, understanding their feelings and actions. Since my story is written in the first person and is very heavily focused on a single character, I find Toews' advice very useful. (I have therefore been playing a lot of chess!)
Once the character has come into existence inside my head, I sometimes find it difficult to know what to do with them. I found another quote, this time from Annie Proulx, that provides one suggestion (it's on her Simon & Schuster website):
"The one thing that a character absolutely must do is carry the story along; characters have to bear some of the burden of the story moving forward. So if I have a character who isn't working out, or is becoming dull, or is just waltzing around in the background, I usually kill him. I don't fall in love with them. They are there to work; they have to earn their keep. If they don't work, if they don't do their job then they're gone."
This approach is not one that I have heard very frequently, but it seems to mesh very well with Toews' views on the genesis of character. If the writer can inhabit the character enough for him/her to become real and believable, then Proulx's argument that the character must move the story along could be put into effect. Once the writer has created this new person, he/she has to give something back. It seems that if an unbelievable or two-dimensional character has been created, the story will not go anywhere without the conscious help of the writer. I probably will not end up killing anybody off in my story, but I will definitely try to create a well-rounded character that can in a sense take over from me in the job of storyteller and propel the narrative forward on her own.
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Thanks for posting this, Joanna. These two quotations are both incredibly reflective pieces – they both seem to pertain to how I feel about writing. I’ve never read any of Miriam Toews’s novels, but after perusing her on amazon.ca and the like, I feel as though I should be adding her to my long list of “authors to read within the next ten years.”
The first quotation resonates fairly resoundingly with my own writing. Like Toews, I usually write in the first person. I’m not sure if I would consider it a preference, or if it always just happens that way. I’ve never really given it a lot of thought, I guess—most of my ideas are just based on a first-person narrative ideal.
Ever since I was really young, I’ve always been fascinated by people—their lives, thoughts, opinions, and the individual stories that they have to tell. Often, I find myself sitting on the subway, looking around, and wondering what stories other people have to tell. I feel like this curiousity fuels my seemingly innate need to always write in the first person. I like the idea of getting into a character’s head, wholly and completely. What I mean by that is I like to become involved with my character—I like to fall in love with them completely. And, much like in real life, to fall in love with someone, I feel like you have to know them inside and out. I find it really interesting, and often challenging (although I’m always up for a challenge!) to “inhabit the character,” as Joanna said, and to come up with their entire lives—their thoughts, their actions, their reactions, their entire histories. Perhaps it is easier to write from the first-person in the sense that you only have to focus on the complexities of one character—in other words, when it comes down to the bare marrow of the story, you only have to rely on one single character to carry the story through until its end. Regardless of how challenging it can be, a lot of the time, I find that stories told from the first-person perspective have a level of complexity that can’t be achieved when using third-person.
However, I have been trying to break out of the habit of solely using first-person narrative. In the story I’m writing for class, which is actually a combination of first- and third-person perspective (Hey! Bad habits are hard to break!), I’m actually having an interesting time writing from the third-person. I find that third-person is beneficial in the sense that you get a wider range of perspective—the story doesn’t focus on one specific person’s thoughts and opinions, thus the story isn’t biased towards one particular character’s view. Also, I feel as though third-person leaves more room for broader descriptions, descriptions that don’t necessarily pertain to the character. A story told in first-person usually only describes places and people and things that relate to the narrator; with third-person, there aren’t any restraints.
In relation to the second quotation, Proulx presents a really interesting perspective on character development that I’ve never really considered. Now that I think about it, most stories that I’ve written deal solely with one or two characters—I’ve never dealt with writing about multiple characters, so I haven’t really had the opportunity to have a character who just sort of “waltzes around in the background,” as Proulx puts it. I’m not sure that in this class, I’ll have the chance to write something that involves a multitude of characters, simply because it’s hard to introduce more than one or two characters into a short story, and still comply with typical short story lengths.
In terms of Proulx’s approach to characters, I’m a little torn. On one hand, I completely agree with her that characters have to bear the burden of moving the story forward. Stories rely on the people they’re about, so, in a sense, they are they to work for the writer. On the other hand, however, I can’t say that I agree with not “falling in love” with my characters. As I mentioned above in relation to Toews, I LIKE to fall in love with my characters. Whenever I write a story, I always find myself becoming involved with the characters, getting to know them personally and intimately, and, ultimately, genuinely caring about them.
Knowing Proulx’s method of how to deal with unnecessary characters, it would be interesting to re-read some of her work to see if and when she actually puts that practice to use.
"The one thing that a character absolutely must do is carry the story along; characters have to bear some of the burden of the story moving forward. So if I have a character who isn't working out, or is becoming dull, or is just waltzing around in the background, I usually kill him. I don't fall in love with them. They are there to work; they have to earn their keep. If they don't work, if they don't do their job then they're gone."
OMG! I love this! I can't help but get attached with my characters. And usually I don't kill them off but put them aside for another story because that's how much I love them! I don't know. Once you create them you're like a parent, filled with so much hope... But eventually, sometimes you have no choice but to admit that some protagonists are just hopeless and do deserve to die. lol. If you keep them around they start killing the story. I put them in a whole new disguise and make a story just for them... I can't kill them. Just can't! But maybe I need to learn to… it really sounds like it could do much to send hopeless protagonists into the land of oblivion.
And about that 1st person narrative. I don't know, I’m one who can slip in and out of the 3rd person perspective and the 1st person. It depends on the subject matter and on the character. I love doing these mind explorations. Getting inside my character's thoughts and emotions, and usually that's when I go with 1st person. Even when I do third I find myself being omniscient and constantly slipping in and out characters' minds. It puts you in their shoes. I love the ability to play "God" as an author. If I had one super-natural ability it would be to read other people's minds. (But that's for another course).
I think I'm going to write a story from a non-omniscient, third-person perspective just to see what my characters look like when I can't read their minds…
Since this has turned into an interesting discussion on third-person narration vs. first-person, I thought I'd share the reasons for my love of third-person.
As Samantha has already said, in first-person narration, you are usually more focused on the main character and dependent on them to carry the story. And that allows a great level of intimacy, familiarity with that character. But that's also completely possible with third-person narration because third-person doesn't always have to be omniscient or general. For example, the first story that I read in class is told from third-person perspective but purely for language reasons (I was trying to avoid an "I"). I tried to get as intimate and close to the character as any first-person narration would allow.
Third-person narration gives the writer the amazing ability to first observe the protagonist at a distance (as a viewer would), and then take the story, without notice, into the character's thoughts. This kind of movement into the character, when done well, can be so shocking or so fluid, depending.
Since my story is close at hand, I'll give you an example from there:
"How odd that her mother should clean her, she thought. How odd that this spider was unclean with no mother to clean it." So, in the first sentence, the reader is still at a distance from the character, spatially located outside of her mind. But, in the second sentence, I take out the "she thought" and the reader is completely inside the girl's head. Her thought is the reader's thought. Vice versa.
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