Reading Response 2: Week of 4/3/11

Steering the Craft

Chapter 7 – Chapter 8

Point of View and Voice

I actually read Chapter 7 back in January when I first got the books, because Point of View is something I was struggling with for my book. Re-reading it for class last week helped refresh my understanding of it and also helped me to notice (if not to perfectly correct) the times I slip out of third person limited to the involved author voice. One thing I was interested in is that she distinguished between the narrator and an observer in first person and third person limited. I never really considered the importance of categorizing whether the voice was the protagonist or someone else, but she made me think about it. It made me recall writing advice I read elsewhere, that the protagonist is the character we’re looking at (the person we’re rooting for), and the narrator is the character we’re looking from. It can be the same person or not, and I think an important thing is not to automatically limit yourself to the protagonist. Achilles is sort of the protagonist (or antagonist, with Hector the protagonist) of The Iliad, but the story is so much more interesting told from varied points of view. I don’t think I would like it at all if it had been told from either one of those characters’ points of view exclusively. It would feel too claustrophobic. On the other hand, telling “The Magic Barrel” entirely from Leo’s point of view (until that last brief scene) made the story for me, by showing me the sort of person Leo was and how he viewed the world through his prickly voice. So it really comes down to how the author uses the voices. You can still use perspective explosively, whether you spread it out or tighten it down.

I love writing so much.

As a side note: it was cool that she brought up Tolkien’s fox, because as soon as I read “involved author,” I thought of Tolkien and his unmistakable storyteller’s voice. (I also thought of Homer and other Greek writers, but then again, I suppose the oratory style of those epic poems and storytelling in general back then makes an “involved author” a given.) I tried writing once from a voice like that and it’s damn hard to do it at all, much less do it excellently and consistently. It seems like more and more of a thing of the past to have such a dominant storyteller voice in fiction, but trying it myself and reading Le Guin’s comments on it made me realize all over again just how much talent it takes.