Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

writing the book. I wrote half a dozen pages and stopped, because I had another decision to make.

First person or third person? I had automatically begun the book in the third person, writing the opening scene, in which the family first visits the country house, from Naomi's point of view. (I had by this time selected a name for her).

But was that the best choice?

I stayed away from the typewriter for several days weighing the pros and cons. First-person narration comes very naturally to me, and I found the prospect seductive in this instance. I'm much better able to get inside the skin of my lead character when I write in the first person. It has always seemed to me the most natural voice for fiction, and I thought it might be particularly useful in The Stepmother for a couple of reasons.

For one, I had a very good sense of Naomi and felt she would be a terrific character. The more effectively and compellingly I could present her to the reader, the more gripping and engaging the book would be. For another, I felt it might be difficult to get inside Naomi as well in the third person.

Ariel was written in the third person, but there were two elements present which facilitated my getting inside the character and making her come alive. I used lengthy extracts from a diary she was keeping, which in effect constituted first-person sections within a third-person narrative. I also had quite a few scenes in which she conversed intimately with Erskine, a classmate of hers, and the relationship between the two kids was one of the more interesting elements of the book.

I didn't want to have Naomi keep a diary, partly because I didn't want to write Ariel all over again, partly because I did not envision her as a diarist. Nor did I expect her to develop a close relationship with a classmate at the new school in the country; on the contrary, I saw her as essentially isolated, contemptuous of her new schoolmates and rejected by them in turn.

So why not switch to first person? Well, that presented problems of another sort. For openers, I'd be limited to scenes in which Naomi was present. The reader couldn't be privy to any information that she didn't know. It seemed to me that the sort of suspense novel I was writing worked best if the reader occasionally knew things the lead character did not know.

It also seemed to me that the book would be more effective if the reader was never entirely certain whether the peril Naomi fancied herself to be in was real or imaginary. The use of first-person narration didn't automatically rule out this ambivalence, but it made it more difficult to bring it off.

One other thing. Suspense would be further heightened, I felt, if the reader didn't know everything that Naomi knew, and if he wasn't aware of everything she did. Perhaps there might be a point where suspicion was raised about Naomi's having been responsible for her own mother's death, say. While it's possible for a narrator to withhold certain information from the reader?I've done that sort of thing in detective stories, certainly?I didn't think it would work well here.

So I decided to go with my original impulse and write the book in the third person. And, in the course of making the decision, I thought up bits of plot business that would enable Naomi to reveal herself to the reader through interaction with other characters. I decided there could be an old man who walks along that particular road every day, a rustic who's a source of information on the area, and he and Naomi could develop some sort of friendship. I had already thought she might run off to New York and be brought back by a private detective, and I now saw how she could have further dealings with the detective. An occasional letter to her best friend in New York might serve a function similar to that of Ariel's diary.

And, in considering and rejecting the first person, I became increasingly aware of the need for writing the book from multiple viewpoint, and got a sense of some of the scenes that would have to be written, and of some of the characters from whose points of view they would be shown.

One consideration, I must admit, was that novels of the sort I was writing are most commonly written in the third person. But I did not regard this fact as evidence of a requirement, or elect to go along with the majority out of a desire to make my publisher happy. Instead, I learned in the course of making my decision why third-person narration predominates, and found that it does so for very sound reasons.

I thought it might be interesting to share the factors involved in making this sort of literary decision, and to show how the decision-making process itself sparks the invention of plot and character elements. I still think Polonius was quite right, and that To thine own self be true ought to be every writer's first principle, but any number of decisions nevertheless need to be made in order to be true to one's own vision, whether they are arrived at intuitively or through the sort of processes I've described.

You'll excuse me, won't you? Now that I've made all these decisions, I've got to sit down