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

the centuries of the stories of important battles and buffalo hunts, is always couched in the first person. While his listeners are aware that the tribal storyteller is recounting incidents that happened hundreds of years before his birth, it's an accepted convention for him to speak in the voice of a participant or observer. And then as I lay in the tall grass I saw Carries Two Spears riding from the mountains, and I felt the ground shake at his approach-.

Maugham explained that as a young man he wrote with the stunning confidence of youth, adopting the omniscient third-person viewpoint. But when he grew older, he reported, he found it much more secure to write in his own voice and from a fixed point of view. (In Maugham's particular case, the limitations of the first person have less effect than gravity on a soaring hawk. If you want to see the agility with which a master can bend the first person to his ends, dealing with events at which his narrator is not present, swimming to and fro in the currents of time, give some attention to The Razor's Edge, Cakes and Ale, and The Moon and Sixpence.)

I've also noted my own tendency as a reader, when confronted with a rack of unknown paperbacks, is to select a book written in the first person in preference to one written in the third. All things being equal, a first-person book is more likely to have a sense of reality about it and the lead character is more apt to come alive for me.

As a writer, one of the things I like most about first person is the way it enables me to convey character easily and rapidly. In Burglars Can't Be Choosers, my lead's a sort of gentleman burglar who finds himself framed for murder and has to solve it to save himself. I wanted to get across right at the onset that this chap was a rather arch sort, so I wrote the first paragraph like this:

A handful of minutes after nine I hoisted my Bloomingdale's shopping bag and moved out of a doorway and into step with a tall blond fellow with a faintly equine cast to his face. He was carrying an attachŽ case that looked too thin to be of much use. Like a high-fashion model, you might say. His topcoat was one of those new plaid ones and his hair, a little longer than my own, had been cut a strand at a time.

Hardly an immortal bevy of sentences, but they do limn the character and get things going. If the same paragraph were recast in third person, I don't think it could do the job nearly as well.

Characterization in general comes more easily for me in first-person books because it's such a natural matter. You don't observe from without. Instead, you get under your character's skin and speak to the reader in his voice, and by doing this you not only make the character come alive for the reader. You make him come alive for your own self as you write.

A standard objection to first person is that you can't describe your narrator. You can, of course, have him look into a mirror and report on what he sees, but I really hope you'll restrain yourself in this regard. Without an actual description you can convey some information about your lead's appearance?in the sample above, for instance, we have an idea what the lead's hair is like.

Anyway, I've long felt that there's a great advantage in not furnishing a physical description of a viewpoint character, and this is true whether you tell your story in first or third person. The story, after all, is seen through his eyes and over his shoulder, and you often come out ahead letting the reader make up his own mind what the lead looks like. (Often, I suspect, the reader winds up seeing the narrator as looking rather like himself. That's as vital a process in fiction as transference is in psychoanalysis, and the last thing you want to do is impede it.)

While first-person narration comes easily to most beginning writers?it is, after all, the natural voice one employs when telling a story to a friend?there are certain undeniable pitfalls which may come into play. Perhaps the most common is the tendency to tell the reader far too much about what is running through the narrator's mind. If reading a first-person story is like hearing a story at a party, reading a story with this fault is like being cornered by a crashing bore who won't let go of one's coat.

I don't know exactly how one sets about avoiding this. You might simply bear in mind that it is not necessary to report to the reader every thought that goes through the narrator's mind, any more than you would report every single act the narrator performs in his day-to-day existence. (You don't have to mention every time your lead shaves, or goes to the toilet, or freshens her makeup, or whatever.)

Along the same line, it is possible for significant things to happen to the narrator without their being reported to the reader. This can be important in suspense fiction. While it's not fair or dramatically satisfying to withhold important information forever, you can pick your time to reveal it. In The Sins of the Fathers, for instance, I have Matt Scudder enter an apartment illegally