The Place For My Writers Notes

original posting: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 18:35:02 JST

I've been holding off on trying to write this up, because every time I think about it, it seems to extend farther. But let me try to suggest the basic catastrophe I see this stance posing for anyone who holds it. I mean the stance that a writer should only - can only - write from their own POV. Consider this an addition to the many excellent points already raised by others.

This stance seems to be based on the claim that we should write what we know - that writing out of our own experience is "purest" or something. I do consider the general guideline as helpful, but the blanket notion that a writer cannot write from some other point of view is something different. In fact, the implications of this seem rather monstrous.

Consider the poor non-fiction or news writer. Since many, if not most, of the things they want to write about are not directly part of their experience, seemingly all they can do is quote. Perhaps we can replace all the reporters with tape recorders and transcriptionists?

Or consider the poor reader. If a writer can only write from their own personal experience, a reader also must be limited to reading from their own personal experience. Thus, despite generations of writers busily writing, as a 42 year old white male from the later half of the 20th century, I should not, and can not "really," read .. oh, Shakespeare, the Bible, and most of the body of literature.

So, in fact, this stance leads to a total rejection of the function of language - to allow us (at one remove or more) to extend our "mental reality" beyond that which has been personally experienced. The result is that all literature is rejected, and we are left futilely playing with ourselves in the tiny bubble of personally experienced reality. Actually, I think when taken to its logical end result, the stance would say that one person is left solipsistically garbling soliloquies in futility. Or perhaps in silence - words and their meanings are heavily social products, and many if not most deal with matters outside personal experience.

This is silly. The writer has to contend with constructing a sense of the narrator - the POV - which both the reader and the writer feel is consistent and as real as any other character in the story, but to bar the writer from considering or using a POV that isn't exactly the same as their own - might as well say that all the characters in the story must be clones of the writer, and that the reader also must be a clone of the writer. Admittedly, it isn't easy, and the farther the character is from the writer's experience, the more research and thought the writer may have to put into "getting inside that role." The writer also needs to be careful to avoid "falling back" into the well-known personal POV.

But using another POV surely isn't unthinkable, banned due to aesthetics, or whatever. In some ways, I think it is fundamental to human use of language, and certainly to fiction, acting, plays, movies, and most of the vast array of activities that human beings enjoy.

I do think it is important to "get inside" the characters, especially those that are farther from personal experience. One way of doing that is tying their life experiences back to what the writer has personal experience of - while they may never have lost a leg (for example), they have probably had scrapes and cuts or other pains. They can also experiment - at least hold their leg stiff and try to do some things. If they've ever had a cast, they know the odd lack of balance - and how quickly it fades, and the funny little things that suddenly remind them that they are not whole anymore... They haven't had the specific experience, but they have their whole life to draw on for comparisons, they have empathy and intelligence to let them jump farther outside their personal experience, and there are plenty of research tools (interviews, reading, and so forth) to give them more material to draw on. Heck, they can even read something written by someone who does have that personal experience... and use that "once removed" mental reality for their own POV.

This stance does point to a "hole" in many of the writing schemes I've seen - they mention point of view, but rarely delve much deeper than third person limited and such "cardboard" characterization in defining just exactly who is "telling" the story. The conventional "abstract narrator" acts as camera or some such, without much detail, but it might be worthwhile to lay out the same kind of "background" for the narrator as one usually does for other characters in the story.

I think it is also a useful caution - to remember that the farther from the writer's experience a character is, the more careful the writer must be in thinking through just what that character thinks, sees, feels, and so forth.

But I certainly don't see any harm in trying to write from another POV. My word, how boring writing would be if all I could write or read were the same things I had personally experienced. Might as well not read... just go bouncing off the walls again, personal and close.

(incidentally, while this was written from my POV as a crazed 42 year old white male writer who lives in Japan with his Japanese wife, it may be read by ... oh, heck, YOU! Let me know if you don't understand it due to differences in your personal experience - be aware that at that point, I will not be the me who is writing this, so neither of us will be able to understand...)

counting on my toes pretty soon, I think
tink