Point of View, Part Two!

(But first, parts of  this made me smile. Warning: language, sexual and politically loaded themes)

When I think of the differences between point-of-view in written media, like books, and visual media, like TV and movies, I tend to focus on person – what’s the cinematic equivalent of a story written from the point of view of an “I”? Does a camera make movies most like the sort of story that gets told about “him” or “her”? Or are they more like stories told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, who knows everything but directs the reader’s attention to specific characters and situations?

Last week, I was interested in how the difference between viewpoint character and protagonist translates (or doesn’t always translate) from page to screen. (And I’ve got to say, just watching this week’s episode of House, with its montages and vaguely-omniscient-POV scenes is making me re-work my theory on how viewpoint works on camera. Stay tuned for take two! Or run away as fast as you can! Whichever!) I admit that this interest is completely self-serving: right now, I’m working on a series of stories with a Watson-like unreliable narrator whose own plot intertwines with that of the “genius” sort-of-protagonist. So figuring out how to balance the attention I pay to both characters when I want them to be co-heroines is a problem I’m working on.

However, there’s another aspect of point-of-view that a writer of prose has to consider, and that’s tense. And, just like my previous conundrum with point-of-view and protagonists, my musings on it are based totally on a writing problem I’m encountering right now.

When I started writing, I used to be most comfortable writing in the third-person, verging on omniscient, because that was the way my favourite writers – Enid Blyton, C. S. Lewis, and Susan Cooper – did it. But suddenly when I hit my sixth attempt, Our Man Tom, I found myself writing in first-person. Ever since, I occasionally start a story in third-person only to find myself juggling awkward and ambiguous sentences like, “He said to him that he would go to his house”. Before chapter two, I nearly always switch back to first. It feels like taking another breath after swimming a length underwater. But I used to be able to toss off third-person like it was nothing.

The point of this otherwise unnecessary background information is that being comfortable writing a particular point of view is something that can change over time. I go through spells where certain points of view flow naturally for me and others suddenly feel clunky.

So there probably isn’t a reason that I occasionally find myself gravitating toward changes in tense. My problem right now is that I suddenly seem to be interested in present tense, when before I couldn’t imagine ever writing in anything but past. And part of me wonders: do movies and TV have anything to do with it?

One of the things about past-tense, first-person narration is that you have to convince your reader that the character doing the narrating is the sort of person who would tell the story they’re telling, whether that means they’d write it in a diary or tell an audience of people or even just go over it themselves in the privacy of their minds. When I’m watching a TV show, on the other hand, I don’t stop to think “does it feel plausible that House is telling his story like this?” The camera gives us the illusion that we’re spying on people going about their ordinary business – people who have no idea a story’s even being told*. This also suggests that the story is happening “now” – in real time, even though time may pass differently for the characters on the TV show than for the audience (it’s 8pm in real time but 5am on the show; 3 days have passed on the show but only 20 minutes have passed in real life)**.

In some ways, then, visual media are always telling stories in the present tense. There are filmic devices that allow filmmakers to use the past tense, like flashbacks, in which the dialogue or cut-style lets us know that the scene represents a character remembering events that took place in the past, or framing narrative shots, in which the first sequence shows what happens at the end and the rest of the film or episode shows how the characters got into that situation (for instance, Citizen Kane or Edward Scissorhands). There are also completely off-the-wall exceptions, like Memento, but they’re usually playing with time on purpose, and it’s so abnormal that their temporal gimmick becomes what the movie’s known for. (For instance, how many times have you heard Memento referred to as “that movie where the story happens backwards”?) But generally, film works by default in the present, and special steps have to be taken to set a story in the past.

Present tense in writing has some of the same benefits as film: it’s easier to believe that a character might narrate events as he or she experiences them. After all, don’t we all keeping a running play-by-play going in our head most of the time – that awareness that “I” am sitting at my desk reading from a computer screen or typing up a blog entry or playing a game of soccer? Present-tense first-person is an acceptable representation of consciousness (although you might argue that James Joyce’s all-over-the-place style is probably more accurate), so it’s not as big a deal if the character using it isn’t the sort of guy or gal who’d sit down and discuss his or her life over a cup of coffee. It also makes the story feel more intimate – like we’re actually inside this character’s brain instead of just hearing what he or she has to tell us.

Present tense also has the benefit of not implying anything about how the story ends. If “I” am narrating the past-tense story of how I went up against the evil emperor, chances are I probably came out of that okay enough to be telling the reader or viewer about it. Sure, that may not tell anyone much about what happened, but it’s still something. It also lets the narrator jump in and drop hints about what’s going to happen later on: “The first time I met Joel, he seemed like a nice guy” suggests that later on, the narrator will have reason to revise his or her opinion of Joel.

Film and TV are also future-neutral in this respect. We can get information about the future through a past-tense narrator’s voiceover (“The first time I met Joel, he seemed like a nice guy” – while on-screen, in the narrator’s past, Humphrey Bogart is eyeing Peter Lorre), but the camera implies no knowledge about what’s going to happen next. The choice of the focus of the shots can hint that something’s going to be important – for instance, if we watch Mulder tell Scully not to worry, the window is perfectly airtight, and then the camera zooms in on a crack in the glass, we can surmise that the window is going to break before the episode is over – but this usually involves making the viewers privy to important “present-time” knowledge, rather than sharing information about the future. In other words, there’s nothing about seeing House in a scene that makes it unlikely that he dies before the credits roll, except outside information that the viewer brings in from the real world, like: he’s the protagonist, the show still has X more episodes in the season, stories don’t usually kill off the main character halfway through, etc. The form doesn’t restrict the potential content.

So is that what I’m going for? Trying to make the stories I’m working on more like TV? To be fair, I’ve recently read and/or critiqued some great novels in first-person present tense, so those are probably working into my brain, too. But I can’t quite justify my choice of present tense based solely on the advantages it has, like the ones I’ve discussed above. Since the stories I’m most interested in playing with lately are told through film or TV, maybe it has affected the way I try to present my own take on it, in a way it didn’t when I was obsessed with print-based narratives like Harry Potter and Narnia.

I guess the best I can do is finish the MS, read it over, and see how it works.

* Except when the main character sometimes narrates directly to the camera or soundtrack, as in shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Dexter. But that’s a choice, not a restraint of the medium.

** Incidentally, I think it’s this feeling that makes me rather indifferent to the episodes that have already aired by the time I become a fan of the show. If I start watching in season 5, I don’t really care what happened in season 1. As Rafiki says, “It doesn’t matter! It is in the past!” (Yeah, yeah, but it still hurts. Well, the past can hurt, but when it does, I can usually still figure out what’s going on by reading the archived summaries on Wikipedia or Television Without Pity.)