Perspective and Parents' Names, Part Two

Last time, we discussed the subtle perspective error that can arise from calling your perspective character’s parents by their names in the prose—it creates a subtle implication of distance to the relationship. It’s a small problem, but one that writers should be aware of.

If you’re looking for ways of dealing with this problem (beyond simply calling the character “his mother” throughout the entire story), here’s a few tips and ideas:

Call the parents what you want, and make the relationship fit. There are a lot of reasons why a character might call their parents by name. You can easily work one of those into the relationship between your protagonist and their parent.

I’ve read plenty of stories where one of the central conflicts was between the protagonist and their disapproving/distant parent. If you’re going to have a conflict between the two of them anyway, why not ramp it up slightly? Perhaps your protagonist calls his father by name in order to upset his father. Perhaps he’s been so long estranged from his father that it feels odd to call him “dad” now, so he thinks of his father by name.

Perhaps your protagonist works with her mother, and her mother is concerned about potential accusations of nepotism. She might have the protagonist call her by name to avoid any appearance of favoritism. Perhaps there are other social circumstances behind the decision.

Or, barring external motivators, perhaps they’re simply the type of parents who prefer that their children call them by name.

Killing off the parents is always an option, too, though it can be a bit overdone. 

Call the parents by a different title. It often works surprisingly well to simply call the parent characters “Mom” and “Dad” without bothering to distinguish “my mom” or “so-and-so’s dad.” This only works if we’re very deep inside the perspective of the protagonist—usually because they are narrating in first-person perspective:

     I was ready to go, but mom was still loitering at the cash register, flirting with the perfume salesman. “Mom, we’re going to be late,” I called. She ignored me. Mom always got like that around cute guys.

This is particularly effective when your perspective character is a child (or an adult narrating their childhood).

Change the perspective. This is both the simplest and most time-consuming fix for the problem. Time-consuming, because if you’ve already written a significant portion of the story, it will require a bit of work to switch it to a new perspective. Simplest, because it fixes the problem without gimmicks or major adjustments to character relationships or plot.

The “Parent Name Problem” is most prevalent in third-person limited perspective, when we’re inside the head of the protagonist. If you switch to first-person, you can easily use the “Mom and Dad” approach above. Or, you can switch to a third-person omniscient narrator, who can tell us what is going on in your protagonist’s head while still referring to them by name without it being a perspective error.

Overview: Third-Person Omniscient Viewpoints

Third-person omniscient is a viewpoint where the perspective jumps from character to character, showing many points of view over the course of any given scene at once. It generally comes in one of two styles: the omniscient narrator or head-hopping omniscient.

Omniscient Narrator

As the name implies, a story told through an omniscient narrator is given through the perspective of a usually-nameless storyteller, someone who is not a character within the story. This narrator is, so far as the story goes, omniscient, with complete knowledge of what all the characters are thinking or doing at any given time. They will often tell the audience what one character is thinking, and then mention what another character is thinking immediately after, rather than restricting what the audience sees to the perspective of one character at a time. Here is an example from the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis:

ONCE there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.) He himself was a very old man with shaggy white hair which grew over most of his face as well as on his head, and they liked him almost at once; but on the first evening when he came out to meet them at the front door he was so odd-looking that Lucy (who was the youngest) was a little afraid of him, and Edmund (who was the next youngest) wanted to laugh and had to keep on pretending he was blowing his nose to hide it.

As soon as they had said good night to the Professor and gone upstairs on the first night, the boys came into the girls' room and they all talked it over.

"We've fallen on our feet and no mistake," said Peter. "This is going to be perfectly splendid. That old chap will let us do anything we like."

"I think he's an old dear," said Susan.

"Oh, come off it!" said Edmund, who was tired and pretending not to be tired, which always made him bad-tempered. "Don't go on talking like that."

"Like what?" said Susan; "and anyway, it's time you were in bed."

"Trying to talk like Mother," said Edmund. "And who are you to say when I'm to go to bed? Go to bed yourself."

"Hadn't we all better go to bed?" said Lucy. "There's sure to be a row if we're heard talking here."

"No there won't," said Peter. "I tell you this is the sort of house where no one's going to mind what we do. Anyway, they won't hear us. It's about ten minutes' walk from here down to that dining-room, and any amount of stairs and passages in between."

"What's that noise?" said Lucy suddenly. It was a far larger house than she had ever been in before and the thought of all those long passages and rows of doors leading into empty rooms was beginning to make her feel a little creepy.

"It's only a bird, silly," said Edmund.

Notice how over the course of these few paragraphs the narrator first sets the scene without focusing on any specific character, and then how he describes to us the internal thoughts and emotions of both Edmund and Lucy. These are hallmarks of third-person omniscient.

Head-hopping Omniscient

The “head-hopping” variation of the third-person omniscient viewpoint is similar to the third-person limited viewpoint in that it eschews narrators and instead conveys the story directly through the viewpoint of the characters, as though the reader were riding along in the characters’ heads. However, unlike the limited viewpoint, the omniscient viewpoint jumps from perspective to perspective within any given scene—hence the “head-hopping” description. Here is an example from the beginning of Frank Herbert’s Dune:

Paul felt his left hand aching, uncurled the clenched fingers, looked at four bloody marks where fingernails had bitten his palm. He dropped the hand to his side, looked at the old woman. "You did that to my mother once?"

"Ever sift sand through a screen?" she asked.

The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen. He nodded.

"We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans."

He lifted his right hand, willing the memory of the pain. "And that's all there is to it—pain?"

"I observed you in pain, lad. Pain's merely the axis of the test. Your mother's told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation."

He heard the confirmation in her voice, said: "It's truth!"

She stared at him. He senses truth! Could he be the one? Could he truly be the one? She extinguished the excitement, reminding herself: "Hope clouds observation."

"You know when people believe what they say," she said.

"I know it."

The harmonics of ability confirmed by repeated test were in his voice. She heard them, said: "Perhaps you are the Kwisatz Haderach. Sit down, little brother, here at my feet."

"I prefer to stand."

"Your mother sat at my feet once."

"I'm not my mother."

"You hate us a little, eh?" She looked toward the door, called out: "Jessica!"

The door flew open and Jessica stood there staring hard-eyed into the room. Hardness melted from her as she saw Paul. She managed a faint smile.

"Jessica, have you ever stopped hating me?" the old woman asked.

"I both love and hate you," Jessica said. "The hate—that's from pains I must never forget. The love—that's...."

"Just the basic fact," the old woman said, but her voice was gentle. "You may come in now, but remain silent. Close that door and mind it that no one interrupts us."

Jessica stepped into the room, closed the door and stood with her back to it. My son lives, she thought. My son lives and is ... human. I knew he was ... but ... he lives. Now, I can go on living. The door felt hard and real against her back. Everything in the room was immediate and pressing against her senses.

My son lives.

Paul looked at his mother. She told the truth. He wanted to getaway alone and think this experience through, but knew he could not leave until he was dismissed. The old woman had gained a power over him. They spoke truth. His mother had undergone this test. There must be terrible purpose in it ... the pain and fear had been terrible. He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.

Although there is no narrator directing us through the scene, notice how the reader is shown the thoughts of all three characters at various points—the Reverend Mother, Paul, and Jessica.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Third-Person Omniscient Viewpoint

Advantages of the Omniscient Narrator

Easier to write than head-hopping: Since this perspective is very similar to first-person (a narrator relating the story to the readers), it can be somewhat easier to write than the head-hopping style of omniscient.

Tension: Since the author can share with the reader any character’s thoughts or even information that none of the characters know, it is easy to introduce tension through obstacles that the characters don’t know are coming.

Infodumping: Since the narrator can show thoughts from multiple characters and even pause to explain information, it is possible to get across a lot of information in a very short space of time.

Direct address to the reader: As always, a narrator can address the reader directly if necessary.

Advantages of Head-Hopping Omniscient

More immediate than the narrator: Since there’s no one between the reader and the events of the story, the narrative can feel more immediate and real and less like just a story.

Tension: Just as with the narrator, you can convey information from multiple viewpoints or information that none of the characters know.

Infodumping: Again, it is possible to convey information from multiple perspectives very quickly, rather than having to give a separate scene to each perspective.

Most reliable narrator: With its absence of a biased, actual narrator and ability to show the thoughts of many characters in quick succession, this is the single most reliable narration that a writer can provide to a reader.

Disadvantages of Both Types of Third-Person Omniscient

Difficult to write correctly: Third-person omniscient is the most difficult to write without creating viewpoint errors or getting confusing—when you move from head to head, the reader can get lost very quickly and become unsure who is thinking what.

Unfamiliar to many readers: To make matters worse, very few books are written in third-person omniscient these days, so readers are unused to reading it. This means that even if you get it right, readers may still end up confused. This is particularly true with the “head-hopping” variation of omniscient, because to the reader it will often seem like third-person limited until the first time the narrative jumps to another character’s thoughts. This can be very jarring to readers, even if they’ve read omniscient before.

Lack of tension: It can be difficult to keep secrets and tension going if the readers are getting too much information about what is going on.

Infodumping: While it is an advantage that omniscient allows you to convey lots of information more quickly, this is a very difficult thing to do well. Often, this can turn into a firehose-esque flood of information that the reader will be unable to follow.

Perspective and Tense Overview

Ah, perspective and tense. These are a vast and thorny topic—too vast for me to cover in only one blog post. So, for today, we’re simply going to run through what perspective and tense are and which of them are best for writing. Once we've established a solid understanding of what perspective and tense are, we'll be able to discuss the ways in which writers can make mistakes with them.

Perspective

Put simply, perspective means “point of view”—who is telling the story and in what manner. There are only a few perspectives from which a story should be told:

First Person

This is when your story is being told from the point of view of one of the characters. It’s usually easy to pick out—if the word “I” crops up a lot in the prose, than it’s probably first person.

Third Person Omniscient

This is when your story jumps from character to character, showing many points of view over the course of any given scene at once. There may be an implied narrator or there may not.

Third Person Limited

This is when your story is limited to the point of view of a single character at a time, but that character isn’t personally telling the story, as they are in first person. It is marked by frequent use of the words "he" or "she."

While it is technically possible to write a story from a different perspective (many choose-your-own-adventure stories are told in second person, for instance), it’s not something that should be done with any sort of regularity or without a very, very good reason.            

Tense

Perspective’s pernicious twin sister is tense. Tense is the “when” of the action. Did it already happen, or is it happening right now? When we’re speaking to one another, it is very easy to keep our tenses straight; but when you’re trying to string together a coherent set of several thousand to several hundred thousand words, tense can be difficult to keep track of.

Past Tense

Past tense stories are told as though they have already happened, finished, and are now being related to the reader.

Present Tense

Present tense stories are told as though they are currently happening (“Jason runs to the car” instead of “Jason ran to the car”). This is increasingly common in first-person stories but is very unusual in third-person.

When we combine our common modes of perspective and tense, we end up with four results that encompass the majority of literature:

First person, past tense: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Animorphs series by Katherine Applegate, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan

First person, present tense: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth

Third person omniscient, past tense: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy, Dune by Frank Herbert

Third person limited, past tense: The Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

Over the next week or so, we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of these narrative modes, and then we'll be set to discuss some of the many, many ways in which new writers tend to break their perspectives and tenses.

P.S.

Before we finish, a word of warning: many novice writers are tempted to look at a list like this and think, “But I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. I want to be original! I’m going to write a novel in second-person perspective and future tense! That will get some attention.” To you, hypothetical reader who is even now nodding to yourself in confident satisfaction, I have one very important word: no.

Don’t do it. And because I’m afraid you won’t listen to me, I’m going to attempt to convey the gravity of that sentiment by isolating it as its own paragraph, capitalizing it, bolding it, and italicizing it.

NO.

I really can’t make it any clearer than that without opening up a live video chat with you and screaming it in your face. Do not attempt to write in a perspective/tense combination outside of the four that I’ve shown you here. You’re not the first person to think of that idea, not by a lo-o-o-o-ng shot. You won’t come across as clever and original, you’ll come across as amateur and inept. Editors won’t even read your story—they’ll take one look and go, “Second-person future? Why is this person wasting my time?” And then they’ll give your story to an intern and tell them to send you a rejection. I know they will, because I’ve seen editors do this, and I have done it myself.

Now, I know: There are some excellent and original books out there that are written in unusual narrative modes. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is in second-person perspective, while Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones are written in first-person omniscient. Maybe you’ve read something else that was written in an unusual narrative mode that just blew your socks off.  Great. Send it to me, I’d love to read it. 

But those stories are atypical. They probably got to print because the author was a well-known, respected professional with a history of turning out great work—the type of person that an editor can trust to not waste their valuable time. The type of writer who has learned the rules inside and out and now knows how to break them to spectacular effect. You’re not that person, not yet. For now, stick with the tried-and-true basics until you've mastered them inside and out.