Be Your Own Editor

Eddy from the Bronx has a dilemma:

I am a screenplay writer. I have a few things in the works. In the meantime I am turning one of my screenplays into a novel, which is an interesting process. The big problem that I am having is changing my description, in other words in my screenplay I use the word “we” a lot. In my research I have not found a book that uses this POV style and I am for whatever reason STUCK on how to change the word “we” in my description as it also bumps up against 1st person, or is it OK and acceptable to leave this style in the novel.

Eddy sent me the first two pages from his novel, which I share just a bit of below, and in it he employs first, second, and third person. (The first sentence addresses an anonymous “you”; after that an anonymous “we” is narrating the story.) Eddy, you need a crash course in what point of view really means and how it affects the reader.

The need to consider POV applies to both screenplays and novels, but in different ways. In a film, point of view is expressed visually, through the characters we spend the most time with and how they are shot. Point-of-view shots (photographed as if through the eyes of a character) would be the rough equivalent of a first-person “I” point of view in a novel. A camera that uses more long shots and no point-of-view shots creates a feeling similar to an anonymous, omniscient third-person narrator in a novel.

When you think about POV in your novel, you have to think about the identity (or lack thereof) of your narrator. After all, it’s through the narrator, or the “voice” that’s telling us the story, that events, thoughts, etc. are revealed to us. Most novels are written either in first person singular, using “I,” or in third person. With first person, “I” is almost always a character in the story, either central or peripheral. Third person is a little more flexible: a third person narrator can have no discernable identity or can follow closely one or more characters, allowing us access to their thoughts as much or as little as the author chooses.

But rarely do we come across a “we” narrator, and with good reason. It’s not like a screenplay, where “we” usually means “we, the viewers.” You can’t write “we” and mean “we, the readers of this novel.” The pronoun you use for narration lets us know who is telling the story, not whom it’s being told to. And “we” implies that more than one person is telling us the story at the same time, which raises all sorts of difficult issues. If any of you are thinking about novels written in first person in which the point of view shifts between different characters in different chapters—see Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—that’s different. Each chapter in that case has its own distinct voice. “We” means lots of voices at once.

It would be almost impossible to pull that off over the course of an entire novel, if only for logistical reasons. You can’t just write “we” and not know to whom it refers, unless you’re trying to be really experimental, which I don’t think is Eddy’s goal. So let’s say three characters are included in “we.” Wouldn’t all of the people included in your “we” have their own version of the story to tell? What if one of them dies? Takes a nap? Goes to the bathroom? Then your action is suddenly being described by an altogether different “we.” It’s distancing and disorienting to the reader. Having said all that, I don’t think Eddy has any characters in mind, besides the viewers/readers, when he writes “we.”

Eddy also says it bumps up against first person. Okay, so who’s the first person? And why can’t that person be the one who describes the action? Is it a character who’s not present at some points in the story? Unless you want to tell your story entirely from the point of view of one character—in other words, what readers see is what that character sees and only that, you might want to consider getting rid of every “we” and “I” and writing in the third person.

Here are the first two sentences of Eddy’s novel:

Nobody knew you would save the world.
We go across the street and in toward a liquor store located on Main Street in Wingate, PA.

First, “you” is also a tough pronoun to pull off in fiction. I’m reading the sentence, so it’s as if “you” is addressing me, the reader. Who is “you,” and who is saying it? Why not “Nobody knew he [or she] would save the world”? Again, there’s a reason entire books are rarely written in the second person. Because it’s awkward, and even if it refers to a character within the story, it makes the reader feel as if they’re being directly addressed or implicated in the action in some way. (Always exceptions, though: Bright Lights, Big City arguably pulled it off.)

Now let’s get to the “we”/description question. Eliminating “we” will actually free you to be more creative in your description, in a way you don’t need to be in a screenplay (again, because in a movie we’re going to actually see everything). You have to paint a more detailed picture for us in a novel, or at least start us on the road to painting our own picture. Instead of writing “We go across a street,” describe the street.

I see how the transition can be awkward—perhaps try to imagine the events and start from scratch, rather than copying the description directly from your script. You need to eliminate not only the “we,” but the action the “we” is performing, which in your screenplay is the action of the camera. That is, in this case, the going across the street.

So if the camera, in your script, is moving across the street and into a liquor store, simply imagine that street and that store, and describe it. If you want a sense of movement, start by describing one side of the street, then describe the street itself, then the store. Think about taking the objects of the camera’s view, which are usually also objects in your sentences (in this case, the store, the street, etc.) and turn one of them into the subject of the sentence, eliminating the need for “we”:

A series of potholes in Main Street led almost directly to the door of an old, run-down liquor store.

Of course, I just made that up, and your vision of the street and the liquor store may be completely different. But you get the point, I hope. Now go to it, and good luck. Thanks for writing, Eddy, and let me know if I can shed any further light on this or any other topic for you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Readers Q&A, Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.