If I’m completely honest, I didn’t know any fiction writers until I got to college. In high school, we didn’t have a fiction writing class. I knew athletes. I knew musicians. I knew kids who were good at math or mechanical drawing. I knew one kid who was into photography. But I didn’t know any fiction writers.
College is where I started spending time with people who took fiction writing seriously. It’s where pretentiousness first presented its face to me. But it’s also where I learned that fiction–both the reading and the writing of it–really does matter. In college, during my sophomore year, I started to listen to people, and I became aware of the way that many of them would dismiss fiction as unreal–and this was a term of real censure. Perhaps this negative assertion is connected with the need to earn money, and the stock market doesn’t exist in novels in any “real” way. But when people assert that to be healthy, we need to know the difference between reality and fiction, the latter of which becomes synonymous with myths and lies, then fiction becomes at best an embellishment on life, at worst tall tales. The thing is that I’ve learned a great deal about the real life people are talking about by listening to the embellishments.
Everyone Has a Point of View — This applies to psychology and marriage as much as it does to understanding politics. For most readers, it should be noted, the point of view in which a story is told goes unrecognized, passes as part of the woodwork, the background. For many casual readers, point of view is subliminal noise to ignore. People read in this way for the most part. It’s close to watching TV. They want the experience, and the words are simply there as some sort of rendition they are willing to trust or at least not question. In fact, the experience and the words are coming from someone’s voice, someone’s point of view. Whose is it? This is the last question they might think to ask–if they think of it. More often, most will read the entire story and never ask it.
This is the first question of the fiction writer. Who is telling the story? The fiction writers I started hanging out with would lean over and point to what everyone else in the room was ignoring. Who is giving the point of view? Whose story, whose facts, are we getting? It matters a great deal that we know that Nick Caraway, a Midwesterner with a college degree, is telling Jay Gatsby’s story.
Fiction writers play with this, tease with it.
First person point of view, that most popular of modern devices, is largely seen by serious readers as the voice of the unreliable witness. What is this narrator not telling us? What is being omitted, what is being over-stated? The thing I find interesting about this is just how real this point is. People, as first person narrators, can be very unreliable. They forget, they overstate, the omit key points that matter. It troubles some critics that Nick Caraway’s take on Jay Gatsby is unreliable.
Third person point of view, in the minds of those who value “reality” over fiction, is almost completely fused with and indistinguishable from the old omniscient narrator. But the third person narrator is not all knowing. As third person limited, it is giving us one character’s thoughts and observations, but from a slight distance so that the author creeps in a bit in places.
This business about point of view has helped me to understand political utterances better. I read someone’s assertion, and I realize that it isn’t reality but their version. And their version can be countered by another’s, and another’s. No statement is coming from a position of knowing everything. The points of view I know are not omniscient. They are contingent, limited, just like mine, just like everyone’s.
This has also helped my marriage. It has helped me to hear where my wife is coming from. My own point of view is not objective. It is limited. Of course, I don’t admit this to her all of the time.
Good dialogue results from listening to the way people say things — In my earliest views of writers, I think I assumed that they were all introverts. This may have been because I saw them in the position of listening. Since then, I’ve learned that some are introverted extroverts. But there is something to the stereotype I first believed. It had to do with this: writers like language, and they listen for it a great deal; fiction writers, especially, like to listen to the way people talk. It’s how they learn about people. It’s how they learn to write good scripts and good dialogue that reveals character through what characters say.
This has helped me in life a great deal. I’ve understood for a while now that people don’t generally just come out and say what they want or need. In fact, it seems that many people don’t know what they want. I learned this from being a fiction writer and listening to the way that people talk to each other. I’ve learned that relationships are not always equal, and that some people are giving more in their connections with people than others are. We are not only capitalists in our economic thinking. We are also emotional capitalists.
Truth is stranger than fiction — In fact, much stranger. I learned this in one writers group where I brought in a story and the main criticism had to do with something that happens to one of the characters. What was interesting was that my readers didn’t object to the part that I’d made up. They thought that was real. But the one thing that really did happen to me in real life, a coincidence that helped me, didn’t work in my story. The members of my writing group refused to believe it in the fictional world, even though it happened in real life.
What happens to us in real life is often not credible in fiction. Coincidences, in fiction, at least, have to be handled with care–they should never be used to resolve a conflict or as a plot device, though coincidences occur all the time in what we call our “real’ lives.
But this enterprise of writing fiction has taught me a great deal about all of the ways that our simple binaries about real life and fiction (and myth and lies) are not so simple as they sound. Of course, I’m not going to invest in stocks I read about in a novel. But I might recognize how limited we all are in our understanding. No one sees everything. No one is omniscient.