Multiple POV or not? Why does it matter?

I've written here before about using multiple points of view, and all the things it can be good for. I love using more than one point of view because I love the way it can drive the plot by exacerbating the sense of misunderstanding at the same time that it lets me have special confidentiality with my reader.

But it is not always the right thing to do.

In the story I'm working on right now, there used to be more than one point of view. Why? Several reasons:

• I like doing it.
• I like alien point of view! It's fun!
• I like knowing how all my characters think, especially my aliens. It helps me characterize them more effectively.
• It helps my readers identify with my major characters

Ok, great. So I was rather dismayed when my critique partners said the alien point of view wasn't working. It was difficult to read, that I already knew, but the worst part was that it was giving away too much to those who understood it, and leaving behind those who didn't.

Not a good sign.

It wasn't until I took it out that I realized there was yet another reason why I should never have had it in the story in the first place. This story is called "The Liars." The main alien character, Op, is a "Liar." So obviously one of the main questions of the story is whether Op is really a liar or not, and what that means.

Putting the point of view in her head seriously weakened the story, because it answered that very important question right up front, thus taking away one of the major story drivers.

The minute I took the point of view out, I knew it sounded better, but the further I went into the revision, the more sure I became that the story was stronger. Now my human protagonists can agonize about whether Op is trustworthy or not. Now they can pursue her, trying to determine whether she is being truthful. They can distrust her. She can switch between being perceived as protagonizing or antagonizing. That uncertainty is doing wonderful things for the entire story.

If you're considering writing with multiple points of view, think about it from more than one angle. Not just "what readers need to know" but also "what readers shouldn't know." Ask yourself, "Does including this point of view serve the themes of my story?" "Does adding this point of view drive the story and make it stronger, or divert and dilute the story and make it weaker?"

These aren't easy questions to answer, but they are certainly worth asking.

What does it mean to lie?

I've been thinking about lying recently, for several reasons. First is because of accusations of lying that I see flying back and forth between people of different political persuasions. Second is because I'm writing a story entitled, "The Liars." Third is because I have children.

You might think that since I say I have children, I would be saying that they lie. Not so. Instead, what they do is they make me question how lying is defined in the first place.

Consider the following situations. What do you think of them? Are these people lying?

1. A person testifies before congress and says that a study defined nuclear families as having one mother and one father when this was not in fact the definition used by the study.

2. A person hears a loved one tell a story of an injury, and proceeds to tell another story about a nearly identical injury she herself sustained, but for which there is no evidence.

3. A person tells a group of curious but unwary outsiders a lengthy story about how he used to ride to school on a kangaroo, including details of what the kangaroo ate, what kind of saddle it wore, etc.

Okay, so let's go through. As I see it, there are two possibilities for the person in situation 1. Either he was lying, or he was in error (possibly as a result of insufficient research). The difference between the two, to my mind, would be whether this person had indeed read the real definition and then decided intentionally to disregard it.

There are also two possibilities for the person in situation 2. Either she is lying to take attention away from the injured person, or she is expressing empathy for the injured person by imagining herself in a similar situation. The difference between the two, to my mind, would be whether the person is maliciously inclined toward the injured person or not.

Just as in the first two situations, there are two possible interpretations for situation 3. Either the storyteller is lying to deceive a group of people as a result of their ignorance, or he is playfully telling a joke and trying to engage their skepticism and enjoyment of hyperbole/sarcasm as well as their curiosity. The difference between the two is whether he intended to fool or belittle the listeners.

I know from personal experience that the people in situations 2 and 3 were not lying (because I know them). I don't know anything about the person in situation 1 except that many people believe he was lying. In all three cases, the situation is ambiguous, not because of any question of factual accuracy (all three cases involve factual inaccuracy!), but because of the implication of intent.

If the inaccurate statement is made with malicious (or selfish) intent, then it is a lie.

Of course, factual accuracy (or inaccuracy) is much easier to judge than malicious intent. In the case of situation 3, the intent of the storyteller was playful, but the culture of the listeners didn't actually allow for this as a possible interpretation, and therefore they thought the speaker was lying (inexplicably!) and the speaker had to explain to them that the whole thing was a joke. And then of course there are "white lies" which people don't seem to mind so much, which are told with explicitly benevolent intent... and there are lies which are told because they are required for reasons of politeness... [See my other article about this, Honesty and Politeness]

I find this an incredibly rich source of ideas for stories. There are plenty of situations when an error or omission by one party can be interpreted as deliberately malicious by the other. Cultural differences only exacerbate these situations. Have you ever been in an ambiguous lying situation? Have you ever seen someone accused of lying when they didn't deserve it? Was the factual accuracy at issue, or the intent behind it?

It's something to think about.

Some thoughts on story endings

I was thinking about story endings - basically, for two reasons. First, I have been taking a break from writing my novel for a few weeks because I felt like the ending wasn't lining up strongly enough, and second, because I just finished a short story. And then after I'd submitted it for critique, grabbed it back for some last minute edits to the ending.

I have a tendency to rush endings in first draft. I'm sure people get my story drafts and say, "I'd better take a close look at the ending." I think this is because it takes me so long to write a story that by the time I reach the end I'm going, "get me to the end of this thing!!!" This means, of course, that I do twice as much work on it in the revisions stage.

I'm an outliner, so I generally have a basic idea of what needs to happen for my ending. My Allied Systems stories are puzzle stories, so at a certain point somebody has to go "aha!" Aha moments can happen at any point in a story, but in these stories the aha moment is usually at the climax. I don't mind if readers figure out the solution before my characters, but it's ideal if they arrive there at roughly the same time, so I have to take the puzzle pieces and distribute them through the story, with the last couple arriving right at the end. I then have to make sure that the aha character doesn't sit down and explain at length the solution to the puzzle, because that would be - well, annoying. I'm not writing Sherlock Holmes here. The most important way for me to get around that is to make sure I'm considering the emotional impact of the puzzle solution. In my current story, the solution to the puzzle does not make Adrian Preston very happy at all - so when I went back to tweak it, I changed the aha moment from an explanation to a questioning sequence. Less like "and here's how it works, folks" and more like "oh, darn, can it really work like this? Let's test..."

I also like to make sure that every major character has something to contribute to the ending. Otherwise my readers would be sitting there going "what happened to Lydia?" The core protagonist (Adrian) has to be the one making the major moves - in this case, solving the linguistic and cultural mystery - but because his relationship with his wife Qing has been at issue, the ending has to bring her together with him - and because Lydia the activist friend was the one who started the worst of the trouble, she really has to bring something of value to the end solution so we don't feel angry with her. In the case of this story, "The Liars," she causes something of a revolution, and I think it's deserved.

The question of the core protagonist making the major moves to bring about the ending of the story is a really critical one. I'll say it again: the core protagonist must be the one to solve the problem and cause the ending. This was one of the things I felt was missing in the outline for the novel ending I had planned. I knew that Tagret brought about the final twist at the end, but I had a feeling that he wasn't really behaving as an actor/agent driving the story toward its conclusion in sections leading up to that twist. This had bells of alarm going off in my head until I took a step back and was able to re-outline.

Here's the thing. I've seen this happen even in otherwise fantastic published books, where the author's desire to make the ending MEGA HUGE ends up causing the protagonist to get pushed to one side in his/her significance to the events of the ending. And while the ending remains mega huge, I find its emotional significance to a reader is diminished by this. In the case of trilogies I've read, the constant need to up the stakes in each book makes the problem of sidelining the protagonist even trickier as the end of the first, the second, the third book comes along. I was working with Janice Hardy on Darkfall some months ago, and I remember having this very conversation with her, because her initial draft had drifted off of Nya as its primary driver when it reached the end. Needless to say, she and I and other critiquers put our heads to this problem rather assiduously, and ended up with a better solution that kept Nya right at the center of things (while still satisfying the need for mega huge).

In the case of Tagret in "For Love, For Power," I knew where and how he would take action to achieve the love he was seeking, but I hadn't yet grasped precisely what the piece of power was that he would wield in order to bring about the events of the ending. (I suppose you can see the pattern here: every major character in this novel has both a love arc and a power arc.) Once I realized that he had a piece of knowledge about his brother's weaknesses that no one else possessed, I saw how he could use that against his brother in an escalating sequence that would get us to the climax of the story.

I always like to feel that at the end of a story, each major character gets something he/she "deserves." It's the way we like to see the hero(ine) triumph and the bad guy get his/her comeuppance. When you've got more than one major character, you should consider how to fit into the climax something that each one specially deserves. A character who has been defined by a relationship with family through the book should have some family-related personal twist at the end. A character who has struggled with a dependence on someone or something else should be able to achieve a change of some sort in that dependence (as when Rulii was partially liberated from his addiction at the end of "Cold Words"). A character who has been filled with hate and had to act against his own worse judgment through the whole story should be able to achieve a resolution that changes the nature of that hate (for better or worse!) at the end. Paying attention to this sort of detail for each character will make the ending more resonant and satisfying for readers.

It's something to think about.