July 20, 2024:
Here’s the commentary I mentioned in Focus and Endings, Part 1, regarding the double-scene posted there, about Focus. (We’ll do “Endings” next week—that’s a bit more complex, and it’s a busy week right now.) I did it as a separate piece (rather than annotating the original scenes), because that way I can use it as material for the writing workshop I’m teaching at the Surrey Intl. Writers Conference this Fall.
FOCUS:
OK, focus is the art of making the reader/viewer look where you want them to look, and see what you want them to see. Sounds simple, does it not? <g>
It actually isn’t a complicated concept, and the tools you have available (whether you’re a film-maker, script-writer, or a multi-purpose writer) are fairly straightforward, too.
The first of these tools is the Point of View (POV, for convenience…). That means, essentially, “Whose head are we in (for written material)” or “Who’s looking? (for film or visual stories (like graphic novels or picture books)?”
(Some years ago, when my husband and I were discussing a chunk I’d just written, I mentioned someone’s point of view, and then had to explain that. Now, my husband is a well-read and perceptive man, but he told me—following my explanations—that it had never before occurred to him that a story was told from someone’s specific point of view. But that’s the sort of principle that, once you’ve seen it, you recognize it immediately.)
The Point of View is one of the things that’s Right There on the Page, but you might not see it, if you weren’t familiar with the concept. Likewise, if you aren’t familiar with (or aware of) the concept, your writing may drift around in terms of the point of view, which runs the risk of distracting, confusing or boring the reader (which we kind of assume you don’t want to do…).
(Now, there is a form called “omniscient POV” writing, in which you do exactly this—drift in and out of people’s heads, just as you please—and that’s perfectly legitimate, but you do need to be careful with it, so that the reader is sure whose head they’re in, at any given moment. I’m just now reading a great book, by Fredrik Backman, a Swedish author. I posted a link to his hilarious—and very astute—speech at a publisher’s convention a couple of weeks ago, and then went directly to buy one of his books. I got ANXIOUS PEOPLE, which is wonderful—very funny and deeply sorrowful at the same time, which is Not An Easy Thing to Do. He uses an omniscient point of view through most of the book, and it’s very effective. So if you’re looking for a good example, there’s one.)
Let’s assume for the moment, though, that we’re using the much simpler point-of-view technique where you’re only dealing with one character’s head (at a time…). This can be a first-person POV, which means that the character whose head you’re using thinks and talks about themselves as “I”.
EXAMPLE: “I opened the door and stopped dead. Which is to say, if I hadn’t stopped, I’d have been dead, as there was a large rattlesnake coiled up on the floor, two feet away. It didn’t look friendly.”
Side-note: I wrote OUTLANDER using only one POV—Claire’s, and that, as you know, is a first-person POV (meaning that she thinks and speaks of her actions and thoughts as “I”). The publisher—out of sheer desperation as to how to market a book that could easily belong to any of five or six different genres—decided to publish it initially as a romance, because that was the biggest market to which it might appeal—and consequently I was told, by any number of romance writers and readers, that One Should NEVER Write in the First Person!
“Readers don’t like it,” I was told (often through primly pursed lips). “They don’t want to be the heroine; they want to be the heroine’s best friend.” Fortunately, I actually hadn’t written a romance novel <cough>, so when someone walked up to me (and a surprising number of people did) and said (in tones of subdued horror), “How did you dare to write a book in the first person?” I replied, “Easy. I just sat down and typed, “I”….”
I mean, call me Ishmael… at least half the classics of English Literature are written in the first person.
The first-person POV is very intimate, but some writers prefer a bit more distance.
The alternatives to the first-person POV are (basically) an omniscient point of view, which I’ve mentioned above, or a third-person POV, in which you write things like “Jamie hoped that the rock he was about to lift didn’t conceal a coiled rattlesnake in an unpleasant frame of mind.” I.e., the POV character doesn’t think of themselves as “I”, but the reader sees only what that character sees.
So. The excerpt from Focus and Endings, Part 1 is (noticeably, I hope) in Jamie Fraser’s point of view—a third-person POV. Everything the reader sees is seen through his eyes, and we vicariously experience his thoughts about and responses to the things he sees and hears.
Other people—John Quincy Myers and Jenny—talk in this pair of scenes from Part 1, but they don’t have a point of view. They’re talking to Jamie, and we see what he sees, both of their physical appearances and the surroundings, and what he thinks about what they’ve said. The POV is his.
If I had written the scene from John Quincy’s POV, it would be different—though it might communicate the same information—because JQM would be seeing and experiencing different things, and interpreting those things through his own lens.
OK. Now, when you’re using either a first-person or third-person POV, one thing to be careful of is the person’s characteristic mode of speech. E.g., Jamie is a Scottish Highlander, and normally speaks either Scots or Gaelic (unless he’s being very formal with an English person). Even when he’s thinking, rather than speaking, he does so in his usual style:
EXAMPLE 2: “Not you, a charadh,” Jamie said, and reached to tweak Meyers’s shirt down into respectability. “Him.” He pointed at the big gray puppy. Skènnen was nearly as big as Bluebell, and him not even a year old. Fully awake now, the dog scrambled to his enormous feet and lunged out to have his ears scratched.
See? He uses the normal “a charadh” (“O, friend”) in direct Gaelic address to John Quincy, and his thought about the puppy’s size includes “and him not even a year old.” That’s a common stylistic form in Scots (and many dialects of English, for that matter—but not in American English). This type of usage keeps the reader embedded in Jamie’s POV.
This is the main trick (if we can call it that) to maintaining a good first-person POV; stay inside the character’s head, and inside his/hers/their usual manner of thinking, as well as speaking. Jamie could have thought: “Skènnen was nearly as big as Bluebell, even though he was less than a year old.” That’s not wrong, and wouldn’t really jerk a reader out of Jamie’s POV—it’s just that using his colloquial, “and him not even a year old” helps (with a whole lot of similar usages throughout) to keep the reader snugly inside Jamie’s head. Focused, in other words.
OK. So choosing (and maintaining) a particular POV is one of the main ways of creating Focus. Others include:
· Choice of/Sense of Place
· Language
A place doesn’t (usually) have a specific point of view, but it does have a characteristic atmosphere and specific physical identifiers that help the reader form a sense of the place. Vide the non-fragrant but flowering dogwood bush that Myers is sleeping under.
EXAMPLE: Take the first paragraph of this piece:
“Jamie made his way slowly uphill through the remnants of yesterday’s—and last night’s—wedding celebrations. Most of those who had slept under bushes and trees had likely managed to get up at dawn and go home to feed their beasts and their bairns, but he passed a big flowering dogwood whose fragrant flowers had fallen on a belated pair of feet and legs, these naked, hairy, and exposing clean but very callused soles.”
We’re following Jamie; we see what he sees, and we know what he knows and when and where he is. And as we read this paragraph, we’re forming a quick impression of exactly where we are (in terms of time and event) and what we’re looking at. Beyond that, look at the internals—the iteration of alliterative terms: “their beasts and their bairns”, “flowering dogwood whose flowers had fallen on a belated pair of feet”, “clean but very callused soles.”
Doing this kind of thing creates a mental resonance for the reader, causing them to pay closer attention to the words. Most readers won’t notice that sort of thing consciously, but their inner ear will pick up the rhythm, and imprint the image you’ve drawn.
(Note: In the second scene, there’s almost no physical focusing beyond the description of the characters’ expressions and body language, because the scene is a very focused conversation—I didn’t need to describe the scenery, clothes, etc. (and didn’t), because what the characters are saying is the only important thing, and that’s where I want the focus to be.)
Footnote 1: Of course, there’s an unspoken other side to using focal techniques: You can use them to keep people from seeing things you don’t want them to see. <g>
Footnote 2: When you’re dealing with visual media—graphic novels, comic books, film, etc.—focus is much more straightforward: You point the camera where you want the viewer/reader to look, and that’s what they’re going to see.
This means that, as the writer, you have to think about what the viewer will see, and how you want them to see it. When you write a script and the POV is specified (bear in mind that the director has the ultimate say in whose face is onscreen and when), you’d say something like “ON Claire, looking worried,” or “OS (off-screen) Jamie’s shout: (line of dialogue)”.
When there’s a conversation, normally there will be two cameras operating, one showing each character (with a lot of distance/focus variations—this is why multiple shots (‘takes’) of the same scene are done, and the director and film editor will decide how to mix them most effectively).
Good luck, and Happy Reading!
Click to read the first part of this excerpt and post: Focus and Endings, Part 1.
Read other excerpts released (so far) on my official Book Ten (Untitled) webpage.
The photograph—of a vintage Ukrainian microscope in a classroom—is from Wikimedia. Author: Ann 2000, Copyright © by the author and CC BY-SA 4.0. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The original JPEG file has not been modified. Link to source image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138936770
The text and excerpts on this page were released here and on my official Facebook page on July 20, 2024.