A Character Demanding to be Heard

After a recent writing retreat, a character came to me with his story and I'm afraid to tell it.  I'm afraid that I'm the wrong person because there's a lot I don't really know about this character's world and I'm afraid to find out.  He's challenging me, challenging my own belief in my open mindedness, challenging my willingness to step outside my comfort zone, challenging my confidence.

The character is a gay teen in the 1980s who moves to the Castro District of San Francisco and experiences the devastation of the AIDS epidemic.  He's brought a book title with him, an incredibly strong voice, a compulsion to tell his story and even a plot structure.  He's also brought an in-your-face challenge:  "Are you, Cindy, willing to learn what you need to learn to tell my story?  Are you willing to really get to know me and my world?"  And I don't know the answer.

He was so insistent that I pulled my car over to the side of the road while I was driving back from this writing retreat and wrote 500 words in his voice, 500 words that appears to be the opening of a YA novel.  Then, when I got home, I started a Scrivener file for this project.  If you know anything about Scrivener, you know that step represents a certain level of commitment.  I even started an outline.

It's clear this kid has pull, this kid who won't tell me his real name but simply says "Call me Ishmael."  This kid who believes the story of the fight against AIDS is the gay community's epic struggle, on a par with GILGAMESH or the ILIAD, or MOBY DICK.

I remember the AIDS epidemic.  I know this kid's big feelings about that epidemic come from a deep place inside me and from my own experience and my conviction that this story needs to be told for a YA audience.  It's a part of history that isn't making it into the history books young adults encounter.  But my experience was not as deep as this kid's.  I was more of an outsider, a straight woman in the theater community with gay friends and relatives who died.  I've tried telling the story from a POV character closer to me.  It's not working.  Then along comes this kid saying, "Hey!  This is my story, damn it!  You need to tell it my way."  What am I supposed to do with this?

 Perhaps this is a time to apply my own advice from one of my recent posts and say "Yes, and ..."

Have you ever had a character grab you with this level of insistence, a character whose story you feel you have no right to tell, might not even be able to tell, but the character has other ideas?

How You See It and How You Say It

"It's all in how you see it," some people say. For writers, that means point of view, which has to be one of the more challenging, complex and, to my mind, fascinating topics of the writer's craft. Point of view is more than just first person or third person. Point of view is about immediacy and risk. Whenever I learn about or explore point of view, I find myself thinking in cinematic terms. Where is the lens of my reader's camera located? Where is their microphone located? How tight is the close-up? Does my story need a more panoramic or epic scope?

Even tense can play a role in point of view. I just made the risky move of rewriting the first scene of my latest novel in first person, present tense. It has a level of immediacy, intimacy and high-risk involvement like no other, but it comes with a price. You have to place all sorts of limits on your access to information, since you can only share what your narrator knows at or before the point in time of the action. But I have to say, my pulse is racing and I feel like I'm going for the jugular a lot more in the first person, present tense. It's almost an adrenaline rush.

How you see it can also drive how you say it. I'm thinking about that elusive quality known as voice. So hard to define. You just know it when you see it. Too often I reread my stuff and am disgusted by how flat it seems, the way it lays there on the page after being run through my critical, analytical, disengaged and dispassionate mill one too many times. Then I'll write something for a workshop exercise and it just leaps off the page. Voice.

When I shift point of view, it can blow voice wide open. To me, finding the voice when you're not writing in first person seems so much harder, and when it comes to YA literature, I keep coming back to the first person point of view. No intermediary between the reader and the protagonist.

At a minimum, if you're struggling to find the voice of your story, I think it's worth it to rewrite a pivotal scene from a variety of points of view. You may be amazed by what you discover. If you're lucky, you'll find the right voice before you've finished an entire draft. If you're like me, you might end up rewriting your whole novel from a different point of view. But the risk is worth the pay-off. At least, that's how I see it.