Part 4 — Character, narrator, and point of view

Before a reader finishes the first page, two questions have been answered, whether or not the writer meant to answer them. Who is this person? And who is telling me about her? Answer either one weakly and it tends to show up everywhere else, in scenes that happen to a mannequin, a voice that explains too much or notices too little, and an ending with no one for it to land on.

In fiction a character is made, and the author is responsible for her design. In memoir, biography, reportage and the personal essay the people on the page are real, and the writer is responsible for evidence and for consequences, which Part 8 takes up. Nearly every technique here still applies to them, with a different obligation attached. A novelist may decide why a character did something. A memoirist who does not know has to say so. An essay has a narrator even when no one calls it that, and a poem has a speaker, so anyone reading a poem is quietly deciding who is talking, to whom, and from where.

The close readings use public-domain texts, mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chosen so that we can quote them exactly and you can check every line against the page; the choice implies no ranking, and the techniques are alive in recent work. Recent books about craft we mostly paraphrase. Where a work is a translation, the chapter names the translator.

The ten chapters start with the smallest unit of character, a want, and move outward: 31 to 36 are about the people on the page, 37 to 40 about the telling. Each can also be read alone, against the problem in front of you.

None of this assumes a way of working. You may build the competing desires and what each viewpoint knows before you draft, or put someone under pressure and find out what she does. The questions are most useful put to pages that exist, however they came to exist. Each chapter ends with a task of an hour or less, and two of them, 32 and 33, finish by handing pages to one reader.