136 Characters and viewpoint

Bride, my students were quite ready to deal with something as relatively simple as King Lear.

What does this have to do with you? You must decide where your story will be on the continuum between presentational and representational storytelling. Either approach has its drawbacks and its advantages. You must decide what your story needs-and what you're good at-and then use that approach consistently.

Whichever way you choose to write, you must let the audience know immediately what to expect. Nothing is more cruelly jarring than to get fifty pages into a representational novel and have the narrator suddenly spring a "dear reader" on us.

Not that it isn't possible to switch from one to another in midstream. I wrote a novel which seemed to be representational except, perhaps, for a certain archness of tone-a "toldness" about the tale-and only gradually dropped hints that the book was being written by one of the characters in the book, who was writing it in order to persuade another character not to kill the protagonist. My editor and I finally agreed, though, that I had been too subtle. I ended up going back and making it plain from the beginning that the book was being written to one of the characters in order to persuade him to a course of action. The only puzzle I left in place was that I didn't reveal until the end of the book which character was writing it. I could have left it the other way, but it wasn't worth the cost to the audience. The gradual shift in the first version brought no great benefit, and stood a good chance of seriously diminishing the readers' emotional involvement in the book.

Here are a couple of story openings, just to show you the difference. The first is extremely representational-it is meant to feel like a real document a character might have produced. The second is extremely presentational-it is meant to sound like a writer who is keenly aware of his contemporary audience. Yet, oddly enough, they both are narrated by a self-conscious narrator, who is sensitive to the fact that he is writing something he means someone to read:

My name is Macon Anderson and I pray God will guide my pen. I also pray he'll find some way to keep these scraps of paper from getting found and going up in flames or down the toilet along with my hope of freedom; I also pray that he'll find some way to get it out of here and into someone else's hands. But what are my prayers? Why should you care? You with your house payments and day-care costs, you with your chance of a promotion and your plans for a vacation at Disney World, what do you ever pray for, if you pray at all? To hell with ^ you, anyway. Paper is too precious, this pencil is too short for me to waste more of it on you. You aren't real, anyway. Real people are the ones whose stink I smell in the morning, whose hands snag on the rough bark of trees and mingle their blood with mine, whose eyes look longingly at my scrap of bread and then study my body, wondering how my strength is holding up, and whether I'm weak enough now that it's safe to start trying to steal food from me. I'm still too strong for them-this is how I know that God lives and answers prayers.

Listen tight, boys and girls, this is what you stayed up so late to read. Your mommy and daddy have gone to bed, you've got the flashlight on under the

Presentation vs. Representation 137

covers, and now I'm going to tell you the story of Mike and Betty Meekly, who got fed up and shot their parents in the head one day. Your folks don't want you to read this book because they're afraid you'll get ideas. Hell, they got nothing to worry about. After years of watching television, you wouldn't know an idea if it came up and spit in your face.

Remember that I made up this story. It's all lies. So even if you happen to have heard some news story about some girl who figured her daddy had poked around in her underwear-for the last time-or about some boy who figured his folks had hit him with a garden tool-for the last time-even if you saw pictures of that kid getting out of court on a six-month suspended sentence, I don't want you to start getting the idea that this story is true. OK? Because I don't want some fruitcake suing me for having led him into killing his parents because my novel told him it was a justifiable kind of homicide. I want to go on record right now as saying that even if your parents are the most unconscionable swine who ever produced accidental, unwanted, and mistreated offspring, I don't think you should kill them. I officially encourage you to avoid even thinking about murder. I'm just a fiction writer, telling entertaining fibs for people who haven't got enough imagination to invent their own daydreams of bloody vengeance.

Both narrators address their audience directly. But the first story is meant to be received as an actual journal scribbled by a prisoner on scraps of paper, chronicling his life in a concentration camp, while the second one is meant to be received as a work of fiction, constantly making the reader aware of the author's not-so-hidden agenda. So the first story's direct address to the "audience" is representational-it enhances the illusion that the story being told is true. While the second story is presentational-it makes it impossible to forget that the story is fiction. Two more examples, now, both in third person:

Martin volunteered to do the shopping just so he could get out of the house. The house was too small these days, too crowded now that he had no job to get to, now that he could sleep as late as he wanted. He could hear every noise that Deanne made, mucking around in the kitchen; and she could hear every sound the television made, as he dozed through his daily pilgrimage through Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Superior Court, and The Love Connection. Martin knew that every theme song was a reminder to Deanne that he wasn't out looking for work. Every time she spoke to him it felt to him like a reproof, even though he knew that her words were innocent, that she was walking on eggshells trying to keep him from getting mad at her again. So he went and did the shopping, even though it always made him feel even worse because he ran out of money so much sooner than he ran out of grocery list.

Sary's job at The Daily Record was to go through all the reporters' stories and put in typographical errors. Now that the paper was set directly from the computer files that the reporters typed in, there was no typesetting stage in which errors could be created. Papers might actually start coming out error-free. Management was deeply worried about this during the lockout when they got rid of the damned typesetters union once and for all. Typos were a part of newspaper life. If they didn't get a hundred letters a week complaining about bad grammar or misspellings, how would they know anybody was paying attention? If they never had a dumb headline or a screwed-up classified ad, how could they