A Writer’s Toolbox–Point of View

Josh asked me about writing from a cat’s point of view in a comment on my Christmas story.  Before I start talking about that, let me give you a warning–some people really don’t like “seeing behind the magician’s curtain”.  If this is the case for you, keep going down the page and read about crooked governors and vitamin suppliments–I won’t mind.  Here’s a disclaimer, too:  I have had exactly one Rhetoric class and that was nearly forty years ago.  The mechanics of my writing is to a college-trained person as a shade-tree hot rodder is to a guy working at Indianapolis.  My work is all seat-of-the-pants stuff, making it up as I go along, so your mileage may vary.

That said, my stories, for me, come in two categories–ones that are easy to write and ones that are like pulling teeth.  There doesn’t seem to be any relationship between the difficulty and how good they end up being–my gay werewolf story was painfully difficult, yet it is one of the best things I’ve ever written.  On the other hand, there’s a short-short fairy tale that I wrote in two hours that ended up leaving audiences saying, “what the hell is he talking about?”  I still haven’t found a way to end that one successfully.

The easy stories, of which Mitzi’s Christmas Morning is one, involve a special relationship between the vision center of my brain and my fingers.  What I am doing, essentially, is watching the scene unfold with my eyes “inside of my brain” and then describing what happens to my audience.  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the words that I’m writing–I’ll fix any problems there during later rewrites and revisions.  Instinctive understanding and use of Point of View, is therefore critical to the story working.

I write for a number of reasons–to impress people, to attract or induce lust in members of the opposite sex, to give stories as presents, to make money, or just because there’s an idea inside my head that’s so cool that it has to come out.  I wrote this particular story because I wanted to start a tradition of writing a Christmas story each year to share with my friends and fans.

There are different ways to narrate a story–you can have the protagonist describe the action, that’s first-person.  You can describe what happens to a character in the third-person, but limit your descriptions to what the character would know–that’s third-person subjective.  If you limit that to only one character for the whole story, it’s called third-person limited.  There’s also third-person omniscient, which allows you to tell information that your character at the time couldn’t possibly know.

One of my favorite short-stories of all time is one written by Fritz Leiber in 1958 called Space-Time For Springers. It’s told from the point of view of a kitten with an IQ of 160.  Gummitch, the kitten, bounces around the house watching over the new baby, doing astrophysics in his spare time and trying to drink coffee so he can become human.  It’s a wonderful story–hopefully, those of you who are SF fans can find it in a collection somewhere.  It’s well worth the search.

So, clever idea of story from cat’s point of view and a need for a Christmas story–what’s not to like?  In Leiber’s story, the kitten had pet names for the humans.  (If I remember correctly, the woman of the house was called “Kitty Come Here”.)  I decided to copy that motif throughout the story, not only for the humans, but for the other animals around our house, too.

The plot was simple–kitty-cat discovers catnip under the Christmas tree and destroys it in an amusing fashion.  Ideal for a short-short–action, conflict, resolution in one narrative scene.  The job, then, was to try to get inside Mitzi’s head for an hour or two.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in non-human’s heads over the past couple years–disembodied souls installed in diamonds, rhyming fairies, gay werewolves–and I think the best way to do this is to find ways of thinking that are as good as human, but different.  (Not an original thought–John Campbell urged his Astounding authors to use this method to create aliens.)

With all the preliminary thinking done, it’s time to write.  I didn’t bother with an outline, but instead visualized waking up in Mitzi’s body and followed her through her Christmas morning rounds.  I have spent a lot of time with cats over the last fifty-plus years.  I know that they hate change, they’re attracted to things that move, some are territorial, and they have attention spans that would put the worst ADD sufferer to shame.  I tried to logically include as many of those characteristics in the story as I could as part of the narrative.  (I got used to seeing through animal eyes while working on the werewolf story–both of the guys in that were completely color-blind.)  As the story progressed, I focused on how the things in an ordinary household would appear to someone at floor level, but with a strong three-dimensional pouncing ability.

Since this was a Christmas card from the family, I included all of the cats that would be upstairs, as well as mentioning all of the people in the household.  It was a lot of fun thinking of characteristics and names for everyone.

The hardest part of the story, really, was the point-of-view switch at the end (and I’m not completely satisified with how that turned out, to be completely honest with you).  I went through two or three iterations of the last two paragraphs.  I had a problem, you see:  Since Mitzi was passed out, she couldn’t describe the final scene effectively, so I had to import a new character to observe–that’s one of the problems with third-person limited.  I could have switched to a completely human perspective for this, but decided instead allow the narrator to still be in “cat-mode” to avoid a jarring wrench out of the rest of the story.

Josh, I hope this answers your question sufficiently.  If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please ask.