Don’t Judge Me By What My Characters Say Or Think.
Sometimes I get angry emails from readers because they think I am a racist or a sexist or because I have written other things that are not politically correct. This happens because they confuse the author with his characters. In this article, I explain where the difference lies.
The Third Person Limited perspective
When I write a novel, I first have to choose a narrative perspective. In my books, I use changing personal narrative perspectives.
This means that I write each scene from the point of view of a particular character.
At the beginning of each scene, I define the narrative perspective. So although I write the scene in the third person, it is shaped by the world view of the perspective character.
This character is then my narrator for the course of the scene, although the story continues to be told in the third person.
The Relationship Perspective Character / Author
As a writer, I don’t see myself as a narrator. I have my stories told by a fictional narrator who adopts changing perspectives.
I make sure that I don’t let my own opinion on the events told flow into the narrative. There is hardly anything more unpleasant than reading a book in which the author continually comments on what to think of the deeds of a character.
An example: The killer sneaked up on the woman from behind and rammed the knife into her back. Cowardly as he had always been, he would never have dared to approach her from the front. He always ambushed his despicable deeds.
Okay, we got it: The author describes a murder, but he wants to distance himself from the perpetrator. That may be understandable, but it makes the author himself look the way he describes the perpetrator — cowardly.
We cannot always distance ourselves from the actions and thoughts of our characters without sensitively disturbing the flow of the story. Above all, however, in this way, we tell the reader how to think about the events.
How to do it better: The killer sneaked up on the woman from behind and trembled with excitement. The thought of immediately extinguishing a life made him shudder pleasantly. What could be more divine than to be Lord over life and death? Without further hesitation, he rammed the knife into her back and gasped ecstatically as her hot blood poured over his hand. Her death cries were a symphony of her transience and his omnipotence.
To write like this, we must put ourselves in the killer’s head.
Many readers accuse the author, who can do that, of secretly thinking the same way as the character. How else could he immerse himself so deeply in the killer’s world of thought?
Well, I can assure you that I have no murder intentions, nor do I find it desirable to kill anyone. But people are capable of what we call a thought experiment.
As an author, I ask myself questions like: If I were a murderer — how would I think? What would I feel? How would I have to see the world in order not to despair of my actions?
These and similar questions allow me to put myself in my character’s shoes. What I then see, I reflect in the text without telling my own opinion.
Through this kind of narrative, we make ourselves vulnerable as authors and as human beings. But we have to endure that.
We owe it to art and the reader that we don’t spare ourselves. It is our job to make ourselves vulnerable. We have to give the story more space than our own moral ideas.
We can’t avoid being misunderstood, and we shouldn’t care.
The example of the killer shows how a reader can confuse us with our characters. This leads to reviews like: How sick do you have to be to write something like that?
But the attacks can be much more violent if one of the characters is a racist, a misogynist, or a pedophile.
If we write from the perspective of such people, we have to use their vocabulary. A racist will describe an Afoamerican as a nigger, a misogynist will call his boss a slut, and a pedophile will call the little girl next door a sweet temptation.
Reading a scene written from the perspective of such a character makes one angry. That’s understandable, and that’s precisely what the intended effect is. The reader should feel loathing, disgust, or horror when reading this scene.
As authors, we could make it easy for ourselves by basically telling such scenes from the first-person perspective. This would perhaps make it clear to many readers more quickly that it is not the author who is speaking, but the killer/racist/misogynist/child molester.
But using a different first-person narrator for each scene can be extremely confusing. That’s why I choose the personal narrative in the third person.
I take the risk that some readers may not understand because my story is always more important than me.
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