Writers often struggle with whether to tell a story through the lens of one or many characters. Multiple point of view (POV) can be tricky to master, but there are several reasons it can be very effective. Rather than go with your gut, consider if your intentions align with these considerations when making a choice.

First, a multiple POV approach can result in a rich characterization, because readers experience characters from both inside and out – at times from their thoughts and feelings and at times when other characters reflect on them. If you have an unreliable, complicated, or defensive narrator, you might benefit from this approach. A great example of such in-depth characterization is Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. By having Mrs. Dalloway’s interiority interlaced with others’ view of her, we get a more nuanced and multifaceted sense of her personality.

Second, because point of view refers to the consciousness through which we see and understand the events of a story, a multiple POV approach can offer the reader competing interpretations. In Atonement, by Ian McEwan, the shifting POV gives varying perspectives on the events of a single day that changes the lives of the characters forever, in a kind of collective understanding.

Perhaps your aim is to reveal different facets of a given world, the way Tom Wolfe skewers social class and politics in 1980s’ New York City in Bonfire of the Vanities. Varied walks of life and a chorus of voices can create a kind of kaleidoscope effect and capture a society as a whole. In my most recent novel, THE STARK BEAUTY OF LAST THINGS, I wanted to tell the story of the coastal area of Montauk, Long Island, an elegy of sorts, and the characters profoundly in love with that place. I wanted to suck in everything–the world of fishing, of landscape painting, land use, and every aspect of nature. Each of my point of view characters contributes a different kind of knowledge to create what I hope is a larger whole.

Multiple POV is especially successful in combating a lecturing tone in fiction that deal with controversial themes and issues. As different characters espouse different values or sides of an issue, the reader engages with these debates as well. In Her Sister’s Tattoo, by Ellen Meeropol, a conflict between two sisters and their warring views animates the story and challenges to reader to choose sides as well. In my novel each character has a slightly different relationship to the land, whether it represents beauty, spiritualty, heritage, or a resource to be bought and sold. Multiple points of view allowed me to explore various themes through the thoughts and opinions of a variety of characters and come at issues from contrasting angles.

It can be a challenge to manage the plot and timeline in a multiple POV novel, but it’s worth the effort if your aims and material align with any of these four reasons.

I love writing setting, but I do so from instinct. In preparing for the lesson, I realized that beyond an awareness that setting is meant to draw the reader into the world of the story, I hadn’t really considered its function in a methodical way. I turned to some craft books for help (see resources below) and came away with an increased appreciation for what setting can provide.

First, a definition: Setting is the environment in which your fiction or memoir takes place. It establishes the time, place, and overall frame and context of your story. It’s time period, social climate, and customs. When done expertly, setting can:

• Connect the story’s elements
• Build meaning  
• Elicit an emotional response in the reader
• Help readers visualize and invest in the story
• Reveal character
• Reveal theme

Setting and Genre

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to setting. How large a role it should play in your work depends on the type of book you’re writing and the specifics of your story.

• Setting as Character. If your setting involves an interaction between place and people, affecting the characters as much as they affect each other, then its role is crucial. Think Moby Dick.
• Setting as Destiny. Does your novel’s environment condemn your characters to a certain fate, as is often the case in science fiction or fantasy Think The Hunger Games.  Here, world-building is essential.
• Setting as History. Historical fiction writers also must rely heavily on setting to make an unfamiliar past come alive for the reader. Think Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
• Setting as Backdrop or Narrative Element. Perhaps you have a courtroom drama, where the courtroom can be located in any big city. Or perhaps your novel is about a close relationship, where the same dynamics would be at play whether the characters are in rural Tennessee or Chicago. If the situation, conversations, and action could occur in any number of places, setting can play less of a role.

Using Setting to Do More

You may find, as I did, that you aren’t availing yourself of some of the ways setting can be extra powerful:

• Reveal Character: How your characters respond to your setting will tell the reader more about them. What if your character finds a small rural town stifling and backward Or instead, charming That tells the reader something about the character’s attitudes.
• Show Emotion: Use setting description to establish mood. Choosing words that convey an emotional tone (ominous joyful frightening?) will deepen the reader’s connection to the story.
• Create Complication: Characters’ different responses to setting can set up conflict or tension and even action. Perhaps the setting feels welcoming to one character but terrifying to another: One wants to stay, while the other is eager to run away.
• Show Backstory: A setting in the past can have great significance to a character.
• Anchor the Reader: A sentence of description in the first paragraph or two of each chapter helps orient the reader to where they are in the time and place of the story.

 A few takeaways:

• Setting description should be intentional and integral. There’s as much danger in providing too much as too little. Don’t load up on details just because you can.
• Distribute setting details in small amounts throughout your story to avoid slowing the pace.  

 Resources:

• A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting: How to Enhance Your Fiction with More Descriptive, Dynamic Settings by Mary Buckham 
• Technique in Fiction (2nd edition) by Robie Macauley and George Lanning   

Fiction Award

The festival awards prizes in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. I was thrilled to learn I won the first-place fiction award, based on the first chapter of my current novel, set in Montauk. I’ll be attending the fiction workshop virtually this year. In years past I found the workshop enormously valuable.

Focus on Literacy

The event typically includes special programming for children and teens, panels by best-selling and emerging authors, culturally diverse programs, a poetry venue, and exhibitor booths. The Festival’s mission is to improve literacy rates among children and adults in Southern Arizona. Since its creation, the Festival has donated over $1.65 million to agencies that improve literacy in the community.

Tucson is a beautiful and cultural city. I loved walking around and noticing all the styles of housing, and the brilliant, lush foliage.

My research for this novel has been extensive, but in creating fiction I need to rely most on my imagination. I need to know enough for verisimilitude but not so much that the flow of creativity shuts down. I don’t want inaccuracies in my work, but I chafe at being overly bound to facts. For me, for the fiction to feel vital, my mind needs to simply wander into whatever avenues seem right for the story I’m making up. I don’t know if others work this way, especially those who write true historical fiction, but for me it’s a strange and peculiar balance.

Southampton Writers’ Conference

BookEnds: Reading

4:30 pm

Set on the lovely campus of Stony Brook Southampton, in Shinnecock Hills, the conference was virtual this year. I read from my novel-in-progress set in Montauk.

I spent days wandering Dorset and surrounding Dorchester countryside and coastal areas that influenced Hardy.

Above is the magnificent Lulworth Cove, where Hardy’s character, Frank Troy, allegedly disappeared in Far From the Madding Crowd.

A recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliams Museum in Cambridge, of works inspired by Virginia Woolf’s writings, explored the relationship of landscape and feminism and importance of place to Woolf. The catalogue states: “Woolf’s writing acts as a prism through which to explore feminist perspectives on landscape, domesticity, and identity in modern and contemporary art.” It was in Cambridge that Woolf delivered the lectures that went on to become her most famous essay A Room of One’s Own.  

I’ve discovered many terrific books that touch on music in some way: Dana Spiota’s Stone Arabia, for its portrait of a singer/songwriter and his relationship to creativity, success, and self-invention; Nick Hornby’s music esoteria in High Fidelity; and Jonathan Coe’s weaving of music in the lives of working-class characters in The Rotter’s Club. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad includes a fascinating depiction of commercial music and the rock scene, while Pat Lowery Collins’ Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice brings us to 1770s’ Venice and inside an orphanage renowned for its musical program under Vivaldi’s tutelage. I loved Vikram Seth’s insights into playing in a quartet in An Equal Music, and Susan Segal’s Aria for its marvelous depiction of a diva.

But most of all, I love and am inspired by novels about music that allow me to feel I’m actually hearing the music, particularly those in which music serves as a catalyst for transformation. Here are my favorites:

An Evening of Brahms, Richard Sennett

A meditation on the experience of music – what it is to play, listen, or be moved by it. Here a teacher is thinking about Brahms’ piano quartet in C minor:

 A passage of dark harmonies then appears in the strings, six bars in which the players seem to be searching for a center, a place from which to begin. The piano does not help them; once more it rings out stark octaves but this time a tone lower…. Brahms forces the strings to repeat their figure of sighing and emptiness three times. These repetitions increase the tension; confusion is pushed to the breaking point by a string passage of even darker harmonies which do not resolve—and then all at once the piano and the strings push forward together as if in a rage, and the piece is launched.

Appassionata, Eve Hoffman

In this exquisitely written novel, Hoffman explores the role of art in a world of suffering and violence. Here she describes her character, a concert pianist, as she plunges into a performance:

She turns to the opening section of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, and forgets all else. The theme, with its rueful half-tones, compressed and repetitive like the circling of obsessive thought, the line curling and uncurling from itself, till it eventually expands into openness of major tones and wide arpeggios, pulls her into its vortex till there is nothing outside it.

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Opera arias are more powerful than the government in resolving a hostage situation in Patchett’s masterful novel. Here are the thoughts of a man at the moment he is first bewitched by opera:

Without opera, this part of himself would have vanished altogether. It was early in the second act, when Rigoletto and Gilda sang together, their voices twining, leaping, that he reached out for his father’s hand…. The pull they had on him was so strong he could feel himself falling forward out of the high and distant seats. 

In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust  

A phrase of a sonata by a fictitious composer Vinteuil haunts the narrator throughout Proust’s masterpiece. So important is this music to the novel that scholars have argued, since its publication 100 years ago, about Proust’s inspiration. From his own papers, it appears the music that triggered this memory was Camille Saint-Saëns’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Minor. This excerpt is from a scene at a private salon gathering where the narrator hears Vinteuil ‘s piece performed:

. . . suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils. . . . This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound.

 Nora Webster – Colm Toibin

An older woman begins to sing again, after decades, and finds solace, engagement, and a true haven in herself. Here she is experiencing her own voice:

 She did not know that her voice could be so deep; and whatever way Laurie was stretching out the notes, she found herself moving much more slowly than she had meant to. She had no trouble with her breathing and no fear now of the higher notes. She felt that the piano was controlling her and pulling her along…. She felt that she was singing into silence; she was aware of the silence as much as she was of the notes.

 Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexi

Alexi takes the magic of music to a new level in the form of an enchanted guitar belonging to bluesman Robert Johnson. At times the guitar talks or plays itself, and it triggers a magical musical odyssey for a misfit rock band. Here are samples of two different characters as they first try out the guitar:

Thomas picked it up, strummed the strings, felt a small pain in the palms of his hands, and heard the first sad note of the reservation blues…. [Victor] played that guitar like a crazy man, and chords and riffs and notes jumped out of that thing like fancydancers. If you looked close enough, you saw the music rising off the strings and frets.

The Soloist – Mark Salzman

This novel can be read as a striking duet between a cello teacher and his brilliant student. I love this metaphor Salzman uses of the sensation of the student’s playing:

Kyung-hee made the arpeggios sound like waves out in mid-ocean, gentle in appearance but with enormous power under the surface.

The Song Is You, Arthur Phillips

In Phillips’ novel, the narrator finds himself increasingly fixated on pop singer Cait O’Dwyer, and becomes a muse for her art. Phillips’s larger theme is how music works its magic on us, and manufactures longing:

 She sang through the laughter, holding the melody like an egg, her voice straining pleasantly, her smile broadening, her breathing heavier than in the demo’s thinner version…Cait had found another splinter of heartbreak.

I am grateful to all these authors as a reader and listener, for enhancing my appreciation for musicians and for music, and as a writer, for inspiring my own fiction.

Eleanor Frances Lattimore: Fair Bay

Like a painter using a few delicate brush strokes, Lattimore creates in this children’s book a rich, imagistic world from few words, illustrating the principal that less can truly be more. This is the first book I fell in love with. It made me a reader and instilled in me the desire to be a writer.

Proust: Remembrance of Lost Time

Proust is a master at depicting the way sensory experiences in the present evoke the past. His work inspires me to include details of taste, touch, sound, and smell as part of creating memory in all my characters.

Virginia Woolf: The Years

Woolf is unparalleled in depicting the interiority of her characters through her groundbreaking technique, interior monologue. She excels at making the economic and social details of her characters’ daily lives as dramatic as any action-packed fiction. She’s my go-to author for capturing my characters’ thoughts.

John Casey: Spartina

Casey’s evocation of place is unparalleled. His lush, evocative descriptions cast a spell over the reader, immersing us in new worlds. At the same time, his prose is spare, accessible, and direct – something to emulate!

Nadine Gordimer: Berger’s Daughter

Gordimer takes complicated political situations and illuminates them through the prism of the individual. Her work inspires me to situate my characters in history and social conflict in order to explore the intersection of the outside world and personal stories.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin, although written in 1899, still has much to say about the lives of women. It’s the story of Edna Pontellier, who comes to the realization that she wants more than a life as a wife and mother. But her awakening ends tragically, as remaking her life and bucking social expectations was simply not possible in those days. This novel was one of the first to question the role of women in society.

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather (1915). In some ways a self-portrait of Cather as an artist in the making, the heroine, Thea Kronborg, leaves her small hometown to go to the big city to fulfill her dream of becoming a pianist. Instead she discovers her true calling as a singer. The novel focuses on the qualities a woman of that time needed to pursue an artistic career and what she had to sacrifice to reach fulfillment and success.

While I Was Gone: Sue Miller (2000). Second chances and do-overs multiply in this layered novel. Jo Becker leaves her marriage for a bohemian life living under an assumed name, and then, after a tragedy, reinvents herself anew. But her past returns to threaten her happy marriage, and she is seduced by the possibility of yet another self and another life, imperiling everything that matters to her. A look also at pain and forgiveness, the novel asks what we owe ourselves and what we owe those we love.

The Doctor’s Daughter: Hilma Wolitzer (2007).  Beset by midlife malaise –caused by her languishing marriage, by the loss of her career as an editor, by her hapless son who is overly dependent on her – Alice Brill separates from her husband and embraces an affair. Alice has a second chance at love, at renewing her marriage, at helping her son to grow up, and at understanding her parents’ marriage and its impact on her life. The Doctor’s Daughter is that rare novel positing that women of later years can experience passion and fulfillment every bit as intense as younger women.

The Whole World Over: Julia Glass (2007) Greenie Duquette, a baker, frustrated by her husband’s midlife depression and by her own desires, impulsively accepts the offer to be a personal chef – halfway across the country and without her husband. What starts as a chance to expand her career becomes a second chance at a new life. Greenie sets in motion seismic changes in her marriage and encounters a new love, while in her absence her husband faces his demons and recharges his life as well. The Whole World Over is a celebration of a woman’s risk-taking while also showing the consequences of choices.

Amy Falls Down: Jincey Willet (2014).  Amy Gallup isn’t looking for a second chance at fame, but one comes to her anyway. She falls, hits her head on a birdbath, and gives a quirky befuddled interview that sets off a chain of events leading to literary fame and fortune. And it’s not just her writing career that takes off but her writing itself as well. Part biting satire of our sudden-celebrity culture and part a skewering of literary pretention, Amy Falls Down is also a profound look at loneliness and connection. Willet, one of the funniest writers you’ll ever read, gives one of the best depictions I’ve ever read on the experience of a woman of middle/late years living alone – alone, that is, except for the basset hound.