Perspective
These are hellebores, from my garden. Lovely aren’t they? That astonishing velvety almost-black one in the middle is helleborus niger. Now, to see the hellebores in their natural state, on the plant, you’d have to stretch out on your back under the shrubbery, which is not fun in March, with slugs and damp and inquisitive dogs and cats trampling you – so I pick the downward drooping flowers and float them in water so all their delicate complexity is exposed.
Do you feel a metaphor coming on?
Good. Some stories are like hellebores. You have to really play with perspective to make them work. As an editor, most of the stories I see are like mid-range snapshots – reasonable clarity in the foreground and background and a good idea who the focus of the picture is. But that gets boring. Sometimes we want close-ups of an old woman’s face or panoramas of life in the subway or fish-eye images of the skyline of New York. If you tend to always take the mid-range approach, look at the hellebores and try to bring one of your stories out from under the shrubbery.
4 Comments
LMD
29th March 2007An astute image and metaphor for our writing, and I have actually printed this blog entry and posted it on the wall I face as I write, but I’m unsure in more concrete terms what you’re driving us to think about. Are you suggesting that a change in POV character might be just the trick we need to bring a story to life? Or that the message of the story is found not with the main character, but in a supporting role?
Maybe it’s just me, but I know this is an important concept, but just how to use it eludes me.
Help?
Kay Sexton
30th March 2007What I’m saying is that too many writers don’t either focus in closely, or draw back to give us the grand vista. Their work is life-sized, well-framed, crisp and rather anonymous.
Innovative perpective is about focusing on somebody’s feet as they talk, or the sunset that is the backdrop to a car crash. Superb users of perspective are JG Ballard (unsurprisingly) and Willa Cather, the first for cinematic jump shots and the second for evolving landscapes of emotion.
What I wish I saw more of as an editor, is some evidence that writers have looked at their story from above, below and sideways, before fixing their perpective.
LMD
30th March 2007Yes, that makes sense, but to do this seamlessly will take patience and a lot of work on the part of the writer. I doubt this is a skill mastered easily.
So much more worth the effort, yes?
Thanks!
Vanessa G
3rd April 2007I think a useful exercise is to take a short scene and rewrite it from as many different perspectives as you can.
From the person themselves (if its in third)… and so on.
But also.. if the piece is an intense exchange between two people… rewrite it only using body language. No speech., it kind of stretches you breadth of vision?
things like that.
vanessa