There was a time when it seemed every work-in-progress that came into workshop was written from the POV of a naïf, which is to say the POV of a person who is innocent, usually with simple motivations, who looks out at the world as though for the first time, not having the right words for things and struggling to gain an understanding of the complexities of human motivation.
It’s a cool POV.
This approach creates a framework for an author to explain ordinary things in new ways. I recently saw a quick social media post where somebody (I’ve forgotten who!) said their child described pockets on clothing as “snack holes.” It’s the voice of somebody who doesn’t have the right words, but has a reason to love pockets, and the reason is made clear in the new name. Perfect!
Writing from a naïve POV at least appears to veer away from the old adage, “write what you know.” Though of course the author will most likely be familiar with the content, using a naïve character involves posing as though the speaker has less knowledge than many.
It involves reframing one’s perspective to a posture of writing as though you don’t know—your POV character doesn’t know—a lot of things, details, dynamics, maybe objects....
There’s suppressed knowledge involved. That’s where it can get tricky. Do we, writers, really want to hold back what we know? How do we convey the world beyond this suppressed knowledge or limited awareness? How do other characters tap into the larger perspective? When we think about somebody like Mr. Rogers, of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood…he often presented himself as staying close to a child’s worldview, while having enough composure and experience to convey more information with great care. Sometimes his character (he, himself) visited experts. These experts allowed room and range of voice, in the show, while still talking primarily to children and recognizing adults as “listening in.”
How much authority can we give our characters, before they become more of vehicles to convey information than complex people, on the page? How might a marine biologist or a data security expert convey deep knowledge, while remaining conversational and guided by perhaps base or human urges? And then the converse: how much information can we take away from a character’s body of knowledge, before any constructed innocence or ignorance becomes perhaps an annoying contrivance?
There’s no one answer to any of this, just a sea to navigate.
In Tom Spanbauer’s story, “Sea Animals,” (included in the post just before this one) he writes from the POV of a naive character, in the form of a child raised in the country, raised going to church, absorbed in the world of his family in a wide landscape of limited population, limited external influences. The child has not seen much of life, yet is working to make sense of birth, life and death—and himself—in a compressed timeframe, in close quarters. It really works.
One thing I like to do at times is approach this city where I live, where I’ve lived forever, as though I were a tourist. Tourists notice things that locals overlook. Tourists take on what locals might consider sappy, because of the way they are marketed to those who come to party, to visit—boat tours, horse and wagon, haunted houses, maybe drag shows, Chinatown, the rest of it, whatever isn’t one’s ordinary milieu, though may be for others—and stop to look at public art, window displays, reading placards and graffiti equally. At least, I do. These things, though “touristy,” can be amazing, honestly, in their own way, and their own stories, complete with revisions. They’re woven into the fabric of others, and through time, giving a version of history, of place.
Even Stonehenge can be seen as a cheap tourist trap, through the eyes of a local. When I was in England, years ago now, a British friend, born and raised in London, saw Stonehenge as “a dusty old place.” Ha! I love her for that. Of course, she also saw the annual IRA bombings during the holiday season as “one more reason to get your Christmas shopping done early, eh?” Her worldview was shaped by her city, a Londoner through and through.
A few days ago, a friend and I wandered into something called PROMSI. It was prom, for adults, held at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, OMSI.
Everyone else was dressed up in prom dresses with a few goths and clowns in the mix. We walked through as tourists, as journalists, as hikers. Somebody handed us a sample of hard cider. The line for prom photos was long. We headed out again, and walked over the Tilikum Crossing bridge, a foot and bike bridge, in the dark and streetlights, to look out over the city that has grown and fallen and made mistakes and is gathering itself again.
Recently, I took a walk from near Portland State to Burnside, through Portland’s bus mall. If you don’t know the city, this is to say that I walked through downtown on a street meant mainly for buses and public transit. I went to look particularly at sculptures I remembered from decades back, from a time when I rode a bus through downtown regularly, always moving from one job to the next. The day was cold and bright. I walked with a friend, an art historian. Some of the sculptures, installed to great public fanfare, are still there. Others have been removed. Some are smaller than I remembered. Artists have been forgotten or their work moved into the museum. Most have been written on with Sharpie. I saw a man draped in a bright purple blanket, standing alone on a grey day, in a way that was both eye catching and overlooked, a man falling through the cracks. I saw a sign on the door of a gallery; the owner had passed away. The gallery was full of amazing prints, history, the work of old anarchists, artists, and I wanted to break in just to get on the other side of the glass, to say goodbye. (Spoiler: I didn’t!) But we also ran into friends, artists, and we all hugged and laughed about nothing, and it was nice to have a mini reunion.
I saw an entire city block, buildings covered in stone and glass, sitting empty. Portland is ready for a new start.
Looking at a city as a tourist is to be both new and old, to have fresh eyes but also a wealth of information from other times, other sources, life.
The poet Richard Hugo has an essay (originally a lecture) called “Triggering Town.” In it, he writes:
The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time. At home, not only do you know that the movie house wasn’t always there, or that the grocer is a newcomer who took over after the former grocer committed suicide, you have complicated emotional responses that defy sorting out. With the strange town, you can assume all knowns are stable, and you owe the details nothing emotionally. However, not just any town will do. Though you’ve never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life. You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can’t understand, you feel is your town. In some mysterious way that you need not and probably won’t understand, the relationship is based on fragments of information that are fixed—and if you need knowns that the town does not provide, no trivial concerns such as loyalty to truth, a nagging consideration had you stayed home, stand in the way of your introducing them as needed by the poem. It is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk. Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem.
Hugo is talking about the line between our internal landscape and the external world, and how language can be personal, conveying so much more than information. It’s looking out that triggers the internal response, and in that nexus there’s a poem or a story.
How are you? Writing?
-Monica
PS—Short workshop! One morning, and hour and a half. I think you’d like it: Consider Audience, Shape Your Delivery - monicadrake