The One that Fits

By: Andrea Ouellette

When it comes to writing, whether that be writing songs, poems, novels, or short stories, it can often be difficult to write something original. After all, everything has been done before. Thirty seven times. And that’s just since the turn of the century. 

 We’re taught not to write in clichés but what is one to do when everything has become a cliché? Writing about love is so overdone. And loss? Well that’s just drab. We have gotten to a point in history where we are so desperate for an original plot line that we are mixing things like pride, prejudice and the undead. Jane Austen would probably shove a tiny tea spoon through her eye if she ever came back as a walker, may God forbid it.  

Perhaps writers are straining a little too much for originality and ignoring the fact that there are simpler ways to make a piece original and authentic. It was only recently that I began to really pay attention to the detail of point of view in my own writing and as I gave it a second look, I realized that point of view can turn a complete failure of a story into something worth the ink from your printer. Don’t get me wrong, Twilight could have been written from a million different points of view (something poor Stephenie Meyer tried) and it still would not have won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It would not even have been long listed, or even considered to be long listed. But you get the point.  

For inspiration on point of view, I didn't have to reach very far on my bookshelf: my favourite novel, The Great Gatsby, is a perfect example of the importance of point of view. Fitzgerald made Nick Carraway his first person narrator, rather than one of the main characters of the plot. If Gatsby had been the narrator, or even Daisy, the novel would perhaps never have been the success that it is today. It would never have been a forced read in high schools and we never would have gotten to witness Leonardo Dicaprio throwing cashmere sweaters about his room, makin' it rain like Fifty Cent. By using a minor character as a first person narrator, Fitzgerald achieved an original telling of a love story that could not have been told, fully, otherwise.  

Another great example of the importance of choosing the right narrator is Emma Donoghue’s Room. The entire novel is told from the point of view of a five year old boy, who is stuck in a room with his mother, who was kidnapped six years before. When I first read this novel for a class, many people complained about the narrator because they thought it was tedious to read his descriptions of things when all he was really talking about was a window. It is exactly that however, that made the novel so powerful; its narration. There are probably hundreds of books about kidnapping in your local Indigo or Chapters, but Donoghue made hers original and authentic by creating a narrator that saw the world in such a naïve and sheltered way that readers experience it in a much more raw fashion.  

In the case of these two novels, the authors’ choices of narration were the difference between being bestsellers and being those books in the five dollar book section (which has treasures of its own, of course). So next time you feel like you have a good story or a good character that you aren’t quite ready to let go of, think of narration. Sometimes you have to try on a few cashmere sweaters before you find the one that’s worth wearing.