Author Brigid Amos
talks about choosing the best point of view for her protagonist, Ruthie, in A Fence Around Her, a Young Adult Historical novel.
One of the biggest
decisions a writer makes when she begins a new story is choosing a point of
view (POV). There are many ways to define POV, but I like to think of it as the
means by which the writer guides the reader through the story and what she
allows the reader to see, hear, and know. It is as if the reader arrives at a
theater to watch a performance, and the writer is the usher who shows the
reader to his seat. But the seat isn’t necessarily in the audience. Sometimes,
it’s inside the head of one of the characters, sometimes, it is even inside the
writer’s head. Where the reader sits will completely affect how he experiences
the story. The usher can move the reader around during the performance, but
must do so in such a way that he does not get confused and lose track of the
story.
When I first started
writing, I gravitated toward an omniscient point of view, or so I thought. I
wanted to tell the reader what everyone was thinking and feeling, as if I were
a camera floating about a scene, but one that could also dive in and out of
characters’ heads at will and somehow record their thoughts. I think this
tendency to the omniscient POV is very common among beginning writers. For me,
it was probably an effect of being steeped in classic literature. But the
problem was that I was not writing in a true omniscient POV. Instead, I was
“head hopping,” that is, changing POV from one character to another and
completely confusing the reader. I learned early on that if I were going to
write in third person, I had to stick to one character for an entire chapter or
at least an entire section. In this way, I could write in a close third person
POV without getting into too much literary mischief.
When I started
writing A Fence Around Her, I so
strongly identified with my protagonist Ruthie Conoboy, that I naturally
switched my usual close third person POV to first person POV. Ruthie tells her
story directly to the reader, and when the reader comes to my theater, I seat
her right there in Ruthie’s head so that she can look through Ruthie’s eyes and
hear with Ruthie’s ears. When I was writing, I felt that I was Ruthie writing
the story as if in a journal or diary. People always ask me if I journal. When
I was studying for my Master's degree years ago, I bought myself one of those
cute little fabric covered blank books and dutifully filled the pages every
day. Then I stopped, because frankly, journaling wasn’t as fun for me as it is
for others. The strange thing is that when I write in first person, it feels as
if I am journaling, but I’m doing it in character. And when I’m journaling from
the point of view of one of my characters, it is most certainly fun!
 |
A Fence Around Her
By Brigid Amos |
Can a girl
break free from her mother’s past?
About the book:
Having a mother with
a past is never easy. For Ruthie Conoboy it becomes the struggle of a lifetime
in 1900, the year Tobias Mortlock arrives in the gold mining town of Bodie,
California. Ruthie is suspicious of this stranger, but her trusting father
gives him a job in the stamp mill. Soon, Ruthie suspects that her mother and
Mortlock have become more than friends. Can Ruthie stop this man from
destroying her family?
Excerpt:
When I left the house that day to go to
the Sawdust Corner Saloon to fetch my father, the day we met Tobias Mortlock,
my mother was still lying in bed moaning as if from a mortal wound and
threatening to do herself harm. While I was gone, she had gotten up and tried
to console herself by working on her latest landscape. But something had gone
wrong, for when we came through the front door into the parlor, we found my
mother slumped on the floor. Her silk dressing gown lay in folds around her and
her blond curls stuck to her head in a multicolored array. Little pots of oil
paint were scattered across the floor dribbling the last of sky blue, forest
green, and yellow ochre onto the Persian rug.
“Lilly, what have you done?” My father
reached down and lifted her to her feet, then walked over to where the easel
lay collapsed on the floor and righted it also. He peeled the wet canvas from
the rug and set it on the easel, then stepped back to have a look at it.
Somewhat distracted by the bits of red
fuzz from the carpet embedded in the wet paint, I fixed my eyes on the canvas,
trying to sort out the swirls of color into a cohesive image. My mother waited silently
for our verdict. She seemed, in that moment, as fragile as a sparrow. I was
relieved when my father broke the silence with his jovial critique.
“Why Lilly, it is the spitting image of
Mono Lake. Yes, here are the islands in the center, and here the mountains
rising up in the background. It is quite an impressive site, just as we saw it
that day.” Two summers before, my father had taken us on a trip to the lake on
the narrow gauge railroad that brought us firewood from the lumber mill on its
southern shore. I remember how much my mother enjoyed that rare outing, saying
over and over that the lake reminded her of the San Francisco Bay.
“It’s a fine painting, Mother,” I said.
She moaned.
“What was that, Lilly?”
“No, Father, she didn’t say anything.
She only made a sound.”
“Not good enough!” Mother wailed. Her
sticky, colorful curls quivered like bunting in a light breeze.
“That’s not true, dear,” my father
said. “You are a fine artist. It’s these fools in this town who don’t
appreciate it. Look around at all the beauty in this parlor! Every day, I come
home and think, who else has so many beautiful works of art on their walls?
Maybe just Leland Stanford, Randal Hearst, and me.” He reached out to brush
back her sticky hair. She slapped his arm away, smearing paint on the cuff of
his sleeve.
“I’m not talking about the stupid
painting," she said. “It’s me. I’ll never be good enough, not in Bodie.”
“Of course you are. I married you,
didn’t I?”
At this she let out a wild scream and
shook her head as if fending off a swarm of bees. Oil droplets sprayed in all
directions, and I looked out the window to see if anyone could have heard.
Mortlock had long moved on, and the street was deserted.
My mother stopped shaking and
screaming, but she was still furious. “I am so sick of hearing about how you
did me this grand favor by marrying me. If you’d wanted to do something for me,
you would have taken me away from this awful place. You would have taken me
somewhere people didn’t know me, where I could have been a regular woman.”
My father looked at the paint-spattered
rug. “Ruthie, why don’t you go in the kitchen and start boiling water. I think
your mother needs a bath.”
As I lit the stove and poured water
into pots, I could hear their voices in the parlor, still going back and forth
as they always did. Hers was like a mournful violin, his like a jolly French
horn hopelessly out of step with the violin. Together they made a dissonant
sound like musicians trying to play a duet, but each playing a different piece
of music. And it never mattered what they were playing since it was always a
variation on the same theme.
Buy the book:
About Brigid Amos:
Brigid Amos’ young
adult historical fiction has appeared in The
MacGuffin, The Storyteller, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Words of Wisdom. A produced playwright,
she co-founded the Angels Playwriting Collective and serves on the board of the
Angels Theatre Company. She is also an active member of Women Writing the West
and the Nebraska Writers Guild. Although Brigid left a nugget of her heart
behind in the California Gold Country, most of it is in Lincoln, Nebraska where
she currently lives with her husband.
Connecting with
Brigid:
