Challenging Writing — Challenge Your Initial Assumptions, Then Write!

Challenging Writing — Challenge Your Initial Assumptions, Then Write!

                                                –by Robert W. Walker

We hear all sorts of advice about a writer should do this and should do that with regard to point of view.  Have you heard that you should keep to a point of view that is “close” to precisely who you are?  That is the ultimate in saying “Write about what you know” since you know your point of view.  It says if you are male, write from a male POV, if female then a female POV.  If black, if white, if green…if Christian, if Muslim, if your faith is Heavy Metal…etc., then you should stick like glue to what you are; that your narrative voice and the tense you choose, and the choice of vocabulary and whether to use first, second, or third person–all of it ought to reflect who you are and keep safely to your world view and psychology and nature.  All very comfy advice.  However, serious writing involves and demands you get OUT of your comfort zones.  Did Mark Twain remain of one voice in all his writings?  Steinbeck?  Great authors challenge themselves and sometimes go down in flames, but out of the challenge comes some fantastic work.

Let’s slow this down and back up a moment:

Present Tense first person is not the same as present tense third person, no more so than past tense first person is the same as third person past tense.  Nor is second person present tense the same as second past tense.  Tense refers to the time clock (verb tense is verb time).  In short, the action and sometimes the first person speech is happening NOW or THEN.  Present is now, first person is use of “I-me-my-mine” as your narrator.  Past is then, third person is use of a third party as your narrator.  Often the story dictates which is best to take on for THIS story.  Often a chapter in, you have some idea which dictate is stronger, and often it has to do with your comfort zone.

When I began writing police procedurals and crime novels, I decided early on that a cop-like VOICE would narrate my medical examiner serial killer chase books, and the voice would have an edge to it yes, but it would also be intelligent.  This meant a good vocabulary and not a “gumshoe voice” but rather one in keeping with a medical examiner for instance who would of necessity be highly educated.  A voice that reflected the complexity of the character and life itself; a voice with a literary flare in fact.

Early on I demanded of myself to write from various POVs in a multiple POV novel, that when needed I could be flexible enough to enter the mind of a Latino working on the back of a garbage truck and a black executive who worked on Wall Street.  A Cuban detective in Havana, a Hawaiian newspaperman in Maui, a Hindu ship’s captain in India, a Catholic minister in London.  In every case, it was a challenge.  In every case, it was worth the effort to rise to the challenge.  Cuba Blue is a great example — a female Havana cop working with hands tied by her own governmental bosses in a Communist world and all she wants is to resolve a triple-murder case.  Setting and character were a challenge–talk about writing to your opposite.  But that is the challenge I throw at the feet of my students who claim they want to write:  Write to your Opposite.  You don’t always have to do so, but you very well should stretch and challenge the ultimate writer inside.  Those students who come to my classes and write about their safe little worlds and their safe friends and their safe cozy zones are not challenging themselves.  The student who sits down and writes a short story from the POV of a child in a Third World Country is going to have to work.  A student who sits down and takes on the challenge of another time zone takes a great risk, but the results are spectacular for her personally.  A student who takes on another time zone is better off than one who remains in his time zone.  A student who makes the effort to predict the future and set a story in a future world is–even in the worst of writing–at least posing a challenge to himself.  Telling the story from the opposite gender, another race, another culture, another world view.  These are students who will go on to continue learning and writing.

A recently overheard remark at some writers get-together had a panelist telling her audience that a writer can’t do justice to his or her opposite.  This is NONSENSE and pure garbage and not useful advice at all.  A writer has to be flexible and capable of playing all the parts, especially in a multiple POV novel.  There are single POV novels that are genius and wonderful–such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye and are a challenge in that the author must create a first person voice that a reader will wish to listen to for some 300 pages or more–same voice!  What a challenge!  Third person multiple POV presents its own challenges (more attention than ever needed in transitions between pov shifts, time shifts, geography shifts).  What is not challenging is writing about characters all from the same cookie-cutter corner of a single place as in the worst writing I find of young people who zero in on telling stories only of their small cosmos and handful of acquaintances.  Certainly, I had a leg up on writing outside my skin just by growing up in Chicago, but Steinbeck was not a Mexican and yet he crafted wonderful Mexican characters.  Twain was not all of his characters but rather drew from the incredible array of characters he found from his childhood and through the Gilded Age.  Hemmingway believed in living life and writing from experiences one had.  I concur, but there’s also research and learning and interviewing.  There are many ways to step out of that comfy zone and dare to challenge yourself as a writer, as a learner, as an artist.  I challenge you to do so.

Cuba Blue is a Kindle book.  Find it on Amazon.com  This is my only collaborative effort and my co-author is a fantastic lady named Lyn Polkabla of Atlanta, Georgia.

Rob Walker

www.robertwalkerbooks.com