I spent hours last week researching different types of furniture, browsing everything from Art Nouveau tables to Post Modern chairs. Ask me about French armoires or Chinese zitans.
There’s no living room in my life right now. No empty corners an Edison Bulb Arc-Lamp might fit. No awkward wall space a Manteau Hat Rack could cover. I am, however, writing a story where the main character is an interior designer.
The trick in fiction (and in life) is to remember Point of View is more than a camera angle. Different characters experience the same world through a different lens. The goal isn’t to write about a character, but from within a character.
To most women, he’s not six foot three. He’s “tall enough to wear heels with.”
When you’re a teenager, it doesn’t take 35 minutes for your mom to drive you to the mall. It takes an entire Blink 182 album.
My interior designer might wake up calm as a chaise lounge but fall asleep feeling low as a Chabudia table.
“There was a time she could count on him. He’d be the velvet drapes in the study, protecting her from the August heat; ready to open the moment she needed light. He’d been reliable and reassuring like a storage ottoman, always creating more space than he took up. But as the year passed, and the winter catalogs arrived, she found he offered her as much back support as a bar stool.”
(I’m hamming it up here for the sake of example. You get the idea.)
Stepping within another person’s point of view is easier when they’re a fictional character. We know the Titanic is going down, but we don’t roll our eyes at Jack and Rose when the iceberg catches them by surprise. In books and movies, it’s often because we know more than the characters that we root for them. We adopt them as our own stupid children and eat popcorn while they learn things the hard way.
We’re less patient in real life. A friend told me recently she’d nicknamed one of her lovers, “Mr. Bugatti,” because, in the afterglow, he said her body, “drives like a Bugatti.” His point of view came from his love of luxury sports cars. To him, an aficionado, this was high praise. To her, a devastating insult. “Why would I want to be compared to a heap of metal and gasoline?” She viewed their time together as a picnic in the grass, not a race down the autobahn.
Another man she was seeing earned the nickname, “Coffee Guy.” She’d asked him to make her a second cup of coffee one morning while running late. He scoffed and asked, “What do I look like to you? A personal barista?”
It shouldn’t be lost on us here that both men earned titles based on their infractions. She didn’t mention anyone named, “Good-Morning Texter,” or, “Mr. Brings Me Flowers Just Because.” Perhaps her own past experience, or body of knowledge, makes it easier to categorize men by the moments they let her down.
If my interior designer described a lover, she might say:
“He exposed more wood than a Fauteuil chair!”
(sorry, had to)
When I wrote the non-fiction book, Productivity Is For Robots, I spent endless hours turning inward, trying to communicate and solve problems from my own point of view. One of the gifts of writing fiction this last year is that it forced my focus outward.
I don’t know if it’s made me more patient or understanding with others. But it’s been nice taking long breaks from myself and my limited body of knowledge.
The non-fiction writer sets out to solve problems, while the fiction writer seeks to invent them. And it’s by stepping within different characters you find the good ones.
II
There’s a scene in Mad Men I’ve always loved where Don says:
“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him.”
We can move forward, but the past still projects itself onto the future. Our body of knowledge keeps score. And our point of view keeps us all watching the same movie on slightly different screens.
Airlines and therapists have a word for the things we carry: baggage.
But I prefer the writer’s view: It’s all material and character development.
Whether you’re a writer or a character, feeling light as a love seat or heavy as a credenza…
What you bring into a room is what pushes the story forward.
Thanks for reading. If this made you smile or made you think, please forward it to a friend or share it on social media.
The temperature is calm as a chaise lounge. 🔥
-Corey
I got a real kick out of this essay as I'm prepping for NaNoWriMo by designing a house for my main character. She is a stylist so the world she created around herself plays big in the storyline. Sometimes I find it painful, looking at a sofa & loving it, then having to wrench myself away because "C' would prefer a different one. As an exercise to get into a character's head, it can't be beat.