A Tough Editing Decision

The most recent issue of One Story magazine (issue #166) showcases the story World's End by Clare Beams. Below are two versions of a short excerpt from the story. One version is exactly as it is published. The other version, I've altered. I'm wondering if you can guess which one is the version actually published.

To set the scene, Robert Cale, a wealthy businessman, is talking to an architect he's hired and is meeting for the first time.

Version one:

"What I want to do is put up houses. Sell them. People said I should talk to somebody before I bring in the builders, so we put everything in the right place. You're younger than I thought."

Version two:

"What I want to do is put up houses. Sell them. People said I should talk to somebody before I bring in the builders, so we put everything in the right place." Then, with no audible pause, "You're younger than I thought."

I'm assuming Clare Beams (or her editor) recognized both versions were possible, and I'd guess Clare (or her editor) thought long and hard about which version was preferable. The second version tells you that there's "no...pause" between two sentences, but by adding the words that tell you there's no pause, the story pauses. I see a conflict between what the text says and what the story does.

If you don't believe me, then try this third version, which I definitely made up:

"...so we put everything in the right place." Then, he didn't pause at all, he just went right on talking with no hesitation, no delay, no amount of time spent being silent between words... nope, he just went on to his next sentence and you couldn't have blinked twice in the time between his previous and his next sentence: "You're younger than I thought."

You see the problem.

I also wonder about the word "audible" in "no audible pause." Why not just "Then, with no pause..."? A pause in dialogue can be only heard. It can't be smelled or seen or tasted. Imagine the author writing "Then, with no smellable pause..." Ridiculous. So I wonder if "no audible pause" in this case contains a redundancy.

By now you've probably guessed that version two, with the spelled-out lack of an audible pause, is the one the author or editor chose. I wish I knew why. The only argument for it I can think of is to prepare the reader for a change in the subject of Robert's dialogue. It's a sudden change. Version one above might surprise readers enough that they'd have to re-read that bit. So I can see the need for something to mark the transition. But why "Then, with no audible pause..."? Why not "Then he changed the subject." or "His eyes narrowed as he added," or something much better written than either of these suggestions? There has to be a better "beat" available than one that blatantly contradicts itself, especially since self-contradiction plays no role in the story, thematically or otherwise.

See what happens when you take editing seriously? I can't just read stories anymore, I have to play around with the parts that bug me.

Second Person POV, part 1

Second person point of view gets a lot of bad press. The most positive opinion I've seen of it in print suggested second person POV is an especially distant form of first person, where the author uses "you" instead of "I" as the pronoun for the POV character. That argument makes a lot of sense if you're talking about the bored, hard partying, thoroughly disconnected protagonist of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, one of very few novels ever written in second person. The "you = distant I" theory doesn't work so well for other second person stories, like one I've discussed in a previous blog entry: Pam Houston's "How to Talk to a Hunter." 

I find second person interesting because hardly anybody will admit to liking it, yet it never goes completely away. The obvious objection to second person is that the author seems to be writing from the viewpoint of the reader, but that objection doesn't make sense in many cases. If a story begins, "You are the new breed: an eight-year-old with a Ph.D. in mathematics and an affinity for soul music," clearly the author's not writing from the reader's point of view. In fact, the only time I've ever seen second person used to represent the reader is in those old Choose Your Own Adventure books.  (Yes, there are new CYOA books out there, but I mean the ones that made you roll dice while fighting monsters. Anyway...)

I can't find a second person POV story that's ever been published in a magazine with strong editorial standards that would be improved by changing the POV. The latest one I've read is "You, On a Good Day" by Alethea Black. This story is in issue #163 of One Story magazine. It starts by talking about an unhappy protagonist with a strong sense of restraint:

You don't give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively...

The story goes on to list many, many things "you" don't do today, and sometimes, why "you" don't do them. The reader learns a great deal about "you" and "your" life up to that point as it lists things "you" don't do. About two-thirds of the way through, the story shifts to the positive:

On this day, you wake up and remember the sight of your four-year-old nephew aiming all of his fire trucks at the television during the coverage of the California wildfires because he wanted to help.

This story could have been written as "I don't do this, I don't do that," and then "Instead I do this, and I do that," and it could have worked. But I think the protagonist would have come across as the most self-obsessed narcissist this side of Narcissus himself. 

The story could have said "She doesn't give the finger..." and "On this day, she wakes up and remembers..." That might have worked. But I think the story's effect would have been less immediate, and possibly more annoying, because at some point readers would expect to learn a name, or be given a reason not to know the name, and I doubt I'd have liked the story as much. Using the second person here lets the author write about self-obsession without annoying the reader. 

The magazine's web site (www.one-story.com) has a short interview with the author, and the author is asked about the second person POV choice, and she says the story came out of a talk she was giving herself at one point, when she was presumably talking to herself like "You shouldn't do this, you should do that." I can see that kind of thinking in her story, and I think it works.

I think at least 99% of good fiction would fail if it were converted to second person. However, I believe second person works in extremely rare circumstances, and in those circumstances, nothing else will achieve the effect you're going for.

Read any good second-person stories lately? Which ones? 

Creative narration in "Girls Only"

I subscribe to the magazine One Story, and I particularly liked the piece featured in issue #157: "Girls Only," by Karen Shepard. Shepard weaves a narrative spell by using a definitely non-standard point of view. The story's about a group of young women who became friends more or less because no one else wanted to become friends with them. They're kind of rotten to each other, but the story admits they don't know how else to get along. 

Anyway, this excerpt might make you think the story uses standard, everyday third-person omniscient POV:

They watched some more, all of them thinking some very unbridesmaidly things, some of them ashamed of themselves and some of them not.

But I say this story uses something else. The narration seems, too often, to come from inside the characters, or inside a character who's just like the main characters but is not one of them. Consider this:

"The playground," Anna repeated. "What was he doing there?"

"Playing?" Cleo suggested.

Sometimes Anna hated Cleo, she really did.

See? That's more attitude than you usually get from third-person omniscient. Plus, the narrator is not omniscient, as we see here:

"Where've you been?" Ticien asked, as if she already knew, and maybe she did. She was more like Cleo than any of the others.

At key points in "Girls Only," the narration can be more judgmental than the characters (which is saying something), but it can also be more sympathetic. The narrator, if it were a person, might be a better friend to these women than they are to each other, and I think that's a difficult, effective, and interesting trick to pull off. It certainly makes "Girls Only" into a kind of story it could never have been had it used a much more standard approach to point of view, at least in my opinion.

Have you read this story? Do you agree with me, or do you think something else is going on?