It’s a delicate thing, points of view. First, second, third, how do you want to tell the story? What do you want to convey? What do you want to keep from the audience? What do you want them to know? Points of view can be reliable or unreliable. They can be Godlike or antlike. There are many things to consider when you decide to tell a story.
What point of view should I use to tell the story of my Red Harvest re-imagining? At first, it was simple. I began writing it through the voice of a character called Jackie Meaux. A first-person account of a woman visiting a small town in Northern Louisiana, to visit the grave of her dead wife. So, I was writing about lesbians as a straight male.
I finished the first draft and a rewrite with this same point of view. It was probably two to three years of writing before I realized that maybe I shouldn’t be writing from this point of view. From the point of view of a black lesbian. I’m a straight white male. Now, I think the rules of writing are there are no rules. Write from whatever point of view you want to write from.
But it’s not that easy, is it? They say write what you know. “They” being everyone and their aunt who’s trying to sell a book to you about writing. Although vague and ambiguous, it’s not a terrible piece of advice. Write what you know. What do I know about black lesbians? I could write that, and it would be very little, and maybe I could get by with telling a good enough crime story.
But what would be so interesting about her, if I presented her with so little knowledge? Does a writer have to be an expert on every kind of character they write? I don’t think so, but there should be the allusion that the writer is an expert on his characters.
Still, I had serious questions about my choice in telling the story from the point of view of a black lesbian. So, what did I do? I rewrote it from another point of view. A whole new book. Same main character but in the third person. It would be one of many rewrites in which I chose to write from a new point of view.
And I still don’t know which one works. The only thing I do know is that maybe there are some points of view white men should just leave alone.
Josh Mayhall 