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Switching point of view; Should I use one space or two after a period?ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Published: March 23, 2010  Brandi Reissenweber
First person has a flexibility that a lot of writers don’t consider. Sure, you have some parameters. Your narrator can’t, for example, know with certainty what another character thinks and he can’t witness what happens at a dinner party he doesn’t attend. Still, you can reach outside one character’s experience when writing in first person. You just need to get creative.
One option is first person serial point of view, where you give a series of first person perspectives throughout the novel. You might section this off by chapter, switching to a new first person narrator at each chapter break. The first and final chapters of Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter are from the perspective of Dolores Driscoll, the woman driving the school bus when it swerved off the road and plunged into the icy water, killing many of the town’s children. Other characters narrate the intervening chapters: Billy Ansel, who lost his children in the accident, Mitchell Stephens, a negligence lawyer who comes in from out of town to stir up a law suit, and Nichole Burnell, a young girl who survived the accident. This approach works well to tell the town’s story in the aftermath of this loss.
Another option is to let your first person narrator speculate or imagine in a way that brings other characters’ experiences to life. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex is narrated by Cal, an intersex character who tells his own story as well as a larger story that reaches across generations. Cal is the sole narrator, but quite a bit of the story happens before his birth. While those sections are in third person, the understanding is that Cal has imagined his way into these moments. This can be a bit of a leap for the reader, but if you craft the voice and environment so that the writer can willingly suspend disbelief, you can show moments outside the narrator’s personal experience and stay true to the point of view strategy.
This same approach can also be used in a more limited way. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, the first person narrator, Nick Carraway, imagines his way into the moment when Gatsby and Daisy shared their first kiss. He wasn’t there, but he’s clearly thought about it and he makes it a vivid scene for the reader.
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Q: I need help settling this disagreement with a friend: One space or two after a period?
These days, you only need one space after a period at the end of a sentence. The confusion arises, however, because the rule used to be two. Why the change? Technology, of course. On most typewriters, every character took up the same amount of space. The letter “l” had the same width as the letter “w.” The same was true for punctuation. So, two spaces after a period created a much needed visual break. On computers, however, characters are proportional. That letter “l” is narrower than the letter “w.” So, an extra space at the end of the sentence doesn’t help make the text any more readable. Most style manuals agree on this point, but some state that either choice is right. Still, for your manuscripts, it’s best to stick to the convention for published work, which is one space.
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Brandi Reissenweber teaches fiction writing and reading fiction at Gotham Writers' Workshop and authored the chapter on characterization in Gotham's Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Phoebe, North Dakota Quarterly and Rattapallax. She
was a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for
Creative Writing and has taught fiction at New York University,
University of Wisconsin and University of Chicago. Currently, she is a
visiting professor at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Send your questions on the craft of creative writing to writingquestions@writermag.com. All of Brandi's other Q&A columns are available to registered users. |
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