While preparing last month’s post with examples from Cutting for Stone, I was once again awed by author Abraham Verghese’s ability to help readers suspend disbelief. I mean seriously, the story’s opening 131 pages are devoted to the main character, Marion, sharing the circumstances of his own birth in amazing detail. Can you recall yours…at all?
As the novel continues, Marion serves as both a first-person protagonist and the narrator of events to which he was not privy. He even relates intimate moments between his parents from before his birth, even though his mother died in childbirth and his father took off, making it impossible for either of them to fill in these blanks.
You know darn well that if it were your manuscript, your critique group would have written “POV breach” written all over it. So how did Verghese pull off this narration—not only believably, but so successfully that his debut novel remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years?
Much of the craft here touches on “lampshading,” which refers to a variety of techniques that allow the author to preempt the reader’s anticipated accusations of implausibility.
1. Support believability with indisputable detail. From the first sentence of the prologue, Verghese is intentional in the way he delivers his narrator’s implausible perspective.
After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.
Who will argue with his knowledge of his mother’s womb, among so many other verifiable facts?
2. Share the narrator’s mission. Doing so substantiates the narrator’s presence as the necessary way to tell this story. At the end of Verghese’s prologue, Marion does so with these inspiring words:
What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother, Sister Mary Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning…
3. Admit that some of the tale is born of imagination. After a factual paragraph about Sister Mary Praise’s arrival from India—in her POV, a good seven years prior to Marion’s birth!—Verghese qualifies Marion’s narration by suggesting that some of his story is imagined:
In my mind’s eye I can see the novitiates lining the quay, chattering and trembling with excitement and emotion, their white habits flapping in the breeze, the seagulls hopping around their sandaled feet.
4. Reveal research. To support the reader’s suspension of disbelief, our narrator tells us how he traveled to Madras, where archived papers gave him a sense of his mother’s life in the convent.
5. Raise questions that inspired these imaginings. Here, our narrator is admitting he doesn’t know the whole tale:
Was she fearful? Did she have second thoughts?
6. Ease fully into each POV character through sensory detail. On the ship taking her to Ethiopia, Sister Mary Praise meets the surgeon who will become Marion’s father; later, she seeks his help with some shipmates suffering with fever. After she enters his cabin at the sound of his faint voice, the details given convince us of the POV shift:
When he tried to look at her, his eyeballs rolled like marbles on a tilting plate. He turned and retched over a fire-bucket, missed it, which didn’t matter, as the bucket was full to the brim.
…
As she gave him a bed bath, she was self-conscious, for she’d never ministered to a white man, or to a doctor for that matter. His skin displayed a wave of goose bumps at the touch of her cloth. But the skin was free of the rash she’d seen on the four passengers and the one cabin boy who had come down with fever.
Note, again, those specifics. Even while our narrator has withdrawn behind the curtain of story, he is still wooing our trust.
7. Insert perspective conservatively. A POV character who must comment on absolutely everything is an annoyance. He stands between you and the unfolding story action, waving and screaming, impeding your chance to observe and add up the story in your own mind. Verghese, wisely, has his narrator step forward only infrequently, and for good reason: to remind us that in his dual role as protagonist, Marion has the highest stakes in this story.
So at times when Marion’s involvement isn’t front and center, we’ll see moments of pulling back, such as this from p. 117:
The legend of our birth is this: identical twins born of a nun who died in childbirth, father unknown, possibly yet inconceivably Thomas Stone. The legend grew, ripened with age, and, in the retelling, new details came to light. But looking back after fifty years, I see that there are still particulars missing.
Try these techniques to give your protagonist access to events that will expand the narrative while keeping the focus on his relationship to them—even if, for the time being, his first-person voice has receded from view—without triggering the slightest blip in your reader’s suspension of disbelief.
How sensitive are you to POV breaches—have you ever wanted to set a book or manuscript down for these reasons? Would any of these techniques help your reader suspend disbelief for the story you want to tell? Have you used others not mentioned here?
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About Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. A freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com since 2006, Kathryn also teaches in Drexel University’s MFA program and runs a year-long, small-group mentorship program, Your Novel Year. Learn more on Kathryn's website.
Kathryn –
Excellent!
Thank you
Thanks for reading, Tom, you’re welcome!
Wow. This analysis is so helpful, and just proves rules can be broken if done right. I’m toying with similar “breaches”, and as usual I’m rife with insecurity. Great points. And, I really want to read this book after these last 2 posts!
I’m glad you found it useful, Ellen!
Rather than “rules,” I try to think of writing lessons as “ways to keep the reader engaged.” If you are equally loyal to the character’s goal and the reader’s needs, you’ll be in good stead.
Kathryn, I think only a masterful storyteller can pull off a feat like this. I was in sure hands from the beginning and the references to “legend” reminded of my family, how stories are told and retold and embellished with each person bringing their own imagination into it.
When there’s a breach of POV and I’m taken out of the story, it’s easy to put it aside. But a breach that spins you into the vortex is unputdownable. I’m not even aware of technique at that point. This is one of the reasons I love to re-read my favorite books. To see, how the masters did it. Thanks for a wonderful lesson.
Vijaya, you have such a lovely way of putting things. Love this: “But a breach that spins you into the vortex is unputdownable.”
We must not despair and think that only masters can wield these tools. If we study their use, our own prose will grow in confidence and mastery!
Thank you Kathryn. I am a novice novelist and soaking up everything. I love this writing life.
Once again a great post. Thanks, Kathryn. I loved CUTTING FOR STONE. I read it at a time when I needed to once again immerse myself in anything medical, missing my role as a maternity nurse. I have such amazing material from that experience, but still working to include it in my novel in ways that make it real, bring it to the page so that the reader wants more. Your ability to pull sections from that expansive novel illustrate so well the things writers can do.
I’m an easy sell for medical dramas. ;) It is at the intersection of life and death that we discover what makes life worth living—or what makes death the greater comfort. I look forward to seeing how you employ these wonderful stakes in your novel, Beth.
Thanks, Kathryn. When love enters the picture, when love is threatened or needs to be healed, the stakes rise. That’s life.
Wow, this is great stuff, Kathryn, and it breaks things down in a way I hadn’t considered before.
VERY helpful insights. Thank you!
You’re welcome Keith, my pleasure!
Great post, Kathryn. Carefully done “tricks” of POV and narration are also engaging ways to play with timeline, smoothly sliding between past, longer past, and present without losing the reader. Thanks for the insights.
Hi Christine, you wrote: “…smoothly sliding between past, longer past, and present without losing the reader.” Is that a promise? LOL. I get lost in manuscript timelines on a regular basis, which is why I wrote my two previous posts. Can you give an example of one or two of these tricks you’re talking about for me, and for others who stop in?
Thank you.
You’re welcome!
I appreciate this post so much! It is extremely helpful in addressing current problems in my manuscript.
Thank you so much!
Nancy
I always love to hear that a technique is useful “right now.” Thanks, Nancy!
Thank you, Kathryn! Your analysis is tremendously helpful. I’m very sensitive to POV breaches and have often abandoned books for that reason. I confess that I struggled with the beginning of Verghese’s novel and only finished it because it was my book club’s selection. But I’m glad I did finish it.
I appreciate the clarity you’ve brought to these techniques and see how I can use them in my WIP, which is set in motion by something readers might not believe.
Lampshading really helps with absurdist setups, which I happen to love. John Irving was great at this (I’m thinking here of The World According to Garp and The Fourth Hand).
Glad this list brought some clarity, Barbara. Enjoy using them!
This article took me back to my childhood – Dad making up fantastical stories for my brother and I to shiver and squeal as we listened at bedtime. My brother’s eyes were always eager and wide, and I suppose mine were too. Point being, story engagement – believability. We didn’t care how crazy or impossible they seemed, because the narrative put us both in the middle of the story. And there was always a ‘to be continued’ hook. No wonder I read and write and listen. Thanks to our Dad.
Jay thank you for sharing such a wonderful memory. Love this!
Thank you, this is what I needed right now. I hope you write more about this… going to look for this book now!
I love topic suggestions—if not to be useful, then why am I here?
I’ll keep this in mind. For now, enjoy Cutting for Stone, and I hope it enhances the points I made for you, Isaac.
Do you have sny suggestions for translating this process when applying it to your own WIP? I find that I read a book, get a new take or approach and can shine that light onto my WIP for a time, and then it fades because (I think) it takes time to shift into a different writing style and to internalize a new form or approach. It feels like shaping a gigantic bonsai and my ladder can only reach one section at a time. I both need to pull back and get in close. Any thoughts on this balancing act would be very helpful.
In a memorable post here at WU, “18 Writing Lessons to Carry into 2018,” Natalia Sylvester wrote: “While teaching a class on finding the heart of your story, I discovered the heart has much to show us about writing: When you’re looking at the big picture, look closer. When you’re looking close, step back. Do this over and over—expand, and contract, like a heart.” So yes, you need to both pull back and get close.
Since lampshading deals with issues of implausibility—and since you don’t want to draw attention to the implausibility by being too heavy-handed with these techniques—this is an instance where you need to rely on advance readers.
When you see they’ve marked a POV breach or written “this isn’t believable,” that’s your cue to reach into your toolbox for one of these techniques—but only AFTER you’ve done two things:
1) made sure the contested issue serves the story in a necessary way, and
2) given serious consideration to the fact that your beta reader might be right, and you pushed things too far.
If in doubt, try #1 and a fresh beta reader and see if it worked!