Dueling Points of View

 

I’m trying something new with my current work. I had already completed the story of a twelve-year-old girl crossing the Isthmus of Panama with her family while heading to the California gold fields in 1850. However, Across the Isthmus is aimed at middle-grade girls, and I wanted to do something similar for boys.

The female protagonist in Across the Isthmus has a fourteen-year-old brother, so I am challenging myself by trying to write the same basic story from his point-of-view. Nobody sees the same events in the exact same way, and one POV character may concentrate on entirely different matters than another does. Still, if both narrators are reliable, shared scenes should contain a lot of similarities. Finding the right balance between “facts” and “perceptions” is a challenge, especially when it comes to dialogue.

Most stories (including mine) need dialogue to keep them interesting, and, of necessity, both books share some dialogue. As in real life, the two characters are unlikely to both remember the conversation word-for-word, but the contents at least should be close (again, given that they are reliable narrators). But when the characters don’t remember it the same, how much variation can I get away with?

That wouldn’t be a problem if I could be sure that the two books would have no common readers. They are being written for different audiences—one for girls and one for boys—but that is no guarantee that the same person won’t read both. I don’t want a reader to say, “That wasn’t what it said in the other book,” but I also don’t want the reader to toss the second book aside as unrealistic because the two characters have such great memories that they remember the conversation (and the facts) exactly the same way. This is a real dilemma that I am struggling with as I write.

The challenge is to find the line between making the stories different enough to account for the two points of view but similar enough to show them experiencing the same circumstances.

These types of challenges make writing hard work.

But they are also what makes it fun.

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The photo at the head of this post shows an 1850 painting by Charles Christian Nahl titled “Der Isthmus von Panama auf der Höhe des Chargres River” (“The Isthmus of Panama at the Height of the Chargres River”).