I just spent the morning with Kate Moses on the official publication day of her compelling new memoir, Cakewalk. We filmed our interview in the sunny kitchen, glass door open onto a backyard, three white cats circling and purring.

I read Cakewalk in the days before our meeting, laughing out loud and also sobbing. Yes, sobbing. It’s a wild and delicious ride, replete with recipes. Kate’s sentences are delicacies themselves–rich, abundant, generous and exquisite.

Rooted in a history of generations of Californians, White Russian treasure burning in a San Francisco dump, children tied to trees after the earthquake to keep them safe, Kate’s is the story of the making of a writer–for without waving any banners, this is a key part of the story and one that my writer self thrilled to read.

I don’t envy Kate her harrowing childhood, even with its flights of sugary beauty, and I suppose many writers have a cauldron of a past that boiled us, left us raw, tender and observant. But what a memory–what prose, what images–drives this narrative. What characters people it and what a journey creates the writer who can transform the whole thing into a delicacy.

I’ll be posting my video interview with her soon. Come join us in her kitchen!

A student writes:

I would like you to talk about point of view – even something as simple as an enumeration of the possibilities. I told my story from the point of view of an omniscient third person who knew the thoughts of the main character but of no one else. This was inconvenient at one point because I envisioned a chapter where [his] love interest goes off with [his] mother [for a scene]. I couldn’t do that directly because the storyteller only knew what was going on through the main character’s eyes. Did I make a mistake? Can an omniscient storyteller know everything? That was about the only place I needed that extra knowledge for the storyteller.

Part One of my three-part reply:

Usually, when people talk about point of view, they concentrate on the technicalities. Let’s get the technicalities out of the way.

Generally, the point of view can either be

* first person (“I walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed me five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) First person can be singular, as shown in example, or collective, as when a town or a family or some other group entity narrates, using “we.” This tends toward a more omniscient role, as the storytellers are often part of the setting more than they are the main character. First person singular need not be a main character, either. Madame Bovary is written in first person from the point of view of a classmate of M. Bovary who shows up briefly in one early pronoun and not much more if at all . . .

* second person (“You walk down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owes you five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”) Note verb tense change. Second person is a bit of a stylistic tic and tends to come in present tense, perhaps to give the impression of hypnotising the reader.

* third person (“She walked down Salamander Street, hoping to see Charlotte, who owed her five-hundred dollars and an ex-husband.”)

Third person can be “close” or “omniscient”:

* A close third operates from inside the head of one character, or follows that one character and dips in and out of his or her head. It is similar to first person, except for the pronoun choices.

* An omniscient third is the God point-of-view. Your narrator can see all; however, this does not mean that your narrator tells all. An omniscient narrator hopping from head to head can be as dizzying and unappealing as a 1970s hippie doing the same from bed to bed. Omniscience is about control, about that bird’s eye perspective that can zoom in, sometimes here, sometimes there, but thoughtfully, craftfully. No zipping, no hopping.

The other technical point of view issue to keep in mind is distance in time between the moment of narration and the moment of the events of the story.

This is an issue in non-fiction, as well, especially in memoir. The writer is obviously going to write in first person–or perhaps I should say, likely going to unless serious experimentation is taking place, whether legitimate–The Autobiography of Miss Alice B. Toklas–or illegitimate–A Million Little Pieces. However, a narrator looking back across a span of fifty years has a different first person point-of-view than one writing as if just upon the heels of the events. Either narrator will zoom in on the events to give the reader a sense of immediacy–we don’t want every moment moderated by that fifty-year perspective–but the first narrator can draw back and reflect, while the second keeps us close to the bone of the story.

Naturally, in any point of view, the distance in time will impact the perspective such that one could argue that the narrator is a different person at one age than at another.

That’s about what you will get in a standard creative writing course. Maybe less.

But I am going to tell you what no one tells you about point of view.

Point of view is story. It is plot, voice and therefore language, character, dialog, setting, the whole caboodle. It could be said that all of these elements of narrative are doors into the same large, labyrinthine room, but that does not mean that the interconnections are not fruitfully searched.

These elements will be explored in parts 2 & 3 of this post.

I edit a fair number of memoirs, and I’ve read some great stories in them. My own family’s story is crazy enough that people tell me I should write about it. But for a long time, I couldn’t imagine taking the layered, messy, contradictory matter of my life–the stuff I’ve blocked out and the stuff I wish I could, and even the sweet or triumphant but private moments of which I am proud–and squeezing it into the form of a story. The blessed thing about novels is that they give shape to the confusion of living. For example, characters change; they grow internally, in one direction.

Do people change? (Remind me to ask this question again, when I have built up more readers, because this is a real question, and if you have answers and examples, especially affirmative examples, I would love to hear them.) One of the strangest things that happened when my father died was that I realized that the story of our relationship was over–or so I thought–and the finale never happened. There was an end, all right, long, drawn-out and dramatic, even. But the change, the perfect reconciliation, and–most important–his flash of insight that would somehow repair all the hurt: none of that ever came. Instead, there were quiet moments. Literary fiction moments:

When I arrived at the hospital, my father was groaning. I could hear him through the gray curtain that sheathed his room from the busy hallway. He begged the attendants to leave him alone. Each jostle caused him pain, and he let them know it. I came in and tried to get him to eat. He wanted applause for fake bites, and wouldn’t ingest anything. In short, it was a bad day. He couldn’t get comfortable, and his thin arm and long fingers kept reaching back to shove his flat pillow under his head in a different way. Finally, I pulled out the old poetry textbook I’d brought, something I’d used in teaching literature in a different year, and I began to read him poems. I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and “One Art.” Every poem I came across seemed to be about death, and I think anyone reading this textbook at their father’s deathbed would have had a distinct advantage in parsing the poems’ meaning. At the same time, the dense purity of the language, the close-up focus on imagery seemed the only way to use language when time is ticking by so mercilessly. I read many poems to him that day, until he began to grow tired and closed his eyes. A smile settled on his face, and he sighed. “What a wonderful day!” he exclaimed before he slept.

There are two points I want to make in today’s blog. One is that I’ve just read a great little book called Ron Carlson Writes a Short Story, and Carlson’s respect for those quiet little moments, for the inventory of the world that makes up the evidence that builds a short story, is inspiring. His key piece of advice–stay in your seat and resist the temptation to go for coffee or a dictionary definition–is probably the best there is. It reminded me of what I’ve learned from watching others about the secret to a life-long relationship, which is this: don’t leave. There may be things that make the time spent more pleasant, but really nothing achieves the success of longevity like staying put.

The other point–and I think they are related–is that my perspective has shifted, and my own story seems more coherent to me. I credit, in no particular order, time, my therapist, and facebook. Just as some chunks have fallen away with time, others have pressed to the surface. And in therapy, I am coming, at long last, to begin to understand that this particular set of experiences I am having and have had are, in fact, my life. I think that as a voracious reader all my life, I’ve sort of shelved my own experiences side-by-side with those of the protagonists and heroes (male and female and other) of my favorite books. Then, as a writer, I have come to imagine that I can go back and fiddle around, change point of view, collapse a couple of characters into one, make different choices. It’s funny, because I resist revision (though I spend a lot of time on it, in fact), but in life, I seem to have counted on it. And as Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is no rehearsal

Shame, really, because what I learned from the sliver of my twenty-year high school reunion that I attended, and from the online materials that accompanied it, and from facebook, is that I could have a lot more fun in high school (the right kind of fun, sustaining fun) now than I ever did then. As they approach forty, all those people look so decent, kind and funny and interesting. Not scary at all

On round two, I’d keep in better touch with those people in college by whose sides I was prepared to fight and live, garden and foment revolution. Instead, I am finding them on facebook, scattered across the state and the country, teaching, doctoring, making art . . . And knowing that I can drop a line to the guy I dated when I was seventeen to say, How would you feel about revising your high school ambition and being the second black president of the United States? or that I can get a status update every few days from the first woman I ever kissed (or, you know, something . . .)–this makes my life seem a lot less scattered. It’s as if what looked like a mass of yarn got rehooked to a big ol’ loom, and now, taut, reveals a pattern, amazing colors, and a patch over in the corner where I can turn my attention and labor a while. Like Carlson’s writing advice, I’ve found a way to stay put in this life, not so much in one place, but just day after day in one life, and just like Carlson’s writers, the story is starting to come to me.