Spoiler altert: I discuss the full plot of the book and film Rebecca in this blog, as well as the ending of Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”

I first saw Daphne Du Marier’s  Rebecca as a film–Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing movie with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. I was just a kid; my babysitter, who was a writer, took me to a little theater that used to live by LaVal’s pizza in Berkeley. As the credits ran, I searched for the name of the actress who’d played the most captivating character of them all, the title role of Rebecca. But of course, she never shows up in the film. In the book, too, she is entirely a creation of the narrator and the people around her.

The narrator is the mousy and very young second wife of the drowned Rebecca’s husband Maxim de Winter. Everything we learn about Rebecca is filtered through her lens, and although we cringe at her meekness and long for her to stand up for herself and realize her own worth, we are as convinced as she is that Maxim is in love with Rebecca and probably always will be. His moodiness is easy to understand as an inability to adjust to this simple, plain wife after having been married to the charismatic and gorgeous Rebecca who stirred so many people’s passions.

The great turning point near the end of the book comes when our nameless narrator learns that Max did not love Rebecca. “I hated her,” he declares. In fact, he killed her, struck her because she was carrying another man’s baby and knew that he would be too ashamed to divorce her and call her bluff. Or so he believes. In the movie, the young protagonist can barely hear Maxim’s confession about hitting Rebecca, watching her fall, realizing she was dead and shunting her off in her sailboat. She just keeps repeating, “You didn’t love her.”

Here is where I am making my grand play for the POV is plot argument: The plot of Rebecca is dependent first on the narrator’s perspective. If we knew all along that Max hated Rebecca, we’d have a completely different story–almost no story at all. Once that tidbit is revealed, we are given a new set of facts that are taken as concrete–Max killed the pregnant Rebecca.

At Rebecca’s cousin-cum-lover’s insistence, the characters begin to follow clues left behind by Rebecca about her last days. It turns out that she’d gone to a doctor far away, up near London. The cousin, the crazy housekeeper who was Rebecca’s nursemaid, the inspector and Maxim’s loyal estate lawyer, Frank, all go, along with Max and his young wife, to find out why Rebecca went to the doctor. The narrator and Max know why, of course: she was pregnant. The suspense at this time, then, is how will these facts come out and how will this cast further suspicion on Max. They are really just stretching out the time before the inevitable discovery of Maxim’s crime–and they want, now, to spend that time together.

But at the doctor’s we learn that Rebecca was not pregnant, as she’d told Max. She had cancer and was dying.  Point of view, again, sets us up and turns the story.

Plot is about what is revealed and what is hidden. What somebody knows that somebody else does not know. Therefore, in those moments when you wish you could follow some other characters to some other place and leave your chosen narrator behind, consider instead your plot options–what your narrator doesn’t know can hurt him, but that can’t hurt the plot!

Plot, in turn, will test your characters, which will reveal them the more fully, which will have an impact on their point of view.

A few more brief notes on some of the other ways point of view is interwoven into every aspect of the book: What your narrator sees and misses in a room or landscape will define your setting. The character’s mood will define, too, what s/he sees and how it looks. The voice, the language choices, that shape your narrative will come from the narrator, whether an embodied character or an omniscient point of view or one that moves among characters. The language will shape the page, the rhythms and feeling of the story.

What your narrator hears will influence dialog. Think of Denis Johnson’s wonderful use of dialog to end “Emergency.” (I am discussing this from memory, so forgive any slight errors.) He sets us up for the line a couple of pages ahead, telling us that it was saying this thing that showed the narrator what set his friend apart from him. Then we get the whole scene about picking up the guy who’s gone AWOL, and at the very end, the AWOL guy asks the friend, who is a drug-addled orderly, What do you do for a living? And the orderly answers, “I save lives.”

What is remarkable about the line is what it means to the narrator and how it is set up, rather than the sentiment itself. This whole story is about point of view, as when the narrator sees giant angel faces full of pity and it turns out to be the drive-in movie theater in the snow. Oh, he says, I thought it was something else. The splendor of that scene, and of the entire story, is wholly dependent on the misunderstandings fostered by the point of view.

Does this mean you should stress out more about your point of view choices? I don’t think so. I think it means that you should lean into the limits of the point of view. Use them for plot turns and thematic revelations, and as guides to language, setting and dialog. Trust the work that point of view does in your story and see where it can lead you.

[I am offering an online course in revision beginning January 15 for anyone with some rough manuscript, fiction or narrative non-fiction--including memoir. Send me an email to receive my once-a-month writing tip newsletter for sales and special offers. See you on the screen!]

Writing about writing can be as racy as the next blog-worthy topic. Hey, I weave in cute stories about my kids and moving tributes to my past and even some political panic. (Okay, political panic is only the subtext. See if you can pick it out.)

So: you meet a friend for coffee. You chat, have a brioche, catch up on who she’s dating and what she doesn’t like about her job and what your kids have learned how to do (oink in a grunty little way when you ask, “What does a pig say?”). You get a refill of chai latte to go, exchange hugs, and leave to go grocery shopping.

This is not a scene. Nothing happened.

I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t meet your friend for coffee or that she shouldn’t complain about the people she’s dating (new people, same complaints). It’s true that I did have a wonderful wise friend who advised me at one of my birthday parties to get new problems every ten years. However, one can live a perfectly decent life–maybe even a better life–with very little scene. (See my very first blog, which is about plot and how unavoidable it becomes over a lifetime.)

No one wants to read your everyone’s-happy-and-nothing-changes book. Even you.

Tell me if you’ve managed to sustain your everybody’s-happy-and-nothing-changes life for very long . . . Or do you go in and mess that up just for excitement? But sure, we WANT things to turn out well. That’s what keeps us reading as the characters get into deeper and deeper s***. We hope that the terrible thing that’s coming won’t come; as the good people that we are, we are rooting for these characters. But if it doesn’t come, if nothing comes, if everything gets better and everyone is out of danger, we’re going to put that book down and never look at it again. Harsh but true. If it’s the last page of your book, then you’ve done your job, and you can let us put it down and go on our way. But if it’s page fifty or page two, go back and stir things up, people.

Even Pema Chodron’s books are full of the struggles she faced and still faces, from her husband leaving her to her monastery disciples or whoever fully rebelling against her leadership style. How do you think she learned all those coping mechanisms for dealing with pain and suffering?

So open those plot-veins and keep that blood flowing.

I was a kid who, on the one hand, frequently put on original theatrical productions, rigging costumes out of the bizarre items the seventies left in my mother’s closet while, on the other hand, spending significant time sitting on my front step filling in workbook blanks. Loved those. I suppose (sorry to Felicia who wanted me to change problems every ten years) that I have been struggling with this creativity/ order dichotemy for a long-a** time.

But in writing, the two come together–or at least they take turns . . . So if you have that mechanical inclination, here’s what you can look for:

Go to the beginning of your scene. How’s everybody doing? Give them little emotional tags: happy, sad, scared, confident, proud. That sort of thing. Now go to the end of your scene. How’s everybody doing now? Are the happies still happy? Have the proud been humbled? Are the frightened still banging knee-caps? Are the confident all shook up? In other words, has anything happened?

If not, you’ve got some work to do.

If you are frightened of work, go dig outhouses in the desert. Don’t be a writer. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, talks about the physical labor that is writing, walking around a nine-foot table until you have to go home and soak your feet. She says (and I’m working from post-partum memory here), if you want to be metaphysical, throw pots.

So you go back and you make sure your scene turns. Let those suckers (your beloved characters) wander unsuspecting toward what is about to happen. Surprise them. Mess with them. Change them.

You cannot do this in real life. In real life, somebody else is in charge, and while I am praying all the time now, for one little boy in particular and the world in general, I feel like an editor who can’t convince my client that something different needs to happen in this book. Of course, the stuff I’m praying for doesn’t offer the best plot choices. I want “hope” not “change” and healing not drama and for the happy to stay happy and only the scenes that are going badly to turn.

So I am going to try to make a deal with this writer-client I’m talking to in my head about what’s going on around me: if I convince writers working on the page to inject some really terrible events into their fiction, to turn lives upsidedown and wring the fates like so many dirty rags, how about you lay off the drama-trauma out here in the world for a while, and I promise, I promise, we’ll enjoy the heck out of it in books.