By Joe Ortiz
Bruce Springsteen once said that the lyrics of one of his songs (perhaps it was “Born in the USA”) was delivered through the point of view of a persona. The Boss was openly admitting that he, the singer, was acting as another character and not himself.
Joe Ortiz
This is an artistic trope used by artists — admittedly most workable for writers, actors, screenwriters, and dramatists — in which a unique or invented “character” speaks directly from their own personality. This offers an artist a disguise, so to speak. It helps remove the author from the work.
Tom Waits uses his unique vocal style, phraseology, and intonation to portray characters that lend an air of theatrical presentation to the character delivering the song—as if reciting a monologue in a play. Waits creates a dramatic tension that helps the song take on a visceral, yet authentic interpretation.
To some listeners this affectation might seem labored and distracting. But many others accept Wait’s distinctive delivery and are transfixed by having been brought into this other character’s world.
A Lesson from Fiction and Memoir: A young woman writer at a 2021 Catamaran Writers Retreat session responded to a comment I made that abused children sometimes deal with trauma by becoming writers. Her response was “Maybe some of us just like to write.”
The very next day, the workshop facilitator, poet Patrice Vecchione suggested to writers who are uneasy with describing a disturbing, traumatic experience to try writing them in the third person. Still a day later, that very same young woman got up and read a third-person account of a woman’s experience of sexual abuse.
The imagery and details of her scene were so descriptively realistic, showing that she was writing about herself. Her intense emotional delivery seemed to many audience members born of personal experience. She had disguised the experience and was then able to access it through the use of another persona: the distance created a permission structure.
What Can We Do? — “Tricking the Barn into Revealing it’s Secrets.”: Novelist John Gardner posed an exercise in which writers can escape from their own confining mental apparatus, their own limited authorial point of view, through projecting it into an inanimate object.
Gardner asked his students to write a physical description of a barn that has just been witness to a murder. By taking the writer’s own consciousness out of the writing and projecting it onto the barn, this exercise helps remove any hint of a writer’s self-consciousness.
Such a description coming from a different point of view offers the potential of a less sentimental and more dramatic treatment. Try it.
Gardner’s comment about the exercise is enlightening: “You’re trying to trick the barn into revealing its secrets.”
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