Perspective, Worldview and Voice

I was driving home on Friday and I saw a billboard. A big obnoxious number, one that's impossible to miss even if you wanted to (which is more with good placement than with content, but that's beside the point). So, I'm going to describe it to you in as much detail as I can muster, while still being brief; I want to talk about things other than the billboard. Now, imagine with me...

It sits on a corner, lurking just the other side of a stop light, in perfect view while you're staring at the red light, waiting for it to turn green. You've just passed the grocery store, or are returning from it, and you see this billboard, splashed across the top with bright, autumn leaf orange text: “20 VITIMANS AND MINERALS!” Below the text, to the right side of the ad, on a field of perfectly green grass is a smiling boy, kicking a soccer ball, his uniform immaculately clean. Opposite him, like the heart of the sun from which the orange text radiates are two halves of an avocado. In the same orange text, beneath the boy: “Chilean Avocados.”

So, what does this have to do with perspective, worldview or voice? Let us consider each of these things separately.

When we write, we write through a huge number of filters—this is only natural, we perceive the world through those same sorts of filters. Your mood, where you work, what your hobbies are, where you live. What philosophy do you live by? Are you Catholic or maybe Buddhist? All of these effect how you see the world. These, and more, form our personal world view. It's how we see and interpret literally everything around us.

Your characters, too, have their own worldview, and their own perspective on things. If we write with our default worldview, our characters will come off as incomplete, choppy copies of ourselves, and if we try to force other traits on them, those traits will come off as shallow, or just wrong. You, and your character, probably wont agree on some things. Some of them may be little (maybe your character loves spicy food, but you despise it), and some of them will be rather large things (your character is a lawyer that argues for the death sentence, and you've given up chocolate until capital punishment has been outlawed).

The thing with perspective to consider is how close your narrator is to your viewpoint character. In some stories, the viewpoint is very loosely coupled, or entirely separated from the viewpoint character (The Hobbit, by Tolkien). In others, the viewpoint character is your narrator (any Sherlock Holmes story by Doyle—in which your point of view character and your protagonist are different, but that's a different blog). The perspective, naturally, is going to differ based on how tightly coupled your narrator is to the POV character.

Okay, let's tie this together then, shall we? Voice. When you write, you write with a voice. Your voice depends on what worldview you (and hopefully your characters) have. The closer perspective you have to your characters, the more of that characters voice the writing should have.

So, let's go back to that billboard shall we? The night before I drove by that billboard, I had watched an episode of Good Eats (if you like food and like to cook, you should watch it, just saying) about avocados. Fun avocado fact: they never ripen on the tree, and can be stored, unripe, on the tree, for seven months! Which makes them a truly year round food.

So, I had my filters loaded, and when I drove by, multiple things ran through my head in parallel. The important ones that are important, though are as follows: “Why do I want avocados from chili, I can get them grown much closer, they're not seasonal.” “People should eat more local food. Not import it from other hemispheres.” And finally, “Why not? Avocados are avocados.”

That's when my writer brain kicked in, and I saw the filters, the preconceived ideas that I held in my mind. What if I was writing a character, and I loaded onto that character my own world view? Well, maybe that character agrees with me, but what if that agreement doesn't agree with the character? Well, this is how you get discordant characters (I'm sure that you have all read characters that just seemed wrong, or forced).

Or maybe the character is from Chili and, though in general may agree with that particular world view, he may prefer the avocados from his home country on a purely nationalist standpoint. Or maybe the character is a neo-nazi and, when he sees the billboard has violent thoughts towards the foreigners who are taking jobs from American (white! [I'd like to point out that I do not think this way]) workers.

That's just a few examples with a billboard, and every character will have all of these possible branches for, literally everything in the world. If you keep it in mind, you'll have a lot more luck with capturing a convincing voice.