My editor friend and I have been talking about camera angles for some time. Several month ago, she told me to put a microphone in Nic’s (my protagonist) head and a camera on his shoulder. Sometimes it’s easy; other times, I miss the boat entirely because I get lost trying to capture the place and forget to capture the place in the context of action.
So in our conversation this weekend, we discussed the selections from my prior post (“Where Dialogue and Action Meet”), she gave me an alternate reading of the Tehanu passage by following the camera and asking “what do we see?” and “why do we see it?” Then she shared this excerpt from Chapter 35 of Dickens’s Great Expectations:
And now the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the ships on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard, close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.
It’s a stunning passage with a clear motion for the eye, presenting the procession to the graveyard exactly as it unfolds, symbolism seamlessly woven into the scene. It’s really a beautiful thing, what Dickens has done here. My colleague’s analysis/instruction as it relates to the beauty of this scene as a means of thinking about the narrative camera was brilliant, resonating in a way that makes me wish I could have sat in her classes when we were teaching years ago. The passage is here where I can come back to it, a reminder to me now that when I think of the camera on Nic’s shoulder (or the narrator’s or anyone else’s shoulder who appears in my writing ever again), I really want to be breathing toward this scene.
And I suppose when I get a few other books in the pile read, I’ll be revisiting Great Expectations for the first time since high school, I think. Not that I’m upset by this–there’s much to discover now that I simply didn’t have the motivation to see then.
Nicanor Abbott 