A Persistent POV

I am not sure I struggled at all with the first question. This was always Cedric's story.

photo by author

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The first decision that must be made before a single word can be put to paper is from what perspective to tell the story. While doing my comprehensive review of FPMC, I toyed with a few possibilities, but one stood out with little contest.

Early Impressions

I pushed my first commit to FPMC on April 22, 2020. The skit was called “Consent”, and though later reorganizations of the chronology would place it as Cedric 000: Consent and mark the beginning of Act II, this was the first work I created for FPMC. Although I focus on the events as observed by Cedric, I made a clumsy attempt at a third-person external point-of-view, somewhat like one might read in a screenplay. My insistence on capitalizing the names of the characters and starkly stating the setting reinforces my attempt to create a vision that might be viewed on a television.

I was not yet ready to commit to a single point-of-view. My subsequent skits toyed with different narrators, each titled with the point-of-view character. I wrote a number of strange, exploratory pieces as I explored emotion and experience. The events transcribed in late 2020 show some refinement of the third-person perspective and motion away from the screenplay style, but the hallmarks are still present. Cedric 008: Where’s My Car maintains a third-person point-of-view, but incorporates more emotional content to detail Cedric’s desperation and confusion. I tried to apply this approach to explore the viewpoints of other characters through a singular event, as in Kevin 017: Pulse, but my application is inconsistent; Perkins 004: Liar does indeed focus on Friday’s actions, but the end of the skit reveals events that Friday could not possibly have observed.

Formative Consolidations

In 2021, I formalized the division into books by character, and began to number each skit chronologically within their book, starting with Mandarc 001: Stoop Kid. I still maintained a style reminiscent of a screenplay, but continued to add detail on inner thoughts and feelings that deviated from the usual limitations of a strict third-person point-of-view.

The first character for which first-person felt a natural consequence was Straud. At this point in my development, I simply wrote in the way I felt most comfortable, and it was his voice that arose from my own. I found myself wanting to express these characters in the most accurate way I could, and I think Straud says it best in Straud 020: Under Her Nose, where he seems to address the reader with a simple, “Why not?”

“I” Spy

When I went back in time to write the events of Kevin’s abduction, I had become more comfortable writing in the first-person. I began Act I with Kevin 001: Trick, where I willfully and without shame began writing the young boy as he might have written himself. It was thrilling to slip into their shoes and truly live as them through their words.

But there were issues with my attempt. I struggled to find a voice for my female characters, and Myrtle 004: Unsupervised notably deviates from the pattern I had established with the other three characters that narrate this chronicle. The other problem I had with writing in the first-person was that it became very jarring to read the story in sequence because of the huge cast of characters. The perspective established on one page would suddenly be quite different on the next, and the singular letter to which I had become so attached had entirely lost its meaning.

By the time I wrote the last hurrah of FPMC, starting with Perkins 010: A Stitch In Time, I had begun to come full circle. While Friday would never be granted use of the first-person pronoun, the final eight skits afterward are all written from the perspective of their titular character, including AVAEL and Roxanne, a decision I made in an effort to fight against my previous difficulties with female voices.

Love and Letting Go

When I first started writing FPMC, I had no idea where I was going. I soon had a hundred characters and I felt everyone had something important to say. My cast kept expanding and I was adding more and more pairs of eyes to the world. Wearing a lot of hats helped me grow as a writer and learn how to think like my characters, but it was not an approachable creation. Bouncing around to different viewpoints made a complex universe that felt very real to me, but it was not always clear who was talking and why. Characters grew in leaps and bounds rather than in digestible increments and I realized my format and habits were actually preventing me from accomplishing the goal I had set out to do from the very beginning.

Who, and How?

I am not sure I struggled at all with the first question. This was always Cedric’s story. Everything I dreamt up, whether character, location, lore -- no matter how estranged, it all came back to him. I wanted to capture within his struggle the elements that echo across the human experience and unite us all. Now I had a wealth of my words to look over and determine what worked, and what didn’t.

It’s no mystery why novels are rarely composed in the first-person. The use of “I” naturally beseeches the reader to compare themselves to the other. It forces one to create barriers to protect their own self-hood from the identity of someone else. When Cedric states, “I wouldn’t say I remember every one of my victims,” does it not compel you to wonder whether you, in his moccasins, would recount the same statement? I realized I could not hope to make Cedric relatable if his words were so constantly at war with my audience.

I chose to return to the place I had begun. I would craft Cedric’s story in the third-person. That is not to say, however, that I will not include his inner voice and his personal convictions. They are very real, and an essential part of the tale I spin. At this point, I don’t think I could silence the man if I tried.