Just as a caveat: this article will focus primarily on writing for protagonists in interactive fiction, mostly because it’s what I’m good at. There’s going to be some applicability to writing in first person, and perhaps in third person as well, but some of the tools which I’m going to describe – especially things like internal monologue – are going to be more effective in some formats than others.
Something which I talk about a lot is the ability for narration to serve not only as exposition, but characterisation. The way which a character describes a concept, a place, a time, or another character can tell us a lot about how they think, where they come from, and what their motivations are. This is doubly the case when characters describe those things to themselves, in their own heads, when they might have less of a reason (or more of a reason) to lie. The perspective which a character views a given thing tells us a lot about who they are, and lets a storyteller develop a sort of inner depth which they might not be able to convey otherwise.
So, how do we develop this perspective? Essentially, we work backwards from the way the audience encounters it. While the audience will encounter the character’s inner thoughts or narration, and interpret those expressed thoughts to come to conclusions, we as storytellers should start from those conclusions, and use them as the lens to colour the way we narrative that character’s thoughts.
What do I mean by this? Let’s use an example. Let’s say you’ve got a character – a soldier (I seem to write a lot of those). Let’s say they’re a long-serving veteran in a professional army. That means they’re going to know things which the average civilian doesn’t, and because that knowledge is something which they’ve had to rely on in literal life-and-death situations for years, that’s going to colour their way of thinking and their internal monologue. They’re going to be able to do things like recognise weapons, uniforms, unit insignia, and military signals by reflex. They might get nervous in certain situations because it reminds them of previous dangers, they might likewise be able to identify weapons by sound, or measure up anyone who they encounter to see if they’re likely to be a threat. If they held a position of responsibility in their branch of service (which is to say, if they were some kind of officer), they might be well-versed not only in the tactics of their own army, but in those of their enemies and likely enemies. A stickler for regulations might be able to cite those regulations from the manual – a well-practised scrounger or malingerer might likewise be able to describe how to skirt those regulations.
None of these things have to be outright stated – in fact, they shouldn’t be. They should manifest to the reader through the subjective way which that character describes things to the audience, through the words they choose and the terms they use and the first solutions that come to their minds when they encounter an obstacle or a complication.
You could make a character whose internal perspective is solely coloured by this one aspect of their character, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The fanatic that is so subsumed by one facet of a healthy human being’s existence is rare in our world – and for good reason. This character might be a soldier, they might think like one and identify themselves as one, but they’re going to be other things too: they’re going to come from a gender, class, and ethnic identity. Those things are all going to shape the ways which they think and react to the world around them – and the ways which the world around them reacts to their identities (their inherited identities as well as their own self-identification as a soldier) will also create experiences which in turn will shape their perspective.
Naturally, this kind of thing requires some robust worldbuilding. If you want to know how a character’s identities and backgrounds shape the way they think, then those backgrounds, and the way which their host society treats them, are going to have to be fleshed out pretty well – which means you as the storyteller, have a lot of legwork to do. Yet at the same time, this is a sword that swings both ways. While it means you have to lay a lot of groundwork, it also means this character can manifest the worldbuilding you’ve done, and show it off in ways which would seem awkward or otherwise out of place if delivered through other means. The way that a character thinks about class, race, gender, culture, and politics (or refuses to think about those things), will not only tell the audience a lot about how those things exist in your setting – but also about how they interact with each other, by showing how a given person who exists as a collection of particular identities interacts with the rest of society.
Of course, this process is not purely determinative. People can come from the same backgrounds, experience roughly the same kind of life events, and come to different conclusions. In real life, this is usually because nobody experiences precisely the same events or come from precisely the same circumstances. Even two relatively similar people will develop differences based on the subtle differences which their journeys through life have taken. In a narrative, this is once again a source of characterisation. There’s a lot of thematic potential in having two characters who go through the same kind of events or come from the same circumstances only to end up coming to vastly different conclusions – although that’s probably a conversation for a different time.
In many ways though, using a character’s perspective to deliver exposition about the setting is the narrowest and weakest way to use a tool this powerful. While it is a useful way to deliver information within the narrative, its applications are also limited to either the internal monologue of the narrator, or a dialogue between characters.
A far more powerful use for a perspective delivered this way is in the forming of the motivations of a given character. One of the principles I use to ground my work is the belief that every character believes that they are the protagonist of their own story. As a result, the things they say, the actions they perform, the loyalties they espouse, and the enemies they make are all informed by the way they see the world. Instead of using a character’s subjective opinions on the society around them to simply illustrate the relationships between their identity and the rest of the setting, those relationships can also be used to push a character towards acting a certain way in a manner which is logically consistent and rational to them. Every character’s actions – no matter how unhinged or irrational they might seem to the perspective of a narrator, protagonist, or audience member – ought to be rational within the perspective of the character performing it.
There are some obvious difficulties with this. For one thing, making an antagonist too rational in the eyes of the audience makes them wonder why they’re the antagonist in the first place. This can be a useful thing to engineer in some kinds of stories, but in others, it’s a bit of a problem. In the kinds of stories where there are supposed to be clear-cut moral distinctions, you don’t want your audience sympathising too hard with the antagonist.
But just because a character’s actions are logically consistent with their perspective doesn’t mean their perspective is necessarily rooted in reality. In our own world, there are plenty of people who make decisions they believe to be intelligent and rational, only to turn out that their judgement call was dead wrong. This is because while our perspectives and worldviews are based on evidence and received wisdom, some of that received wisdom may in fact be based on assumptions which do not actually conform with reality. We see this often in the case of identity-based prejudice, be that in the case of ethnicity, gender, or religion. Since we can’t gauge the potential threat of everyone we meet, we often fall back on prior evidence, or broad generalisations fed to us by those sources we trust. In many cases, these assumptions are wrong – yet unless we’re willing to re-examine those previously held assumptions based on new evidence, and rearrange the worldviews we live by to correct those assumptions, we tend to keep on living with them – especially since we all live with the knowledge that just because someone disagrees with your existing beliefs doesn’t mean they’re right.
Fictional characters are no different. Their assumptions form their convictions and their convictions form their perspectives – and those perspectives are what motivate words and actions. In fact, it’s possible that characters may be so invested in those perspectives, that they will purposefully and willingly lie to themselves to maintain the logical integrity of those convictions, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. I think we all do this at least a little bit in our daily lives – and I think that, with some exceptions, fictional characters who also do this are a lot more interesting and offer a lot more depth than the ones who don’t.
Which brings me to one last neat little tool, one I use regularly for my own work.
Players say they like interesting moral dilemmas – which is true. However, players don’t like being told that they’re a bad person. This means a lot of game narratives fall into something which I occasionally call the “Bioware Morality Trap” (rip): namely, that while the game presents evil choices to the player, they are telegraphed as evil in a way which means that nobody ever takes them.
To avoid this, I use the subjective viewpoint of the player character to recontextualize the “evil” choice in a way which makes it seem rational. This is doing the thing which I just mentioned: the use of a perspective to motivate a character (in this case, the player character) in a way which makes a choice which might seem irrational or evil anything but. I use the perspective of the player character to justify the decisions of the player, in a way which works to convince the player that while other characters or even other players might describe their actions as “wrong”, they themselves have an argument which they might be able to use to claim that they are – at the very least – choosing the lesser evil. Not only does this construct a sort of moral consistency which allows the player character to act as if they were justified, but it also adds a degree of depth to any moral dilemma which the player is confronted with. If the game itself is willing to justify an “evil” decision as “good”, then it becomes a lot harder to distinguish between good and evil.
I think this is a technique which is particularly strong in the particular kind of interactive fiction I create – because the narration can serve as a sort of internal monologue for the player character. Writing that narration from the perspective of someone who exists within the setting – and is subject to its biases and prejudices and assumptions – is something which not only helps contextualise the player’s choices within the framework of the setting itself, but also helps immerse the player in the world which their player character is inhabiting – and puts them in the role of someone who lacks the degree of detached quasi-objectivity which we as players would have observing a fictional world. In linear fiction, this is described often as an “unreliable” or “motivated” narrator – but in interactive fiction, I think that every occasion where the writer chooses to present some kind of hard objective truth over a biased one distorted by the lens of setting and characterisation is a missed opportunity.
As in our own world, all things are subjective in a fictional setting, and the foregrounding of that subjectivity – or the clashing of rival subjectivities – makes that world seem more real and more complex.
I hope what I’ve just written all makes sense. Subjectivity and perspective are often difficult things to talk about – and of course, my own views on the topic are themselves subjective.
But I’m hoping you’ll agree with some of what I’ve just put down.
