Perspective and telling your story

This is a follow-up to my previous post about writing from the heart and writing exercises, in which I argued that, while it is always important to be true to the story that you want to tell, sometimes it is a valuable exercise to try to tell that story in a way that suits a particular audience, especially an unfriendly audience.  This takes that same issue from a slightly different perspective—from the view that any story can be told in different ways. I’m not talking about there being two sides to every story, in the colloquial sense of different people viewing the same event in different lights—though that is closely related. I’m talking about how one person with one story can tell that one story in different ways and with different perspectives.

Consider, for example, this blog post and my previous one: both are telling my views on writing to varying audiences, including hostile ones, but the first focused on viewing the activity through the lens of a writing practice—a practice to develop your writing skills—and this through the lens of the variety of perspectives inherent in a given story.

Or consider, for example, a research analysis using a novel method: just from the start, one can focus on what the new method reveals about the subject or on how that particular analysis reveals insight into the method. Both of these are typically present in any research project that applies new research methodologies to old, established fields of study.

The perspective that you take in writing or telling your story can shift, even if the underlying story itself remains the same.  Now it may be that you are more interested in one perspective than the other, but that only makes it a little harder to shift to other perspectives. Because stories are complex, the other perspectives are always there.

The researcher who picks up a new method may be so fascinated with the method and learning the method that he/she tends to focus on the methodological issues despite matters of interest in the subject, or may be so focused on the research subject that he/she disregards matters of method.  And yet, in this generic situation—applying a new method of analysis to an old problem—both the perspectives are always there.  This can be most easily seen by imagining two separate audiences: one, the audience of people interested in the subject, the other, the audience of people interested in the development of the method.

The perspectives focused on theory and subject aren’t the only possible perspectives, of course. Any work that bridges disciplines will naturally have separate perspectives for each discipline. And then any study of literature or history or any social phenomenon could choose to focus on a variety of perspectives, including historical, economic, sociological, or technological concerns. A Jane Austen novel, for example, could be examined through all these lenses (and probably has been).  Or a building designed by Le Corbusier. These many lenses could be turned on almost anything related to humans.

How does this perspective (that every story can be told from multiple perspectives) affect your practice as a writer? In my previous post, I was talking about writing to a hostile audience while staying true to your own story, and I think there’s a similar opportunity there. In the previous post, I suggested using the attempt to write to a hostile audience, and to suit one’s words to the hostile audience, as an exercise to improve your skill as a writer. Now I’m suggesting a way to deepen your thinking about your work by imagining the different perspectives that different audiences are taking.  What perspective is your hostile audience taking?

By understanding the perspective of your audience, you can better craft your response so that you can reach them.  Understanding the perspective of your audience means understanding what they are going to focus on as important.  Now it is quite possible that what they want to focus on is not what you want to focus on. In the long run, of course, you do want to try to bring the discourse around to focus on what you want to focus on. But the starting place is to focus on what they want to focus on.

If you think of the different perspectives on your story as all being present in your own story, you can start to see how to tell the story you want to tell, even if the first things you need to talk about (write about) are not the things that you care about most.  Such shaping of your presentation to suit your audience is not a sell-out of your story: you can stay true to your story. It can be a very good learning experience as you try to imagine your work through someone else’s eyes. (But of course, try to imagine your work through reasonable eyes—you don’t want to get stuck asking yourself self-destructive questions about your work.) Imagining reasonable objections to your work is a good way to make it stronger—finding real weaknesses is the first step in fixing them. (But, again, be reasonable: all work has some limitations, so don’t throw your work away as soon as you see some weakness in it.)

Hostile audiences are often hostile because they see the world differently from you. Trying to understand their perspectives can help you gain some insight into your work by looking at it from angles you may not usually consider, and trying to communicate your understanding of their perspective can help reduce their hostility to your work. 

Trying to build such communicative bridges is not, in my view, an abdication of your story or any sort of selling out.  Communication need not be focused on and framed around a disagreement, even if that disagreement is central to the work being done.  The very fact that you are communicating with a given group means that there is some common ground—some place on which you stand along with your hostile audience.  That common ground is a good place place to start a discussion that will lead to a point of dispute. That shared perspective, however limited, is a tool to try to bridge the differences.