LATRAME

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Focalization is the answer to a very simple question : through whose eyes ?

Take a plain scene. A man walks into a café, sits, orders. A woman, two tables away, watches him.

Tell it from him : he has no idea he's being watched. He's thinking about his meeting, about what he'll say, about the rain that ruined his shoes. The woman is just a shape at the edge of the frame, if he notices her at all.

Tell the same scene from her : suddenly everything he does becomes a sign. He glances at the door twice, so he's waiting for someone. He kept his coat on, so he doesn't plan to stay. She reads a whole story into gestures he thought were meaningless.

Same café, same minute, two stories that don't resemble each other. And you changed none of the facts : you only moved the camera behind different eyes.

The classic trap is thinking you choose a focalization once and for all. In reality, every scene asks again : whose gaze is this ? Sometimes the strongest answer isn't the main character. A murder is more terrifying seen through the witness who doesn't understand what he's looking at than through the killer who already knows everything.

A small test, next time a scene resists you : ask who's telling it. Then try handing it to someone else in the room. Often the scene that was stuck didn't have a writing problem, just a point-of-view problem.