A List Is Already a Point of View

A list can look like the part of a story where the writer stops telling us what to think. Here are the objects. Make of them what you will.

But someone has chosen the objects. Someone has decided what to call them, what belongs together, and where to stop. Even an inventory has a point of view.

Consider two invented lists made in the same kitchen.

The first reads:

Six white dinner plates.
Four wineglasses.
One green gravy boat, chipped.
One electric kettle.
One photograph in a silver-colored frame.

The second reads:

The plates she wouldn’t let us put in the dishwasher.
Four glasses from a set of six.
The green thing nobody liked.
The kettle that takes forever.
That photograph again.

The room has not changed. The person looking at it has become harder to miss.

The first list seems concerned with identification and quantity. The second brings in use, irritation, and shared history. Even so, it would be too simple to call one objective and the other emotional. “Silver-colored” in the first list could belong to someone carefully avoiding a claim about value. It might also belong to someone who knows very little about the house. The list tells us something, but it doesn’t settle everything.

Naming gives an object a job.

If a character calls the gravy boat “the green thing,” that choice may suggest indifference. It may suggest unfamiliarity. Or it may be an attempt to sound indifferent about something the character knows very well.

The surrounding scene decides which reading earns our trust.

Imagine a daughter packing this kitchen after her mother moves to a smaller apartment. Her brother reaches for the green thing.

“That goes in the donation box,” she says.

He turns it over.

“It’s got your name on the bottom.”

Now her earlier dismissal has a different pressure behind it. The list has not hidden information unfairly. It has given us a version of the object that the scene can test.

A label can do more than describe. It can be a position someone is trying to maintain.

An omission needs a surrounding shape

It is tempting to make a list mysterious by leaving something out. But a reader cannot notice the absence of every object that might have been in a room. There needs to be a reason for this particular absence to register.

Suppose the scene has already established that the mother kept six wineglasses and counted them before visitors came. A later list of four can carry a question. Without that earlier attention, “four wineglasses” may remain exactly what it appears to be: four wineglasses.

The useful work is in the connection. You need not explain the missing glasses at once, but you have given the reader a specific gap.

There is a similar choice at the end of the list. Ending with the photograph gives it a little more weight than placing it between the kettle and a stack of tea towels. The objects have become a sequence. The sequence creates an expectation about where the scene will look next.

A changed list can show a changed decision

Return to the daughter. At first, she sorts the objects by where they will go: storage, donation, trash. Every item is a task.

Later, she might make a different list:

Call Mom about the plates.
Ask Ben where the glasses went.
Take the green gravy boat home.

The list now contains unfinished conversations and one decision. Her change does not require a paragraph announcing that she has discovered the value of family history. She has picked up an object she meant to discard.

That is enough for this scene. It does not prove that she has resolved every feeling about her mother. A small decision is more convincing when the writer allows it to stay small.

Let the list belong to someone

Lists can be useful in fiction because they interrupt the usual paragraph without leaving language behind. They can speed through a room, make a reader linger over one odd item, or reveal how a character tries to impose order.

But the format alone will not do the work. An inventory written by a daughter is different from one written by a mover, a thief, or an insurance assessor. Each has a reason to look and something they may fail to see.

Before adding a list, ask who needs it and what they intend to do with it. Then look at the names they give the things in front of them.

A character can write “donation” on the box and still take something home.

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Author bio: Paul Michael Durivage is a Michigan author writing supernatural horror, speculative fiction, and nonfiction about writing. He is also a lifelong machinist. His website is paulmichaeldurivage.com.