How can a single point-of-view novel include multiple voices?
In previous posts on Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler, I’ve looked at how the opening of the novel hooks readers and how McQuiston uses dialogue—especially the white spaces around dialogue—to reveal character. Today’s post is going to focus on another white space McQuiston makes use of: the breaks between chapters, which she fills in with extraneous materials that illuminate corners of her fictional world that her single point-of-view character, Chloe Green, doesn’t have access to.
All of these excerpts are given the title “From the Burn Pile”—a title we don’t learn the meaning of until the bonfire in the final chapter—and they are all quite short, most under a page. All of them are ‘found’ documents, the kind of detritus you would find in a locker or backpack at the end of a school year: notes between characters, old homework assignments, scribbled exchanges on scripts, teacher evaluations, student council meeting minutes.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler is told from the point of view of a single character, Chloe Green. Chloe has an intense, dramatic personality, and we can sense her voice come through on every page. Take, for example, this opening line to chapter 5: “Chloe enters the choir room for lunch with a peanut butter sandwich in her lunch bag and murder in her heart.” Or this show-stopper of a speech she delivers at a high school party:
One day, when Dixon’s fifty and his second wife has left him because he’s a balding middle school football coach with the personality of a frozen meatloaf, and his kids hate him because he’s never expressed an emotion that’s not impotent rage or horniness, he’s gonna look back on senior year of high school and realize that being prom king was the only thing he ever achieved in his life, and that at his absolute peak, before everything went to shit, that girl from LA with the huge boobs still wouldn’t have slept with him.
If you want to stand up and cheer, I think that’s the effect McQuiston is going for.
But Chloe’s strong voice threatens to drown out quieter characters. McQuiston uses the Burn Pile material to showcase some of those other characters, as well as to provide documentary-style clues about emerging subplots. They appear after every chapter, starting with the first, in which McQuiston keeps us in Chloe’s POV, but delivered from a different angle, in a note to her friend Georgia—apparently sent during class because Chloe tells her, “PLEASE DO NOT REACT you are calm you are a placid lake you are my moms after a pitcher of hemp tea” and then delivers the news that we have already gleaned once from the previous chapter: that Chloe was kissed by Shara Wheeler.
The next Burn Pile note also delivers a piece of information we already had—that Shara kissed not only Chloe but also Rory, her next door neighbor—but this time from Rory’s point of view, using a transcript of one of the tapes he uses to record his music. It’s in first person and reveals his emotional reaction to the kiss: “It didn’t exactly feel like the earth-shattering moment I always thought it would, mostly because I was just… confused.” Without this Burn Pile material, we’d never know Rory’s emotional reaction to the kiss since he’s established as the cool, aloof rebel, and it would be out of character for him to reveal this, especially to our point-of-view character Chloe, who he doesn’t yet trust.
A later Burn Pile document—this one an excerpt from a creative writing assignment to describe a person with one word, written by Chloe’s friend Georgia—hints at a subplot that McQuiston will deploy at a dramatic moment late in the novel. Georgia writes, “There’s a girl with brown eyes who reminds me of the first book I ever loved. When I look at her, I feel like there might be another universe in her.” We know already that Georgia is gay and Chloe’s annotation, “Who is this about????” clues us in that Georgia may have her own long-standing romantic obsession.
As the novel progresses, McQuiston moves farther away from the central characters of the novel in the Burn Pile documents. Showing passed notes between secondary characters and tertiary characters brings all of them to life, making the fictional world of Willowgrove Christian Academy feel layered and realistic. For example, the minutes of a student council meeting reveal the personalities and social standing of Brooklyn Bennett, the hyper-organized, micromanaging student council president, and April Butcher, a stoner friend of Rory’s. The header tells us the minutes were “extracted from the back of Brooklyn’s accordion folder (the pink one, not the green one)” and include these lines:
In the Treasurer’s report:
ii. April Butcher (not a member) suggests adding more spicy items to the vending machines
iii. April Butcher is not recognized by the chair
In the Senior Executive Committee report:
i. April Butcher proposes Teen Mom 2 as a prom theme
ii. April Butcher is again not recognized by the chair
iii. April Butcher is asked to leave the meeting by Secretary Bailey Hunt
iv. April Butcher eats half of the sandwich President Brooklyn Bennett’s packed for lunch
v. April Butcher is removed from the meeting
It’s funny, of course, but also sheds a light on the many tiny rebellions and power plays afoot at the school, which Chloe will succeed in tapping into in the triumphant conclusion of the novel.
Perhaps the most moving of these documents gives us a brief glimpse inside the head of Mr. Truman, the longtime drama teacher at Willowgrove. Chloe, convinced he is gay, wonders why he teaches at a school that requires him to either forgo or hide any long-term romantic relationship. The discarded draft of a self-evaluation that ends up on the Burn Pile gives us a clue.
The piece starts off with his musing about the Kevin Bacon movie Tremors, in which the star sees a hard hat full of brains twenty minutes into the movie. “In the real world,” Mr. Truman writes, “if you happened to see somebody’s brains by accident, it would mess you up. The whole movie would be about the fact that you saw somebody’s brains.” He notes that by middle age, it’s easy to forget how your own seeing-the-brains moment felt, but when you are in high school “the brains are everything.” He’s concluded that God’s plan for his life is for him to “keep some kids from seeing the brains. Or at least showing them something in the desert that isn’t brains. A cool cactus, maybe. I don’t know. Metaphors are hard. I’m not the literature teacher.”
This tiny little glimpse into Mr. Truman’s interior life allows us to imagine, then, just how meaningful it must be when Chloe, giving a speech about specific moments that have shaped her sense of who she is, finds Mr. Truman in the crowd and directs this line at him: “The moment a teacher told us they believed in us.” I’m not crying—you’re crying.
As you are reading them, these Burn Pile documents can seem like throwaway bits of lighthearted fun, but when you sift through them and lay the contents up against the plot, themes, and narrative structure of the novel, you’ll find that McQuiston has put more meaning into them than you can catch on a first read. It’s a clever strategy easily adaptable to a wide range of stories.
If you want to try it out for yourself, spend some time thinking about what kinds of documents or other ‘primary’ evidence would exist in the world of your book. Which secondary or tertiary characters could be brought to further life by a brief glimpse into their seemingly private exchanges or a short first-person narrative? What plots could you foreshadow or what clues could you drop? If you try this technique, be sure to keep it limited and brief. Don’t let yourself get carried away into writing books within books!