Narrative Voice, Part I

The emphasis of seminars, blogs, teachers of writing, and workshops today is often on plot and character. Narration—narrative voice—which is one of the most important factors in creating an attractive, compelling text, whether a short story, poem, or longer work like a novel or novella— is often underemphasized. Yet voice is vitally important. In this blog I want to list several reasons why it is important and why writers need to give it more attention than it generally gets these days.

 The narrator of a story is a character. This is obvious in first person stories. We recognize that the language of a first-person narrator helps readers understand the character’s psychological disposition, attitudes, and morality. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” begins, “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” The short, terse sentences create an impression of the character's nervous, jumpy, hyperactive disposition. The last part shows he is deranged, thinking he can hear every noise on earth and even things in heaven and hell. Poe’s masterful writing sets up the character in one paragraph so we know he is insane and erratic from the very beginning of the story. Poe does it by means of narrative voice.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” uses first person, but what about third person narrative? It is here that the technique of narrative becomes more subtle and perhaps requires more attention than with first-person narration. The author is creating a character in this type of discourse, but not a character who participates in the action of the story.

 And yet in third-person stories the narrator is 

a character none the less. The narrator of a third-

person story is, in fact, the first figure the reader encounters. The voice, the one telling the story, even if from a perspective outside of it, is also the character to whom the reader is most exposed. As such, it is vital that the persona, the one telling the tale, is as carefully drawn as any other character in a work of literature.

The narrator in any work of fiction is not the author. Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House, but the voice that tells the story is not his voice even if he himself assumed it was. Even in autobiographies or memoirs, writers create a character. As I write these words, I am creating a character of myself! It is impossible not to do this. We create ourselves from the same imaginative facility by which we make up fictional characters. We are always creating characters when we write, even if we are writing factual prose or confessional poetry.

A common interpretation of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is that Frost is talking about his decision to become a poet but he moves the experience further and applies it to all decision-making. Wrong! Robert Frost may have been writing about his decision to become a poet; this might have been what inspired the poem; but he was not writing about himself. He was creating a character based on his experience. Between an author and his or her voice, there is always distance.

A great deal of a writer will go into narrative voice—experience, memory, attitude, politics, morality—everything that defines what a person is. And yet, the voice is none the less a projection. I would even go so far as to say it is impossible for me to write as “me.” In order to state anything, I must project a character of myself, and it is the character who speaks, not me.

When any author writes, even in third person, he or she is not speaking with his or her voice. The writer is creating a voice. This voice is a character who actively participates in the story. Even if readers might not consciously recognize as much, it is none the less true and a reader does understand this, even if at the subconscious or subliminal level.

More on this. A great deal can be said about narrative voice. We will explore the topic in a couple more blogs.

I've experimented with narrative voice in my full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas. Each segment of the story told about the Sorceress Lybecca is from a different narrator—some of the sections are told in first person, some in third. Pick up a copy.

Check out my Writer's Page. Strange Brew, The Gallery, The Prophetess. All marvelous reads. Some new titles will be coming soon.

I would love to hear your comments. Write me on Facebook or Twitter.

Learning to Write Character . . . from James Bond, Part II

Last post we looked into some reasons James Bond, 
created by English writer Ian Fleming, has been such a notable character, is so well-loved, and why the books became so popular, spawning a recognizable fan culture. What can we learn about creating characters from the character of James Bond? Here are a few more thoughts on the subject.

James Bond embodies sexuality. I might say, and readers of this blog might say, “Don’t all characters in modern novels do this?” But the answer is no. In this age of ambiguity, we often find characters that are sexuality anomalous. They don’t seem to like much of anything or be successful at anything, and sexuality falls into this category as well. We read a chronicle of their uncertainty, reticence, their hang-ups and inhibitions. Some may think such characters, male and female, make for interesting studies. I don’t. Most people don’t.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, but I stopped halfway through a book of his, Anansi Boys, precisely for this reason. What made me quit on a book by my favorite author? I stopped reading because the main character was a sexual nonentity. He never scored. He bumbled about with women. He loses his girlfriend to his brother, who is his opposite. This was part of the plot. The two brothers were the children of an Afro-Caribbean god who seemed to have split apart the successful and nerdy side of their personalities so that one is a complete misfit and one is super-cool and does everything right. Still, who wants to read about a boring guy who can never make it with a girl?

Pussy Galore

James Bond isn’t this way, and, let’s be frank, we love to read of his sexual exploits. He gets between the sheets with (this only a partial list):  Honey Ryder, Sylvia Trench, Miss Taro, Jill Masterson, Domino, Helga Brandt, Kissy Suzuki, Tiffany Case, Rosie, Solitarie, Andrea, Corinne Defour, Magda, Pola Ivanova, Vesper Lind, and the spectacularly named Pussy Galore. Fleming is accused of being sexist, and he was. His very names for women are sexist. Yet we like it that Bond isn’t sexually ambiguous. Not in any sense of the word.

Goldfinger

Bond is good and he fights evil villains. Ambiguous villains abound today. They are villains only because they have been mistreated, abused, frustrated by an unfair society, and so on. The demarcation between the good guys and girls and the bad ones is blurred in a lot of modern writing. Not so in the James Bond novels. The bad guys are bad. The bad girls are bad. They are creepy, nasty, repulsive, and without redeeming features. Goldfinger wants to own all the gold in the world and murders a woman by painting her gold so her skin cannot absorb oxygen and she suffocates. Rosy Klebb, the KGB agent, rushes frantically down a hall so she won’t miss a torture and personally supervises each brutal interrogation the KGB does, using her mother-like voice to reduce the person being tortured to “a sniveling child.” Sir Hugo Drax wants to destroy London with an atom bomb. Ernst Blowfield, the head of the evil organization SPECTRE, wants to rule the world. There is the KGB, the Mafia, and all number of evil organizations staffed with cruel, ruthless villains. Bond fights against these.

Rosy Klebb

Bond knows his mind. For agent 007 there is not a lot of psychomachia, no inward struggles, or at least very few of them. And the books (maybe not the films) do not suggest, as many stories do today, that there is no good or bad, that one side is just as corrupt as the other, and every government and agency in the world is evil. Bond believes the West is good, the Soviets are bad; MI6, his sponsoring agency, is good, the KGB is bad. He believes it’s alright to do the things he does.

Bond is set in his ways. I always remember how the series ends. Bond is thinking about marrying but then says it’s not for him. For James Bond, the view would always pall the same. And it does, not just with marriage but with everything he believes. At least he believes something.

Ian Fleming was sexist. He was racist. He stereotypes nationalities. It is a lame excuse to say he was a man of his time, because such characteristics are always reprehensible and living in an age when most people thought that way does not excuse them. Still, there are certain things he did right. As writers we can learn from them. I want to have characters as recognizable as the one who can raise spirits and please readers by introducing himself as "Bond—James Bond."

Rock singer Andrew Cabot is not James Bond--but maybe he gets close to being like him at times. Get a copy of my novella, Strange Brew. I think Lybecca Mavis is a good name for the woman who becomes his lover.

Check out my Author Page--lots of good characters and good books to chose from.

I would love to hear your comments on the blog. 

Write to me on Facebook or Twitter.

Learning to Write Character . . . from James Bond, Part 1

When I was a teenager, I read all fourteen Ian Fleming books about James Bond, Agent 007. It was the ultimate high-class pulp fiction, and the books sold in the millions. Most people in the Western world (and millions in the non-Western world) have seen a James Bond film or read one of the novels. As I recently went through a book titled The Man Who Saved Britain:  A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond by Simon Winder, a study of the sociological and political forces that created James Bond and made him so popular, I came across some speculation on why Bond is such a memorable character and why he was so popular.

Winder thinks Bond came about in reaction to Britain’s decline in power after World War II. The British won the war but came out broke, exhausted, and weary. The United States replaced England as the world power. England went into political and economic decline. Its empire of colonies evaporated. This nation, once the most powerful in the world, became an economically depressed, run-of-the-mill, minor-league country.

In the midst of this gloom and doom, the character of James Bond appeared. Though Britain had declined as a powerful nation, someone was working behind the scenes to save the world. Secret Agent 007 did not, in the books, attract a lot of attention, but he stopped destructive evil time and time again. He was a deadly fighter, as we would expect, but he was a lot of more. Besides being a hidden champion, he was also a remarkable character. Readers loved him and were intrigued by him. Writers can learn a lot from the character Ian Fleming created. Here is a partial list and some notes on the particular items about Bond that caused readers to be fascinated by him.

James Bond had characteristics with which readers became familiar. Everyone knows his favoritedrink was a martini, stirred, not shaken. Unlike most Brits, he did not drink tea but coffee (he called a cup of tea a “cup of mud”). If you read the novels you know what he likes and dislikes, drinks, eats, smokes, prefers. You get to know his preferences very well and they are consistent throughout the novels.

In all types of writing, characters need to be defined. They should have habits, preferences, and likes that the reader can recognize. They should be presented consistently through a work or a series of works centering on that character. The reader should know what the character will do in a given situation. In reading about the figures you as writers have created, your reader should experience the pleasure of recognition. Recognition always occurred in the James Bond novels.

I have written and published thirty stories about a character named Sossity Chandler, a female rock star. Whiskey is her favorite drink. She loves the Rolling Stones and often does covers of their songs at her concerts. She lives in Michigan and likes it so much she stays there rather than living in New York, LA, or Nashville. Her hits are pop hits, but her greatest love is the blues and she supplements her popular albums with “art” albums where she does blues by Robert Johnson, Son House, and Memphis Minnie. “For Christ’s

sake” is the oath she uses more than any other. In her concerts she does the first thirty minutes with her band, does a solo segment with acoustic guitar, and then brings the band out for the last five or six songs. If you read the stories I have written about her, you will know these things, encounter them consistently through the sequence of stories, and enjoy coming across them when they occur in the text. It is the pleasure of recognition. Writers would do well to follow Fleming in this.

Bond has convictions.  He is convinced that the British are right and the Soviets are wrong. He thinks freedom and self-determination are an inherent right all human beings should know. He thinks people should be free and democracy is superior to totalitarianism.

In our age of ambiguity, in the era of the anti-hero, many writers create characters with questionable motives. They can’t quite be trusted. Their loyalties are uncertain. The reader never knows where the character’s loyalty lies.

A bit of ambiguity can work, but readers like good characters who are truly good, loyal characters who show loyalty, courageous characters who show courage; conversely, they want evil characters that are evil and despicable character who may be despised.  Fleming always supplies these things, and this is what made his novels popular.

We hear a great deal about the chimeric nature of virtue. Good people can be evil; marginalized people can be good. But this kind of postmodern ambiguity—the virtuous swindler who trumps the corrupted, thieving clergyman; the stripper with the heart of gold who exposes the sadomasochistic Mother Superior—have been done to death. Readers still long for truly virtuous characters who oppose truly evil characters.

More to come on Bond as a character and a template.

For a study in character, check out my full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas.

If you would like to read a story about Sossity Chandler, The Loss of Good, published in Amarillo Bay is a good place to start; or the story in Out of Time in Intellectual Refuge.

Check out my Writer's Page for other choices.

I would love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter.

More on this topic to come!