Voice, or Who's Talking?

In the last Writing Boots blog entry, I asked you two questions about your novel.  This blog entry addresses the first, (1) who is your ideal reader?

Your answer allows us to choose the right voice for your novel’s narrator.  The narrator is the person telling the story.  The voice, including verb tense, character, setting, dialect, etc. is the word choice that reveals the narrator’s identity, or obscures it, depending on what you want to accomplish.  If your narrator is a southern gentleman, he should sound like one in his descriptions of your setting and his attitude toward the action that takes place.  I give examples of narrative voice further down in this article, and there’s a good wikipedia article here.

For example, Woody Allen’s movie  Vicky Cristina Barcelona features a male New Yorker as the narrator.  As a result, the narrator’s viewpoint on the action adds humor, distance, and irony to the film.  Without the narrator, the ending of the movie might be depressing, but with the narrator stopping and commenting on the action, it’s funny.

Another example: The voice of female private detective novels is usually an omniscient third person, mostly written close.  A close third person voice means that the main character will be talked about by her name, as with Kinsey Millhone.  While it feels like readers are inside Kinsey’s head throughout most of the book, they aren’t as close as they could be.  Here are the various options for voice, and when you might choose to use them.

First person: this voice is all “I” and “my.”  We are right inside the narrator’s head, and we can only see what she can see.  Historically, few novels were written in first person.  It’s mostly too limiting a voice because you have so little flexibility to share information with the readers that the narrator doesn’t have.  Lately, a lot more novels have been written in first person to get readers as close as possible to the experience, or to surprise the reader.  

I Am the Messenger, by Marcus Zusak is an example of a first person surprise ending novel.  I’m not sure it was the most successful ending of a novel ever written, but I loved the book, and so did the Printz committee when they gave it a Printz Honor Medal.  Even with this degree of closeness, most first person is past tense.  Present tense gets unwieldy.  If the trend continues, we might see more books written in present tense to try and get as close to the action as possible.  Maybe you will be the one to write a novel this way.

Second person: this voice is all “you.”  It’s very rare to see a novel written entirely in second person, but some authors use it because it sounds like vernacular speech.  Passages in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books are written in second person.  It sounds like we’re listening in on Tiffany’s thoughts.  Pratchett switches back to his omniscient third, mostly close voice the rest of the time.

Third Person Close: This style of storytelling is very common; it links reader and protagonist together and we seldom learn anything the protagonist doesn’t know.  Usually third person close is told in past tense, though occasionally you’ll see present tense.  Most novels are narrated in either third person close or third person omniscient.  It’s rare to find a novel written entirely in third person close.  Usually novelists like to mix third close and third omniscient.

Third Person Omniscient: You can tell when a book is written in third person omniscient because the point of view of the narrative may change to another character midway through a chapter.  Sometimes the beginning of the book will show a scene without the protagonist present.  This is a dead giveaway of a third person omniscient narrative.  Then when we meet the protagonist, the narration will switch to third person close.  It’s unusual for narration to stay omniscient in the presence of the protagonist, but some authors choose this approach.  Marcus Zusak, clever man, brilliantly chose Death as his narrator in his extraordinary novel, The Book Thief.  We get close but never too close to the protagonist’s experience, as Death, our narrator, wonders what she thought or felt during a difficult scene.

Originality, an Emerald City
Many literary fiction writers will discover the route to originality when making decisions about their narrator.  Toni Morrison, in her novel Jazz, makes the actual book itself the narrator.  Thus sometimes, the narration takes place in the household library, while the action is taking place in the kitchen.

William Thackeray in Vanity Fair does what many Victorian novelists did, his narrator represents a kind of Greek chorus, and will often interrupt to speak directly to the reading audience, addressing his “dear reader” in a knowing, righteous and humorous tone.

Choosing your voice and narrative point of view up front will help you in the novel’s long drafting process.  It’s a bear to change point of view and narrative perspective midway through a 110,000 word novel.  Making these decisions up front can save you time, energy, and offer an opportunity to be clever, creative, and even to transform the novel itself.

Write tasty!  Just as in cooking, the layers of narrative character, point of view, and perspective add richness to the stew of your novel.  The narrative voice you choose is like the base you use: plain water makes for thin stew.  Choosing an interesting narrator is like starting with a great cooking stock.  It makes it that much easier to cook, or write, world-class fiction.