Narrative-ly Speaking Chantal Boudreau

Narrative-ly Speaking
By Chantal Boudreau
Choosing what voice you are going to use is an important part of the planning process in fiction writing. Normally, I hate writing in first person. I don’t think I’m very good at it, and I don’t think that I necessarily do the narrator proper justice, but sometimes the stories demand it, so I grit my teeth and go. I have a much easier time approaching a tale as observer. I’ve heard several writing peers suggest that writing for them is a matter of recording the movie going on in their head, and it is a similar experience for me. When writing in first person you are no longer observing but have to immerse yourself into the character completely, and I don’t like trying to present a story from inside of someone else’s skin.
When voice does give me trouble, aside from the narrative, part of the problem is language. I can usually (although not always – I’ve had my dismal failures) capture the nature of the characters in the dialogue. My novel, Fervor, was a test of skill, because the characters were very unusual children and it takes some careful explaining as to why an 8-year old speaks like a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, but the 13-year-olds he’s with sound more like (although not exactly like) typical teens. In most cases, though, it’s just a matter of making sure their personality shows through their word selection.
Accents can be difficult to master too, and sometimes I skip trying to reflect the accent in the dialogue and just note it in the description, like with my wandering barbarian, Traveller. As one of my test readers pointed out though, it’s best to try and find a way in tone or expression to really distinguish your characters in a story, so that there’s never any question as to who is speaking if you have no dialogue tags (my dialogue tags are an overused guilty pleasure, but it is not a habit I’m willing to discard.)
Returning to first person narrative – the hard part for me is not just the perspective, or capturing the voice, but the fact that the voice is coming from inside the character’s head. You actually have to think like that character. That might come easily to some writers, but my brain fights the idea of regressing to the mind-set of a precocious 7-year-old child trapped in a very traumatic situation, like in my short story, “Little Sister,” or even worse, a particularly repulsive, villainous character who is bemoaning a well-deserved, but pretty horrific fate, like in my Arabian moralistic fable, “Dry Heat.” It is a struggle to go against your better nature when it wants you to keep a character like that at arm’s length, and in a way, it comes as no surprise to me that such a story elicited very mixed responses from my test readers, some glowingly positive and others filled with revulsion. Seeing things from that character’s point of view can be horribly unsettling.
There is also the second person option, an obscure form commonly used in select-an-ending YA tales, but I haven’t dabbled in that narrative style yet. I’m not one to shy from challenge, but I think my stories will remain, for the most part, third person. That still leaves me with whether I want the story to be directed – from a single character perspective using the third person narrative – or omniscient which allows for a broader point of view. Once again, it really depends on what the story demands. In Fervor, my digital short story, “The Ghost in the Mirror,” and in my current work-in-progress, When You Whisper, the story really is from one character’s perspective, just not from inside their head, so third person directed was fitting. The majority of my novels, however, cover varying scenes with multiple characters and don’t just follow one protagonist in particular. With these ensemble tales, third person omniscient seems to be more appropriate.
I’m sure there are those who disagree with my approach (especially my use of dialogue tags,) but as an artist, I have to present things in a way that leaves me satisfied with the results, and that I would enjoy if I were the reader and not the writer. It’s good to have knowledge of technique and style, but maintain that awareness that the voice you choose should match your vision and should not adhere to someone else’s absolutes.