Voice of Narrative

There are always a lot of possibilities for who is telling the story and

how you would like to frame the story.

I'm going to read a short section from Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous

American novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In which Harriet Beecher Stowe does something very unusual and

very engaging with her narrative, which begins with the omniscient,

all-knowing, all seeing voice.

The frosty ground creaked beneath her feet and she trembled at the sound.

Every quaking leaf and

fluttering shadow sent the blood backward to her heart and quickened her footsteps.

She wondered within herself at the strength that seemed to come upon her, for

she felt the weight of her boy, as if it had been a feather.

And every flutter of fear seemed to increase the supernatural power that bore

her on, while from her pale lips burst forth in frequent ejaculations,

the prayer to a friend above.

Lord, help, Lord save me.

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie,

that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader tomorrow morning.

If you had seen the man and heard that the papers were signed and delivered and

you had only from 12 o'clock til morning to make good your escape,

how fast could you walk?

How many miles could you make in those few brief hours,

with the darling at your bosom, the little sleepyhead on your shoulder?

The small, soft arms trustingly holding onto your neck.

The power of this kind of scene is inescapable.

But in this fragment, the author's sudden turn to

the reader, to say to us, how fast could you walk?

Is the kind of example I wanted to use about the choices you get

to make as a writer.

How ever you want to frame the story telling is up to you.

You can change points of view.

You can begin in the first person and you can move to the third person.

You have a lot of choices about who tells the story, and you are allowed to move,

as if holding up a light through a prism and seeing

all the different images and all the different possibilities of illumination.

You get to choose.

You don't have to stay with just one character or one voice.

You can move as if you have a swinging camera and

include multiple points of view.

Or you can do what Harrier Beecher Stowe did, and let me remind you,

that's a novel written in the 1800's.

And still it is so fresh, and that sudden turning to the reader is so startling and

so engaging that that's the kind of choice that you have in framing your narrative.

The possibilities are endless.

And the possibilities that you explore depend on several things.

Who do you want to tell the story?

What is the story you most want to tell?

Which of your characters is most able to tell the story?

You might have a very interesting character

who you know will not be very articulate.

That could be a child, or an adult who's not very smart or

not very comfortable with language, or a largely silent person.

And those may not be your best choices as your narrator.

You want your viewpoint character to be somebody who can tell the story.

And then decision you have to make is, who should tell the story?

And when I say should, I don't mean morally.

I mean, what's going to best serve your story?

Do you want the story to be told by somebody who's in the middle of

the action?

Which might be very exciting, but also kind of chaotic.

Do we want the story told by somebody who stands off to the side,

like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby?

You always want to remember that The Great Gatsby is not told by the Great Gatsby,

it's told by somebody looking at the Great Gatsby.

Do you want it to be told by the woman that Gatsby is in love with.

I always thought that would be a really interesting novel myself.

So one of the things you want to think to yourself about is,

not only who can tell the story, and who should tell the story, but

then finally, what will the story become n the voice and the eyes of that character?

And that's a process of exploration.

And don't be surprised if you find yourself writing a scene in the first

person, and then in the third person, and then maybe

back to the omniscient narrator, where you can see everything that is going on.

The omniscient narrator was very popular in the 19th century and

a little less so in the modern world, but the great advantage that it gives you,

is that it is the all seeing.

And this gives you a very wide lens with which to engage your story.

The first person gives you something narrow but very deep.

The limited third, for a lot of us, sort of splits the difference.

But the question you have to solve is, who do I hear when I listen to this story?

Creative Writing: The Craft of Character

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Amy Bloom

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