Narrative Voice

flickr photo by moriza

It has taken a long time for me to recognize narrative voice as the heart and soul of my stories. Every writer develops a narrative voice with every story he tells, but skilled writers are more conscious of it as the underlying spirit of their works and they are able to use voice as a creative element. I have tended to step back and 'let the story tell itself'. But even that is a form of narrative, expressing who the teller is by his absence. In other words, if you don't step brashly forward, the reader will invent you as an aloof being they are trying to piece together from your script!

Readers want a sense of the story-teller. He cannot escape being part of his story.

More on that another time. What struck me this morning is narrative voice as the essence that separates literature from every other art form. Film and theatre can incorporate narrative voice, but when they do they are really straying into the realm of literature and it is a device they can only use sparingly. Their audiences want immediacy. They want to experience action through their own senses, not interpreted through the intellectual and emotional lenses of a story-teller.

This is what will perpetuate literature as an art form. Whether the narrative voice speaks from the pages of a book, through a book reader, in a YouTube clip, or even in a collaborative work with other art forms such as film or dance, the narrative voice is that distinctive quality that readers and listeners want to experience as part of the story.

There is an intimacy to writing that other art forms do not share. The reader or listener is actually allowing the writer to blossom inside his or her own brain as a narrative voice, and the reader as participant is creating a story with the writer. That is the beauty of the form. It is the same intimacy that people share around a café table or in a conversation with a friend. Or (for those with the courage to write this way), the dreadful intimacy of talking to someone you detest but cannot get away from.

For anyone who thinks literature is somehow passé I have one phrase to utter as my perpetuating mantra: Narrative Voice.

Why I LOVE writing - Rationalization #1

This morning I found myself poring over issues of the Cariboo Sentinel from the late 19th Century. For a lot of people that may not seem a very inspired lead-in to a post about the love or writing. Who in his right mind wants to spend a day reading parchments about events that transpired more than a hundred years ago - before the invention of the the caffeinated human?

A writer! That's who. At least this peculiar manifestation of the species.

One of the things I love about writing is the weird dimensions it takes me into. Too often we're in a big rush to get words onto paper to prove we're actually WRITING. But as I mature - strange thing for a 58 year-old to be saying, but perpetual maturation is another facet of writing I should perhaps write about... as I mature, I find I want to get off the linear track and explore wider and wider circles of discursive meaning.

I just looked up discursive, by the way, and discovered it signifies what I intended in one sense, as in: dis·cur·sive adj - lengthy and including extra material that is not essential to what is being written or spoken about. There's another nuance to the word I don't mean, namely - using logic rather than intuition to reach a conclusion. Logic is like Werther's caramel candies to me, a bad habit I have trouble avoiding.

What Mr. Encarta refers to as 'not essential', however, is the very essence of writing. The not-essential stuff is what you stumble on when you are researching character, place and meaning. It may never actually make it into print, but it's fascinating just the same. And fun. For example, I came across a tidbit in the Cariboo Sentinel about a witness to the signing of a will, who was being questioned in court and was asked how he knew the 'testatrix' was of sound mind. His reply: "I base my opinion on the fact that she knew brandy from beef tea."

Not essential. But surely delightful, and somehow revealing about the sentiments of the era.

Those kinds of intriguing digressions, whether or not they actually make it into the story do help make the story - and shape the writer.

The Nib

flickr photo by Limbo Poet

Regenerating Symbols

Sometimes I think a favoured symbol of mine is worn out. It's either been used too often or has become anachronistic. How well does the modern reader relate to symbols like the steam engine, which once dominated the industrial literary landscape, or a rose by any other name, which has been a faded emblem since Shakespearean times.

But symbols that have lost their vigour can sometimes be revisited. A case in point is stained glass, which will be a significant symbol in my novel of the same working name. I have gone through several vicissitudes working with this particular element. At first I was excited. The symbolic import of light, passing through glass into a sacred space seemed so obviously potent that I couldn't help but be deeply pleased whenever the image came to mind.

But it dawned on me gradually that my excitement had as much to do with my own incomplete literary knowledge as with the vitality of the symbol itself. As a spiritual and religious image stained glass has probably been used in countless passages. As a modern symbol it will be irrelevant to a growing demographic of readers. So does the reference to stained glass warrant prominent treatment in my work, even a work of the same name?

Before abandoning the reference as anything more than a passing curiosity, I did a little research. And lo, a whole new set of meanings have emerged, which revitalize the symbol in ways I had not dreamed possible. Indeed, the beauty of this symbol is its transition from a classical religious icon into a feature of many religious institutions that has been deeply altered by modern science. Instead of being an overwhelmingly religious and spiritual reference, stained glass is now invested with an amazing set of scientific properties that become a metaphor for the impact of scientific inquiry on religion. It now symbolizes for me the altered nature of light that pours into our churches.

I haven't fully grasped even the fundamentals of the science around photons and light waves. But Einstein's Theory of Relativity and a cluster of other scientific discoveries have as much to do with the significance of a brilliant church window as do the biblical scenes that are depicted. A remarkable and provocative dissonance builds when I consider stained glass from these dual perspectives. It's a fragmenting view that makes me think hard to align my notions of spiritualism and science - both of which are central to my world view.

That makes stained glass a potent image, and the shattering of stained glass by the fictional  iconoclasts of Barkerville a dramatic statement pitting one world view against another. So my instinctive appreciations of stained glass as a symbol has been borne out by its precarious position in the modern intellectual and emotional context. I'm so happy it has a revivified meaning, because it would truly have been a shame to give it up.

The Nib

Lost in Blunderalnd

Recently I borrowed a DVD remake of Alice in Wonderland from the local library. It struck me, as I watched the young heroine tumble down her particular rabbit hole, what a fitting metaphor for writing Alice's misadventure could be. As a writer I tumble into literary rabbit holes all the time. That's half the fun and half the frustration of being a writer.

For example one of my present works in progress is Stained Glass. It's not really about the art of painting on glass, or soldering glass fragments together to make a window, but that's one of the rabbit holes I expected to tumble into as I worked on the novel - and so I have. For the past few days I have been reading about the types of compounds artists mix to paint on glass, the tools and brushes they use, how their works are fired, how they are mounted, and so on.

Once I've climbed out of that hole, back into the main warren, I will have acquired a sense of that aspect of my story. But, as I said, the book is not about stained glass per say. Stained glass will be at most a symbolic element in the larger context. Fun and necessary as it may have been for me to stumble into the rabbit hole marked 'Stained Glass', that is not the most important rabbit hole. Nor was it the first.

In fact, the plight of the writer is far graver than what Lewis Caroll imagined for his delightful character. For the writer there's a virtual mine-field of rabbit holes, and there are rabbit holes inside the rabbit holes he may topple into. Every second word an author taps out on his keyboard may open up like a trap door to a whole new world of research, his novel proliferating into a three-or-more dimensional maze of bewildering proportions. To name a few of the tunnels I've galumphed down so far researching Stained Glass: the history of the Anglican Church; The Cariboo Gold Rush; frontier prostitutes in the Victorian era, modes of transportation in the Victorian era.

The trick is to dive into every one of those rabbit holes, and to keep on going until you find out how they are connected to the main tunnel. That requires imagination, intelligence, a sense of adventure, determination, but above all deep humility and patience. If I hurry toward what I think may be the light at the end of my tunnel, I miss all the rich detail and meaning that can be found in a complex series of fascinating digressions.

Getting Into Character

A couple of weeks ago, at Open Studio, we sat down with actors Kyle Cassie and Emilie Ullerup to pick their brains about 'Getting into Character'. I mean, who better to ask than people who make a living stepping into and out of roles. What an eye opener!

First, a tribute to actors. I never realized how hard they have to work to take on a persona. I sort of assumed the ability to act is something you're born with. Sure, you have to study theatre to bring out your talent, but in the same way that watering a rose results in a rose every time.

Kyle and Emilie set us straight on that score. They work hard. They meditate on character. They walk through the world in their characters' shoes. They look for settings and experiences to immerse themselves in. One of the techniques they talked about was method acting, a process of absorbing the feelings of your character so you can express them realistically.

A few points they made:

• There's always a bit of 'you' in the character;
• The motives of characters are either 'power' or 'love';
• If a scene is not necessary to move the action forward in a script, cut it.

While I still have some chewing to do on what we learned, the session exhilarated me. It definitely gave me some new approaches to developing character. Most importantly, their techniques for exploring new roles can be used by me to break out of what I will refer to as my character set. If I read my stories, I find the same characters emerging over and over. I know these characters and have become comfortable working with them. Which is not a bad thing. But it would also be good to stretch as a writer and a human being, and get inside the skin of some new characters.

Joy and Wonder

I will add to the Joy and Wonder of my World.
That's my mission. It's taken a long time to identify and formulate into a declarative sentence, but the urge has been with me since I was a child. It's never been the kind of motive you could put forward as a raison d'etre in a world governed by pay cheques and time stamps, but thank God it hasn't been snuffed out during 50 plus years of practical living.
Now when I am asked, why are you here, I have an answer. In a pinch, I can even cut the phrase down to three quick words: Joy and Wonder.