“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
“My attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in my bath, singing, if I remember rightly, the Toreador song from the opera Carmen.”
“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.”
It’s not a particularly startling observation that first-person narration is one of the most common methods of storytelling. The omniscient narrator, a style familiar to us from our nineteenth-century classics, has really fallen out of favour. Perhaps, as the reader’s understanding of the novel grew more sophisticated the notion that any narrator can be detached and objective seemed paradoxical. All narrators are controlled and directed by the author and reflect his or her tastes and concerns. We postmodern readers enjoy tales told by a first-person narrator because of their very unreliability. We know that we are hearing a version and that the story really could exist in many forms and be subject to any number of interpretations.
It does seem to me that the majority of novels are now written in this style. This current trend could be viewed as a move back to that early form, the epistolary novel. However, a significant difference, and dare I say advantage for the author, between writing a novel in the form of letters and first-person narrative is that the audience of the epistolary novel is clear – the intended recipient of the letters. The decision to freely write prose from the perspective of a character poses difficult questions that have to be answered – why is this character telling this story, and who are they telling it to?
I recently had a breakthrough with an idea I’ve been struggling with. I knew it was important that the story I was writing should be told directly by the main character, because I wanted the events to be seen only through her eyes. However, nothing I wrote seemed to have the ring of truth. Her mode of expression seemed false and too stylised. It was then I realised I had failed to address those fundamental questions. I remembered some advice from my acting training – why does this character have the need to speak, and what do they want to effect by their words?
Suddenly, instead of addressing an anonymous mass of critics and reviewers and disinterested members of the public browsing in bookshops, or indeed my Write On Essex comrades, I knew that my narrator was interested only in speaking to one person. She was making a confession to a very specific audience. The wrong kind of pressure, the pressure of critical opprobrium, dispersed, and the right kind, a compulsion to talk, pushed the narrative along.
I was doing myself no favours in imagining this hugely judgemental audience for my writing. If you write to someone with a fervent need to make them understand, and believe that they too will be desperate to hear what you have to say, it’s easier to get the words down on the page. Shar spoke about this at our last meeting in regards to her piece Children of Lesser Mortals. The person who needed to hear this family history was her three-month old granddaughter. Can you imagine a better audience for this story? I’m not suggesting that everyone write to a baby of their acquaintance but try to keep in mind a reader as non-judgemental and receptive and one that you simply have to tell the story to, before it is lost.
I can’t pretend to know how exactly David Copperfield, Holden Caulfield, Bertie Wooster or Kathy H. were created, but I definitely get the sense that these memorable character-narrators grew out of the authors’ knowledge of why they were telling these stories and who was listening to their tales.
