Posts Tagged ‘narration’

Figuring Out & Balancing My Narrator’s Voice

Posted: April 9, 2021 in Novel, Progress Report, Reflections, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8
I think this fits the theme of the post very well, don’t you? Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

In my last post, I mentioned that I would soon be tackling editing River of Wrath and The Pure World Comes, two novels that each have gone through some edits and which I would like to try submitting this year. As promised, I have started editing River of Wrath, which is about one of the nine circles of Hell appearing in a small town in 1960s Mississippi (you can guess what sort of themes are included with that description).

And so far, the biggest obstacle I’m dealing with is my narrator’s voice.

For a bit of background, my narrator, Audrey Falley, is writing down her experiences as she remembers them. She’s a character I thoroughly enjoy. She’s an Army wife in the 1960s, but she’s not demure like you would expect from that sort of character in that time period. She’s brash, street smart, she admits she drinks, swears, and has sex with her husband. In other words, she’s unladylike, and proud of it, and I tried to make that show in how she tells her story.

Which is challenging. In addition to all that above, Audrey is also not your typical narrator. By which I mean, this is her first time really telling a story, as her life hasn’t had many opportunities for her to practice creative writing. She also breaks the fourth wall a lot in a way Deadpool might approve, pointing out things about her word choice and how at certain times she sounds like she’s writing a romance novel.

And yet she’s very much aware what sort of story she’s telling.

And here I am, on the computer, trying to tell this story through this character’s unique perspective, while also balancing that perspective with the needs and tone of the story. Not only that, but I have to make the language used sound both like they were written by Audrey and by me, a writer who has a few published books and stories under his belt. And I have to ensure it reads like a horror story.

All told, it’s a bit of a juggling act. And I’m feeling the struggle. There are plenty of points where I’ve wondered to myself, “Does this sound good? Or does it sound totally amateur-ish?” It can affect how I look at the project at times.

That being said, there are moments where I look at the changes I’ve made and I’m like, “Yeah, I got this.” I had one of those moments when I was editing the scene the novel goes from period piece with strong romantic overtones to full-on horror story. Here’s the passage in the previous draft:

Before either of us could answer, there was a scream from the edge of the park. It was followed by several other screams, not just women, but men and children. Dogs barked, and birds flew into the air and away from the park entrance. Around the park, and in Little Angola as well, people stopped what they were doing, stood up if they were sitting down, and looked in the direction of the screams.

And then there’s the section from the current draft (asterisks are to prevent spoilers):

From the edge of the park came a woman’s scream.

Everyone, including Gordon and me, froze before turning in the direction of the scream, which was the same direction we’d come from. We could hear more people screaming, not just women, but men and children too. And that wasn’t all: dogs were barking, birds were flying in every direction, and everyone in the park, from the folks in ********, to the families at their picnic benches, to the children on the playsets, and to the couples in the flower garden, stiffened.

Later on, it occurred to me that we were all feeling the same thing. We weren’t just afraid. We were dreading whatever was causing those people to scream and making the animals go crazy. We dreaded it in our very bones.

Busy editing. Hopefully by the time I’m done, this novel will look a whole lot better and I’ll have a better idea if it’s ready to be submitted anywhere.

How was that? It’s not perfect, but it is better written than the previous version. Feels more like something you might read in a professionally-published horror novel. And that difference really made me feel like I could balance all those things I mentioned above. I don’t know if by the end of the draft, the novel will be ready to submit to publishers as I’d hoped, but if the new passage is anything to go by, I’ll at least get a bit closer.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I think, as the draft continues, I’ll hopefully not only get a better idea of where the story is in its development, but maybe even be able to go back to the beginning and do a better job of polishing up the story. We’ll see what the rest of the draft holds.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’ll check in again soon, though I’m not sure when or what I’ll be talking about. Until next time, pleasant nightmares!

Rose: One-Year Release Audiobook Anniversary!!!

Posted: December 20, 2020 in Novel, Scary Stuff, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
4
The audiobook cover for Rose. Available from Audible and Amazon.

You know, its been six months since I last had a post focused on Rose? How crazy is that?

But to the point of this post: a year ago today, the audio book for my novel Rose was released, the first time a story of mine was ever available in an audio format. The book was narrated by the amazing Sara Parlier, who I had to pleasure to meet this past summer in South Carolina. No joke, at times her narration gave me chills! And that was both times I listened to the audio book, by the way. And I wrote the damn thing!

So if you don’t know about Rose, it was my first novel published with a publisher (Castrum Press if you’re curious). The story follows a young woman, Rose Taggert, who wakes up one day in a greenhouse with no memory of the past two years. However, before she can get a handle on that, her body undergoes a startling transformation into a human/plant hybrid! As those around her react, she realizes some are not all that they seem, leading to a desperate fight for survival.

Sara Parlier, the narrator for the Rose audio book, meeting at a Starbucks in South Carolina.

And I can’t believe it’s been a full year since the audio book came out. I can believe nearly all of 2020 has passed, but the audio book being a year old? The mind boggles!

And I’m happy that the majority of reviews on the audio book, and the novel in general, have been positive. At the time I’m writing this, Rose rates a 4 out of 5 on Audible based on five ratings and four reviews, as well as a 4.6 on Amazon’s US site based on thirty ratings and twenty-nine reviews. Considering how I’m still not as well-known as other authors I could name, I consider all this feedback from readers absolutely amazing, and I hope there are more to come.

And if you’d like to check out those reviews yourself, or maybe even check out Rose, I’ll include the links below. And if you like what you read, or if you find Rose to be horrible trash, please leave a review. Not only do I appreciate all reader feedback, but it helps me out in the long run and helps other readers decide whether or not the book is for them.

One last thing: I’d like to thank everyone who’s read, reviewed and enjoyed Rose since its release in June 2019. It’s been an insane ride this past year and a half, even excluding current events, but I’m so grateful for the love and support you’ve shown me and this little novel I wrote as my college thesis project. I’ve dreamed of being an author since I was a kid, and you’ve helped make that dream a reality. So, once again, thank you so much. I hope you’ll enjoy my other stories, as well as the ones to come, just as much.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m off to stop that creep Santa Claus from stalking people and then breaking into their homes based on his assessment of their behavior. Until next time, Happy Holidays and pleasant nightmares!

Rose: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Audible

Working a Challenging Story

Posted: March 4, 2018 in Novelette, Progress Report, Reflections, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
4

I have not been blogging much in the last week or so, though I’ve read just about every blog post that shows up in my inbox. This is partly because I haven’t had anything I’ve felt passionate enough to blog about and because of time constraints, but it’s mostly because of the story I’ve been working on lately. You see, this story is challenging me as a writer, and the challenge has me engrossed, more so than a test engrosses Hermione Granger around exam time (oh Harry Potter, you always give me something when I ask). It’s so engrossing, that it’s taking up all my creative energies, leaving me unable to blog or even come up with new ideas for stories (though I already have more ideas than I know what to do with, so that’s not a huge problem).

Some of you may remember that I started working on a story I thought might become a novelette or novella in between drafts of Rose back in October or November. After finishing the short story Do-Over the other day, I started working on this story again, and as I said, it’s been challenging. On a number of levels, actually: for one thing, there’s an anthology I’ve heard about that’s looking for stories of a certain word length, so I’m trying to write this story to keep it within the anthology’s word limits. Yeah, I know I should let the story be whatever length it’s meant to be, but after expanding Rose to twice its word length last year because it was suggested I do just that, I feel like I can aim for a certain word count and still get a good story out of it.

Another reason it’s challenging is because of the narrator. Like Rose, I’m telling this story through the eyes of a first-person narrator, which means I’m reliant on her as a narrator to tell the story and to create a good horror ambiance. But at the same time, she’s got a history, a personality, and observations that she’s putting into her story. It’s less like I’m writing the story and I’m channeling my narrator as she’s telling the story, though I do have the power to go in and make changes as needed. And creating that horror ambiance while balancing my narrator’s voice and what she feels is necessary to put into her story, such as her interactions with her husband, isn’t that easy.

Did I mention that this story also takes place over thirty years before I was born, in a state I’ve only visited once? Well, it does, so in addition to being a horror story, it’s also historical fiction, and I’m working hard to recreate an age and place I’ve never experienced, with all the fashions, technology, and attitudes in place. It’s a lot of work, to say the least.

And on top of that, you have all the normal challenges of storytelling: making a story interesting, pacing, showing vs. telling, dialogue, word choice, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

But honestly, I think it’s all worth it. Because in my experience, if a novel challenges the writer, it’s going to be a better story in the end. Look at Rose: that novel challenged me every time I worked on it. The first draft alone, I had to go back to the very beginning and start over again because I had to totally reroute the path the story was taking. During the third draft, I added forty-thousand words, a whole new plot line, and even a character or two just to make the story not only longer, but better. And in the end, I created one hell of a story that I feel has a great chance of publication. Hopefully with this story I can get a similar outcome.

Stories can be challenging to write sometimes. It may be difficult to get the words on the page, but in the end, with a lot of work, I think it can lead to a really compelling story. And I’m looking forward to seeing if, after a lot of blood, sweat and tears, I can wrangle out a good story here.

Considering Double Narrators

Posted: April 22, 2015 in Reflections, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

I’ve two short stories, one that has had two drafts already and another that I’m trying to get through the last act of. Both stories involve the supernatural, and both focus on two characters, a man and a girl (though in each story the relationship dynamic is quite different). As I’m thinking of the different things I could do with each story in order to improve it, one thing comes to mind for both of them and it’s really got me thinking about the possibilities.

One story is State Fair, which I’ve mentioned here before and is about fairgrounds haunted by ghosts. The other is called Streghe (that’s Italian for “Witches”) and is based off a witch mythology I learned about in my History of Witchcraft (that class is already pretty useful). At their current stages, both short stories are told mostly from the male character’s point of view. So I’m thinking to myself, one of the ways to improve them might be to tell part of the story from the female character’s point of view.

Two narrators in a single story isn’t unusual. I’ve read a couple of well-known short stories that were told in this manner, one of which immediately comes to mind is The Falls by George Saunders (boy, is that one a trip). And the Bartimaeus books, which I loved as a kid, often had two to four narrators, depending on which book you were reading. And most of my novels are told from multiple points of views (and people tend to like those). So I’m wondering why I haven’t tried that with my short stories. Heck, I’m wondering why I haven’t tried it with either of these short stories. I mean, State Fair‘s main character spends most of the story following a girl named Lizzy around the park, so why did I not get her POV on being followed around? And the events of Streghe happen as much as to my young female protagonist Sarah as it does to my nasty male antagonist Tom. Not sure why I’m saving her POV to the end.

Well, it’s something I’ll definitely try. Since I’m still working on the first draft of Streghe, I’ll see about getting Sarah’s POV in this thing, maybe heighten the mystery element of the story by including her. When I get around to another edit of State Fair, I’ll see where where I can put Lizzy’s point of view. It’d be interesting to see how she reacts to a ghost following her around.

But what do you guys think? Am I onto something? Do you use multiple narrators in your short stories? And if so, how does it usually work out for you? Let me know, I’d love to discuss.

Unreliable Narrators

Posted: August 1, 2014 in Reflections, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3

Every now and then I look to do a post musing on the mechanics or subtleties of writing fiction, and today is one of those days. And as you can tell from the title of this post, I want to talk about unreliable narrators, those strange voices in the books we read (and occasionally in the films and TV shows we watch) whom we can’t always trust.

According to that awesome source of usually-factual info that is Wikipedia, an unreliable narrator is a narrator, usually in some medium of fiction or another, whose veracity has been called into question. Usually this happens very early in the story, where the narrator may make a plainly false or delusional claim, or it may happen elsewhere in the story, perhaps near the end where a twist in the story turns everything we thought we knew upside down or slowly through hints that are given to us in the narration. Stories with unreliable narrators can feature a single narrator, or multiple narrators giving their own versions of events, or even a supporting or side character who tells a story in such a way that we question whether or not they’]re being entirely truthful about what happened.

A great example of an unreliable narrator is Patrick Bateman from the novel American Psycho. As a man suffering from psychoses and the occasional hallucinations, Bateman makes a great unreliable narrator. Other examples include Nell from Wuthering Heights, most of the characters from the Japanese movie Rashomon, and Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother (according to show creator Craig Thomas, anyway). Oh, and any story that has children narrating it could possibly have unreliable narrators, because kids sometimes remember things incorrectly.

(If you want to think about it though, every one is an unreliable narrator, because no matter how they see events, they are biased, they may mis-remember details, and they may cover things up in order to make themselves look good or to hide their own guilt. But let’s not get too philosophical about this. Otherwise we’ll be here all evening)

One of the characters in my thesis project, the antagonist, is an unreliable narrator. Because of his mental problems and his infatuation with protagonist Rose, he sees things through a very certain light, so when he tells a story it is often through that lens, which probably won’t reflect reality too well. As I’ve never written a story from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, so exploring the device through this character should be interesting. (Or have I used unreliable narrators before? Technically, any time I tell a story from the protagonist’s first-person point of view, it could be construed as unreliable, but i’m not sure if it counts. Oh darn it! Now I’m an unreliable narrator of my own writing career!)

But why are unreliable narrators used so much? And why do they appeal to readers and writers alike? It’s a very difficult question, and I’m not sure I have an answer. Perhaps for writers, it’s the chance to tell a warped version of events. When we tell a story, especially through the lens of an omniscient or almost-omniscient third-person narrator, it’s almost expected that the story being told is what actually happens, one-hundred-and-ten percent factual. Even when the story is limited to the viewpoint of a single character, that third-person narrator’s portrayal of events is assumed to be accurate. Heck, even when we read a novel told in the first-person, we tend to see the depiction of what happens as true. Especially if we like the character.

An unreliable narrator allows the writer to break from that, to tell a story that might not be accurate, and that the reader and maybe even the writer will have to guess how true the story is or how much we can trust the narrator to tell the truth. In fact, maybe that’s what the reader gets from these sort of storytellers: they have to figure out how trustworthy the storyteller is, or where the line between truth and the storyteller’s own delusions or beliefs is laid down. It’s like solving a mystery or a puzzle, in a way, and the only way to really solve it is to read on until you finish the story. And even then, you might not be able to tell how reliable the narrator is (which is why there are e-forums to discuss these issues).

In any case, I’m going to enjoy exploring the antagonist’s own unreliable stories and seeing how much we can or should believe him. It’ll make for an interesting discussion point when talking about my thesis with my adviser during the next semester.

What do you think of unreliable narrators?

Have you ever used them in your own writing? How did it go?