Session 7: Exercise

Here is a 'diagnostic' exercise to complete in time for Session 8:

This is a continuation on from our discussion about being able to discern 'opinion' (or 'personality') from 'description', in order to be able to observe how the narrative voice may be biased.

Select a paragraph of your own text (can be fiction or non fiction), and go through it, highlighting only the bits that aren't opinion or embellishment, but are the bare bones of description about what is happening.

Now go through and look for words that are embellishments, and you'll see that these are either unconscious (the writer doesn't realise they're offering their POV) or intentional (the writer is using the bias in order to give the narrator a personality or an unreliability, perhaps).

You should be able to start building a picture of how the writer is positioning the narrative voice.

Example from Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1.

Bold is bare bones.
Green is opinion or example of how the words chosen exhibit personality.
Orange is assumption.

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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all — I'm not saying that — but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

You'll see the narrative voice is being built up as an 'unreliable' narrator. We can see he is probably young (colourful, colloquial language), has opinions, makes assumptions, and has perhaps even had (or likes to say he's had!) a breakdown.

Which all adds up to a unique Point of View!

Session 7: Wrap-up

Our 'topic' this session was Point of View (POV), and we were able to incorporate some thoughts about POV and its importance into the workshopping session.

We also had a discussion about writing in a language that's not your mother tongue.

POV

We kicked off with our workshop piece, and referred to the first chapters of the submitted work-in-progress to look at two POV aspects in particular:

1. How we break up our narrative on the page, asking questions like: How can the visual design be a 'clue' for the reader about a change in POV?

For example, italics can signify that the narrative voice is switching from external to internal. Thriller novels use this technique, sometimes as a way to get inside the head of the protagonist or the antagonist. (e.g. Silence of the Lambs.)

Similarly, a paragraph break can be a clue that a new action is happening, or we are changing focus (or dialogue) to a different character, or perhaps a different train of thought is being tacked.

2. How we choose to position our narration. How much does the narrator know? Are they all-knowing? How much of what they say is reliable?

We discussed the advantages of having a narrator who doesn't know everything (who is not omniscient), because it can be easier to keep the reader 'in the dark' or 'guessing', so to speak.

And, on the other hand, with Memoir, for example, omniscience can be useful for painting pictures with broad strokes, especially when writing about, e.g., a global political climate, or events going on in a country at the time the story is set.

(We also talked briefly about The Martian, because about 2/3 of the way through (ish), the 3rd person narrative voice breaks into an omniscient voice ... for just one solitary chapter. It's weird, but somehow it works, perhaps because of the pace or timing, as up till that point it's a fairly intense, same-ish read, and the break-out chapter provides a change of sorts for the reader to take a breath. We're talking about the final frontier, after all!)

We talked about the excellent exercise of breaking down our narrative into dot points, in order to remove everything that isn't a straight-up description of action. (One of Libby's favourite activities. :)) This is good practice for learning to identify opinion and fact (or action), and how we use the interplay of these elements (plus description and our innate writerly magic of course!) in order to build narrative reliability (or not).

An 'unreliable narrator' can provide the reader with a 'game', where they must work out what's real and what's not, what's fact and what's narrative fiction. Fun!

Writing in a language that's not your mother tongue

In this session, Thanh-Nu kindly shared her experiences of writing in English (a third language), having first learned Vietnamese and then French.

An insight for all of us was that being able to write in our first language can be an advantage, but we can also be too 'close' to that language, and sometimes writing in a different language can give you critical distance ... as well as some turns of phrase that are very 'non-cliché' and even unusually beautiful.

Session 7: Outline

At our meet-up on May 19th, we will:

• Hear from Thanh-Nu about submitting writing in a language that's not your mother tongue (and, if we get time, a few hot tips on submitting for journals and small presses!).

• Talk about POV (Point of View) and how choosing the point of view from which you tell your story matters (and in what ways).

• Tie POV to the units of story (global, scene, dialogue etc.).

Session 6: Exercise

This is an exercise in preparation for Session 7, when we will be discussing Point of View (POV).

Write the same short scene (half a page is fine) from 3 different points of view.