The Narrator's Voice

Confession: I always wished I had a brother or sister. Or even a cousin my age. I grew up feeling like the point of an ice cream cone with all the weight of generations above me.

Reading:

• "Riding the Doghouse" by Randy DeVita
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold"
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"

Future Projects:

• Dairhenien's Library - Development
  
• Floorcraft - First rewrite of 1-5, first draft of 6-8
• Ferian Fetlock - "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife."
  
• "Motley" - Expansion
• "Fireworks and Earthworks" - 5% into first draft
  
• Untitled School Mistress Story

Unpublished Stories/Status (in chronological order of completion of first draft)

• "Pictures of the Old Port" - 5th Draft, Unsubmitted
• "What Price Stamps" - 3rd Draft, Submitted to The American Drivel Review, July 30th, 2008
  
• "The Frost Fugling" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Black Pudding" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Cora and the Sea" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Motley" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Leaves and Sunsets" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "A Happy Ending" - 1st Draft, Unsubmitted
• "The Revenant" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Illuminated" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "A Cup of Coffee" / "Morning Tea" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to Tea: A Magazine, July 29th, 2008
• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Hattie Donnelly's Favorite Doll" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to 24 Hour Short Story Contest, July 27th, 2008

The top part of this blog is getting way too crowded, so I've figured out a way around that. If you look on the right side of the page, you'll see a link to a wiki entitled "Dairhenien's Library." I'm using that to keep track of all of my stories, their submission status, etc. Once I get it fully updated, I'm going to simplify the header stuff, and just put stuff up there when it changes.

Just now, I finished "Balto" by T.C. Boyle, and it had an ending that made me want to stand up and cheer in the middle of the restaurant. It's about a girl named Angelle and her father, who is a drunk. He picks her up from school one day so drunk that he realizes he can't drive, and he gets her to do it. She's thirteen, by the way.

She winds up hitting a bicyclist. The father tries to pass it off as if he were the one driving, and the lawyer rehearses and rehearses Angelle to get the story straight, but in the courtroom, she tells the truth. I'm going to repeat the last paragraph below, because it was powerful.

She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they'd been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth, the truth no one would have guessed because she was almost thirteen now, almost a teenager, and she let them know it. "I was," she said, and the courtroom roared to life with so many people buzzing at once she thought at first they hadn't heard her. So she said it again, said it louder, much louder, so loud she might have been shouting it to the man with the camera at the back of the long churchy room with its sweat-burnished pews and the flags and emblems and all the rest. And then she looked away from the judge, away from the spectators and the man with the camera and the court recorder and the bank of windows so brilliant with light you would have thought a bomb had gone off there, and looked directly at her father.

Oh, that's good stuff. Listen to the voice of the narrator, with long conjoined clauses that get you into the head of a thirteen-year-old without crossing the line into run-on sentences. Look how the description touches on different aspects of the room so you can follow the focus of Angelle's attention as she looks around the room. See how it grabs your focus and guides it? The reader's imagination is primed to follow what Angelle is looking at. And then with a final triumphant push, the reader is forced to confront the drunk father.

As the last words of the story resonate, you are left with the impression of just how very, very strong this girl is. You realize that although later in her life, this is a scene that might haunt her, it is not something she will ever regret.

It's not a comfortable story to read, but it's one that will stick with me. It made me think about the voice of the narrator in a story. "Balto" was written from two different 3rd person limited POVs, that of the father and of the daughter. Each has a distinctive voice. Angelle's is focused mostly outside herself, to the objects in her vicinity. She is trying very hard not to pay attention to the people who are addressing her in virtually every scene. Instead, she takes in the extraneous details, but what we learn about her character comes from the way she describes them.

The father, however, is entirely self-focused. It's all about how he's feeling, what he thinks about his girlfriend, how the beautiful day is affecting him, how Angelle's fierce looks affect him. That's so totally in keeping with his character... or rather, that's totally how we learn about his character.

That's the magic of this story, and the one thing I hope to carry away from it. The events of this story could have been told in a 3rd person omniscient voice, and the exact same story information would have been conveyed. But it would have been an inferior story. Instead, Boyle chooses to let the way in which the story is told serve as a vessel to convey character, and the result is far more powerful.


Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 3