I’ll bet when Proust was dipping his pastries in his tea that morning the last thing he expected was his whole life to flash before his eyes. Yet this goes to show just how many memories there are in each of us, a vast tidal wave of experience that could break at any time and flood back into our present consciousness. These memories – these stories – are what give us the power to write realistically and evocatively. The key is learning how to harness them.
How are you supposed to recapture events or conversations that now exist only in the murky depths of your mind? I don’t know about you, but my memory is hopeless. I find it hard to remember what I was doing last week, let alone last year (and unfortunately this has nothing to do with alcohol). But my memory, or more precisely my history, is the foundation of who I am. When Wordsworth said that the child was the father of the man, he was emphasising that the sum of your past experience, including your childhood, is what makes you uniquely you.
I compensate for my fuzzy mind by keeping diaries. They’re nothing special. Most entries are random observations from events or meetings rather than detailed accounts of treasured moments. These scraps of text only mention the odd scent, like Charlie Red on a date, or a tune, like ‘Abide With Me’ from a funeral. But I don’t need any more than that to remember the event. The senses are the key to unlocking your memories. How many times has a taste or smell dragged you back to a precise moment in your past, often so unexpectedly that you have to gasp for breath? Powerful fiction is based on thoughtful use of all of the senses and the emotional memories they evoke.
Powerful flashbacks or ‘memory transplants’ are an essential part of writing, and can be miracle cures for a text that is lacking in emotional or descriptive depth. Of course a piece of writing that only features your memories is autobiography, and won’t always interest a reader, but they will enable you to paint a much more vivid picture of your characters and their setting.
Your memories enable to you to construct an image that is unique to you, that resonates with your own history, even if ostensibly the plot you’re working on seems a million miles away. This attention to detail, this engagement with elements from your past, can be transplanted from your mind to that of your characters, creating a much stronger illusion of real people. Incorporating the memorable sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touches that mean so much to you will create a tangible atmosphere in your work, one that might feel like a real memory to everybody that reads it, as well as to you. Building memories into writing is a key to writing powerfully, it is why something that isn’t real can have the strength of something that is.
It’s always fascinating to look at what the mind remembers when asked to do so spontaneously. What about your five senses: which seems most important? Visual, most likely, but what other sensory reminders come into play? And how do you express your emotional experience of an event? Look for the strings of associations in your mind that help memories flood back to the present. When they do, make notes, capture the salient details, and allow your mind to follow along the path the memories lead: where were you, what were you doing, how were you feeling? Expand and write a little about yourself and the people you knew back then. What’s changed? These ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that!’ moments are the details that can be inserted into your work to make it that much more convincing.
Friday, 23 September 2011
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Succeeding with first-person narrative
If you’re looking for an intense and surprising narrative viewpoint, try the first person. Anybody or anything you like can be telling the story – the trick is to avoid ‘I’ becoming ‘you’. The first-person viewpoint is all about the ‘I’, the character’s sight, their frame of mind, their limited understanding of themselves and the world around them. Think of the difference in effect between ‘he thrusts in the knife, feeling her skin rip’ and ‘I thrust in the knife, feeling her skin rip’. The ‘I’ narrator speaks from a privileged position: he or she (or even it) inhabits the world of your text, and is part and parcel of what goes on within. Events therefore have more power to spill off the page and into the reader’s consciousness.
But there are some restrictions to this point of view. How do you describe your character without risking cliché by having her look in a mirror? Also, everything in the text has to be something known by the narrator, and told through her unique narrative style. She can’t see what’s coming, she can’t see what’s happening in another room, she can’t tell what other people are thinking, and she doesn’t know the truth about everything that has happened (four excellent reasons why this viewpoint is often used in detective fiction).
Moreover, first-person narrators aren’t always reliable: how often have you embellished a story to boost somebody’s opinion of you? First-person narrators telling somebody else’s story (think Heart of Darkness) are at even more of a disadvantage. Work out before you start writing exactly what your narrator knows, and how much of what she says should be considered the truth.
We all tell stories from a first-person viewpoint – how many times do you use the word ‘I’ in a sentence? Because of this, it’s easy to see the first person as the most immediate and accessible form in which to write. This way, all of your experiences and knowledge can be drawn upon demand, and little is lost in the translation to a third person. The first-person narrator also inspires a kind of intimacy that is absent from the more detached third-person alternative. The narrator is speaking from the heart, confessing to you, sharing an experience.
But this complicity between the author and the narrator can often be the downfall of both. Because the ‘I’ is so familiar, the character using it can quickly lose her own identity and become merged with yours. Instead of forming rounded, autonomous characters, you risk simply creating extensions of yourself, each with the same form of speech, the same opinions, the same personality. If your characters are missing the spark that makes them appear unique – if a reader can tell that you’re blatantly speaking through them – then nobody is going to be interested in their progress for more than a few pages.
Keeping your characters alive and independent in the first person can be extremely difficult. The trick to succeeding is to ensure that you know each player intimately – their pasts, their dreams, their fears, their pet hates, their political opinions, everything about them – so that they don’t risk becoming literary versions of yourself. They are as much a separate construct as a third-person character. The weaker the character appears in your own head, the less chance he has of staying afloat in the seething mass of ideas and images that is your text.
But there are some restrictions to this point of view. How do you describe your character without risking cliché by having her look in a mirror? Also, everything in the text has to be something known by the narrator, and told through her unique narrative style. She can’t see what’s coming, she can’t see what’s happening in another room, she can’t tell what other people are thinking, and she doesn’t know the truth about everything that has happened (four excellent reasons why this viewpoint is often used in detective fiction).
Moreover, first-person narrators aren’t always reliable: how often have you embellished a story to boost somebody’s opinion of you? First-person narrators telling somebody else’s story (think Heart of Darkness) are at even more of a disadvantage. Work out before you start writing exactly what your narrator knows, and how much of what she says should be considered the truth.
We all tell stories from a first-person viewpoint – how many times do you use the word ‘I’ in a sentence? Because of this, it’s easy to see the first person as the most immediate and accessible form in which to write. This way, all of your experiences and knowledge can be drawn upon demand, and little is lost in the translation to a third person. The first-person narrator also inspires a kind of intimacy that is absent from the more detached third-person alternative. The narrator is speaking from the heart, confessing to you, sharing an experience.
But this complicity between the author and the narrator can often be the downfall of both. Because the ‘I’ is so familiar, the character using it can quickly lose her own identity and become merged with yours. Instead of forming rounded, autonomous characters, you risk simply creating extensions of yourself, each with the same form of speech, the same opinions, the same personality. If your characters are missing the spark that makes them appear unique – if a reader can tell that you’re blatantly speaking through them – then nobody is going to be interested in their progress for more than a few pages.
Keeping your characters alive and independent in the first person can be extremely difficult. The trick to succeeding is to ensure that you know each player intimately – their pasts, their dreams, their fears, their pet hates, their political opinions, everything about them – so that they don’t risk becoming literary versions of yourself. They are as much a separate construct as a third-person character. The weaker the character appears in your own head, the less chance he has of staying afloat in the seething mass of ideas and images that is your text.
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